color interaction

ART 251

michel eugene chevereul

just examined. The industrialist had ordered wallpapers with a grey pattern on a green background but when he received them, he refused to pay, arguing that the grey pattern looked reddish. Hence the trial. With a great sense of humour, Chevreul explained that both the manufacturer and the client were right: the former who claimed that the grey pattern was perfectly grey and the latter who claimed that the grey was reddish. To show it, he cut out in a white sheet the exact contour of the grey pattern and placed it over the wallpaper in order to hide the green background and replace it by the white of the sheet. Seen this way, the grey pattern looked quite grey. Then Chevreul suggested a solution to the problem: adding to the grey a small part of the colour of the background, in this case green, in order to neutralise the complementary effect.

Plate 6: One of the plates illustrating M. E. Chevreul’s The Laws of Contrast and Colour & etc.., Routledge, Warnes, and Routledge, 1859.

Georges Roque

8

josef albers

principles of color interaction

1.  Light/Dark Value Contrast

2.  Complementary Reaction or Effect

3.  Subtraction

Light/dark value contrast

Light/dark value contrast

complementary reaction

complementary reaction

subtraction

subtraction

Optical mixtures

Optical mixtures