Johannes Itten:
The Elements of Color
7 types of colour harmony
& contrast
Johannes Itten (1888-1967)
-painter, designer, teacher
(http://www.johannesitten.com/ )
Space Composition, I
[Raum Komposition I] –
Itten (1944)
Art of the Color
(Kunst der Farbe)
Itten
Itten’s
colour
wheel
1. contrast of
hue
Painting with
Three Spots Wassily Kandinsky
(1914)
(hue)
Improvisation 31
(Sea Battle) Wassily Kandinsky
(1913)
Hue
The Gate –
Hans Hoffman (1960)
2. light/dark
contrast
The Black Feather
Hat - Gustav Klimt
(1910)
warm colours
cool colours
3. cold/warm
contrast
Landscape - Cezanne
Mounte Sainte Victoire – Cezanne (c. 1885)
A red-violet juxtaposed to blue looks warm (left),
while the same red-violet juxtaposed to red looks
cool
The narrow red bars advance
toward the viewer, while the
cooler blue recedes.
4. complementary contrast
Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret- Delacroix
Y-P: strongest
value contrast
R-G: equal
value contrast
5. simultaneous
contrast
Marilyn Andy Warhol
ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars,
Deaths, and Disasters, 1962 - 1964
are the reds the same?
simultaneous
contrast also
occurs with
value contrast
6. contrast of
saturation
Portrait of Franz Marc
– Macke (1910)
Contrast of saturation: This is the degree of
purity of the color, so it is possible to contrast a
pure, intense color with a dull, diluted color.
There are four ways to dilute a color:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Tint (add white).
Shade (add black).
Add gray (heading toward neutrality)
Add the complementary color
Adding gray to a pure color demonstrates one way color
can be desaturated. The grays in the corners of each
pattern are the same neutral gray
7. contrast of extension
Starry Night – Van Gogh (1889)
relative areas of
complementary
colours for
balance to the
eye
A red/green checkboard pattern looks static compared to a
green field sprinkled with small red squares, illustrating one
way to manipulate contrast of extension
other harmonies:
monochromatic
Woman Darning Vuillard
analogous
or
adjacent
Orange and Yellow
– Mark Rothko
(1956)
Head of a Man
– Paul Klee