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| Goethe. The Colours Wheel |
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Goethe
La teoria dei colori [The theory of colours]
Lineamenti di una Teoria dei colori: parte didattica
A cura di Renato Troncon
Il Saggiatore, 1979
[1] The original title was taken from the publication Goethe scienziato (Goethe as a scientist), Einaudi, 1998, p. 125 n. 2. Goethe's work, in fact, was composed of two volumes. The first was published on this occasion, the second (The Story of colours) was issued by Luni publishers in 1997 (and also edited by Renato Troncon).
[2] Text of the back cover:
"With his Theory of Colours Goethe's implemented what he considered as his most challenging scientific project. The controversy that separated him from Newton keeps a precise historical interest but, beyond it, Goethe’s book served as a reference work at a broader cultural level, as ideas and themes from it were frequently quoted in different directions and contexts, also in more recent times. It is sufficient to recall the interest in Goethe’s position by `several Gestalt psychologists, by a philosopher like Wittgenstein, and by painters such as Kandinsky, Klee and Albers. This edition presents in full the Parte didattica della Teoria dei colori (The educational section of the Theory of Colours), which forms the theoretical core of the research by Goethe. It is divided into three sections in which Goethe focuses on the material nature of the colour, treating of successive images, atmospheric colours and surface colours. Other three sections follow, devoted to the "colour wheel" and psychological, aesthetic and symbolic aspects.
The reader of the Theory of colours will find combined the rigor of philosophical analysis with the beauty of the word, and will be especially encouraged to put into practice the invitation of Albers to 'watch the colour acting’. The analysis of Goethe is animated by a commitment to its own subject that is deeply rooted in a view of the world in which the colour participates of the dynamic unity of the cosmos. Any special consideration refers continuously to a view of the human being where the same instance of science is also located. "
[3] Below is the text of an article published by Gillo Dorfles in the newspaper Corriere della Sera of 19 September 1982. The original article is kept inside the volume:
About a number of the magazine "Verri”
The colours according to Goethe
By Gillo Dorfles
Often, in our country, cultural fashions follow unpredictable fluctuations, mainly due to the timeliness or not of individual translations. Sometimes they may occur so rapidly that the foreigners’ texts arrive in the windows of our bookstores about the same time - or even earlier - than in the country of origin (take for example the cases of Barthes, Derrida , Baudrillard, etc. .). Other times they arrive with a delay of several decades (in the case of Benjamin, or Mukarovsky). Other times the delay is even more than a century, and this is the recent case of the "Farbenlehre" - the Doctrine of Colours – by Goethe.
The extraordinary aesthetic, psychological, and scientific qualities of this work were known to me for many years. I even dedicated to it a chapter of my "Technical discourse of arts” in distant 1952.
And even then I wrote (I apologize for the self-quotation) : "In his Doctrine of colours Goethe laid down the foundations of a renewed psychological interpretation of human perceptions, pioneered many of today's stages of Gestalt and behaviourist doctrines … etc.”. Not only that, but I considered the development of the concept of “Trübe" - opaque – as the essential point of the theory. "The light appears through a turbid medium, as yellow; and the darkness through a lit means, as blue" says Goethe and adds to it in his "Sprüche in Reimen" (Proverbs in rhyme), saying, «Du aber halte dich mit Liebe, / An das Durchscheinende, das Trübe», i.e “With love, stick to what is transparent, what is opaque”.
The fact, however, that only a really partial translation existed (published in his time in "Civiltà delle Macchine," the journal by Leonardo Sinisgalli), made the acquaintance of the Italian large public with this critical writing almost impossible. Recently, a translation into Italian was published (JW von Goethe «La teoria dei colori» (The Theory of Colours), edited by R. Troncon for Il Saggiatore Publishing), which covers the most important part of the work. Moreover, the last issue of the veteran but still agile “Verri” journal (the magazine by Luciano Anceschi) was also released. It was edited by the same Troncon and completely dedicated precisely to the theories of Goethe , with large pieces of the same Teoria del colore (Theory of colour) accompanied by extremely precise and comprehensive annotations of the curator.
The interest of this publication - of which we can only mention the main arguments - is not only given by short texts by Goethe, but the presence of two extensive quotations of what was perhaps the first modern exegesis of the same, the work by Rudolf Steiner. As well known, he inspired himself in his anthroposophic writings and teaching more than once to the personality of the great German poet and even baptized "Goetheanum" the school he founded in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner devoted several years to the study and publication of scientific works by Goethe and had thus the great merit of rediscovering some of the extraordinary insights of the poet, with respect to colour theory as well as the areas of morphology, the metamorphosis of plants, the meteorology, etc. The concept of "Gestaltung" - formation - on which Goethe reasons in the Metamorphosis of Plants and in the Morphology must be considered as a guiding thought, both for his "scientific" than for those literary and poetic works. A thought that will have major echoes in the aesthetic of Franz Brentano, and later on in the research of the Gestalt psychologists.
In addition to the two essays by Steiner, the issue of "Verri" also displays an essay by Hermann Glockner, and one of Werner Heisenberg around the Goethe -Newton controversy, as well as a few pages of Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Albers, and Klee, which can be considered in some way as derived from or inspired by Goethe’s princip Especially the essay by Glockner builds a useful approach to the questions agitated by the theory of colours. In fact - the author says - "here Goethe has made its most acute observations ... I remember the theory of oppositely coloured successive images, of 'recalled colours’, the theory of coloured shadows, the numerous experiments explaining the mutual reinforcement of opposite colours one after the other." It remains however quite uncertain whether, and to what extent, Goethe’s principles are to be considered as the basis of many recent studies in this area. Among writings published in "Verri", those of Van Gogh and Klee are only indirectly "dependent" on Goethe, while only Kandinsky appears to have drawn directly from the doctrines defended by Goethe. At least in part, he was under the influence of a thinker like Steiner, with whom he had notoriously contacts during a stay in Berlin.
Instead, an author who - oddly enough - is not included in Verri’s anthology is Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose essay dedicated to colours was recently published in Italian (L. Wittgenstein, «Osservazioni sui colori» - Remarks on Colours, ed. Einaudi , pp. . 110 , L. 7000). Wittgenstein refers again and again to the remarks of Goethe, both pointing to the letter of Runge published in the Farbenlehre (about transparent and opaque colours), both claiming solomonically, about [Goethe’s] famous dispute with Newton: " So I can understand that a physical theory (such as the one by Newton) cannot solve the problems that had stimulated Goethe, although the latter was also not able to solve them."
On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that Wittgenstein has derived just from Goethe many of the comments in its treatise: for instance with regard to thes on colour. colour circle, the existence of 'abnormal' colours, like white and black, the relationship between clarity and obscurity, and especially the issue of transparency and opacity, which - as I have already said - was one of the foundations of Goethe's theory, so late revisited.”
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