THE SPIRIT OF COLORS
THE ART OF KARL GERSTNER
Karl Gerstner & Henri Stierlin [Editor]
Karl Gerstner & Henri Stierlin [Editor]: THE SPIRIT OF COLORS: THE ART OF KARL GERSTNER. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981. First English-language edition. Square quarto. Black cloth stamped in gray. Photographically printed dust jacket. 225 pp. 140 illustrations, 70 in color. 2 fold-outs. Jacket lamination faintly marked and bubbled [as usual]. Title page loose and laid in, thus a very good copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
I cannot see why sensation should be less precise than thought. The scientist designs conceptual models, the artist perceptual models.
— Karl Gerstner
7.5 x 9.75 hardcover book with 225 pages, 140 illustrations [70 in color] and 2 fold-outs. illustrating Gerstner's theories about color and form. Swiss artist and designer, Karl Gerstner draws on artistic literary, and scientific sources, as well as on his own studio work to investigate the basic visual elements of color and form. Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky, Gerstner explores the ideas of continuous and evenly measured changes in the three dimensions of color - hue, tone, and saturation.
The essays include: The Spirit of Color: The Farbenlehre of Goethe; Conception —Perception: Fifteen Aspects to a Sentence of Max Bill; The Precision of Sensation; and Is Constructive Art at an End? Or its beginning? The illustrations include the "Color Sounds," the "Color Forms," and the "Color Lines."
Color is Gerstner's essential medium. In this book, he presents the pure sensation of color with great precision. He explores color physically, sumptuously, yet with cool, formal clarity in the book's seventy color plates. He also pursues the subject of color historically and psychologically in a series of essays, citing examples from Aristotle to Andreas Speiser, from Goethe to Max Luscher; theories and speculations about the character and employment of color and form. His notes and observations are often couched in a poetic, aphoristic manner:
"Kandinsky:
in general, then, color is a means
of exercising a direct influence on the soul.
The color is the piano key.
The eye is the hammer.
The soul is the piano key with all its strings."
"Albers:
if one says 'red'
and 50 persons are listening to him,
they will be imagining 50 reds.
And no doubt:
all these reds will be very different."
"Goethe worked in his green room.
In the blue one he welcomed guests he didn't like.
So that they would leave soon."
Gerstner has found a system of simple and symmetrical geometric shapes that can be continuously transformed from one to another so that each colour can be given its own distinct shape ... Some of his resulting artwork can be seen via the exceptionally good reproductions in [the] book, which I recommend to any artists engaged in thinking systematically about colour. Karl Gerstner is above all, a visual combinator. Rather than pursuing solutions to specific problems, he is seeking a general program valid for many solutions: a systematic approach for analyzing in design terms the conceptual and emotional aspects of form and color.
— Emilio Ambasz
To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements and combining them.
— Karl Gerstner
I consider him one of the most impressive and creative men in graphic arts today. His clarity and inventiveness is consistently a mark of his work.
— György Kepes