You don't need to be an artist to enjoy the magic of colour charts: boards with a variety of shades are indeed simply mesmerizing and usually feature hues for all tastes.
In the book The Art of Color (Download Johannes Ittens_TheArtofColor) Johannes Itten stated that "color is life, for a world without colors appears to us dead". So, for today's post, let's look at some particularly inspiring colour charts.
In 1966, Gerhard Richter introduced the Color Chart concept in his practice: the arrangement of the colours on the squares painted on the canvas was done by a random process, but the first works of this kind were inspired by Pop Art and based on commercial colour samples.
Then, little by little, from mere copies of paint sample cards, Richter came up with a system that allowed him to multiply his primary palette and come up with a definite number of colour fields. In this way, he managed to conjure up 1,024 tones in an artwork that called to mind pixelated images.
He took things further and, in 1974, by repeating each of the 1,024 hues four times, he created "4096 Farben". The painting consisted of 4,096 colour fields and ended up being used as the basis for the artist's remarkable Cologne Cathedral Window (View this photo) in 2007 (but there are echoes of this work also in modern artworks such as Beeple's groundbreaking NFT "Everydays: The First 5,000 Days").
Richter's "4096 Farben" is on public display at Sotheby's London galleries until tomorrow before going up for auction for the first time in nearly two decades at the auction house's New York HQ in the Contemporary Evening Auction on May 18 (estimated value of $18-25 million), presented in partnership with Celine.
Fashion-wise Bernat Klein was a pioneer of the colour chart. Nowadays, colour charts are mainly digital and fashion houses and brands often subscribe to agencies that provide colour services, but Klein created his own guides.
Born in Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1922, to an Orthodox Jewish family running a wholesale textile business, Klein studied in the UK and lived in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders.
In his work he was inspired by the colours of the local landscapes and the nature surrounding his modernist house, High Sunderland (commissioned to architect Peter Womersley in the 1950s), and by his passion for Pointillist oil paintings.
An accomplished painter, colour consultant, textile and industrial designer, Klein turned these inspirations into highly original palettes and fashion textiles with unique textures.
At times, his paintings - such as "Lichen", a grid of squares (similar to Richter's colour charts) in which neutral tones were mixed with a green palette with occasional sparkles of yellow - became the starting point for his intricate and multi-coloured tweeds.
In 1965 he published his first Personal Colour Guide: this concept was inspired by one principle - individuals should adhere to a palette that complimented their eyes when choosing clothes, rather than follow fashion trends. The eyes for Klein were indeed "the most positively coloured part of the human body".
The Guides, discussed in great detail in Klein's book "Eye for Colour", became successful also with the UK Government: in 1969, the Department of the Environment commissioned the artist and textile designer to create a standardised range of fabrics for a variety of purposes and for administration offices and army accommodation.
For the occasion, he came up with co-ordinated colour guides for interiors, with designs for 22 carpets, 13 woven textiles and 11 polyester fabrics. The three volumes of colour schemes, featured one key carpet design with samples of co-ordinated textiles and accent fabrics that would have worked well together to create perfectly co-ordinated working and living environments.
Some of Klein's colour charts are also part of the exhibition "Bernat Klein: Design In Colour" at the National Museum Of Scotland, Edinburgh (until 23rd April).
The museum acquired Klein's archive in 2010, that includes around 4,000 objects. The charts on display are taken from his Colour Box, "a large wooden structure designed to hold twenty or so boards on to which were stuck row after row of tiny, plastic pockets," Bernat Klein's daughter Shelley explains in the volume "The See-Through House".
The pockets contained "tiny twists of yarn, snippets of paper, dimples of wool and fingernails of cloth", collected and subsequently methodically arranged throughout the years for reference purposes. Klein used them to combine and balance colours, so these charts are important to understand where his luxurious multi-nuanced velvet tweeds came from.
As stated above, Klein appreciated the nuances of the colours surrounding him, but also their instability: a video interview included in the exhibition features people who worked with him and includes a story about Klein bringing a leaf into the dye-works and asking to immediately produce a hue replicating that particular shade before the leaf changed colour.
In our intangible, immaterial and digital world, Klein's colour guides (replicas of his charts are available from the Bernat Klein Foundation) provide us with a tangible and physical connection with colours. They inspire us to appreciate and value all hues in different contexts and disciplines, not just in art, fashion or interior design, challenging our traditional understanding and preconceived notions of colours.
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