Pastel drawing of a color globe on a curved metal stand, with red, yellow and green bands, a darker blue-shaded form behind it, and the inscription Pat. Jan. 9. 1900.

History · Foundations

From Munsell to the Bauhaus

In A Color Notation (1905), the Boston painter Albert Munsell argued that color needed a scale and vocabulary as settled as music's.

His starting model was a color globe he patented in 1900, drawn in pastel for the book's opening plate. He also taught for decades at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. At the Bauhaus, the German design school, Johannes Itten taught color in the required first course from 1919 to 1923; Josef Albers, there from 1920, later carried his own method to America.

  • His system itself is set out on the Munsell's System page.
  • Itten later wrote The Art of Color (1961); his contrasts are covered on Itten's Seven Contrasts.
  • Albers's Interaction of Color (1963) taught through cut-paper exercises; both books are in copyright, so this course only describes them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, from Google Books (id naYa8D6TkgEC) · Public domain

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