The history of colour theory is, in essence, the history of extremely serious people arguing over what happens when you put red next to green. For centuries, colour hovered uneasily between science, art and mysticism, attracting physicists with prisms, painters with headaches, and philosophers who suspected that blue probably meant something profound. By the early twentieth century, Johannes Itten had turned colour into something approaching a spiritual fitness programme. At the Bauhaus, he taught students to study contrasts, harmonies and the emotional temperature of hues, often combining these lessons with breathing exercises, meditation and dietary ideas. To Itten, colour was more than decoration. It possessed temperament, energy and an almost moral force. Yellow advanced, blue withdrew, red demanded attention, and his students were expected to follow these moral guidelines closely.
Josef Albers, another great Bauhaus teacher, approached the subject with cooler nerves. His famous studies demonstrated that colour is gloriously unreliable: the same square can appear lighter, darker, warmer or colder depending entirely on what surrounds it. Colour, he argued, behaves less like a fixed property than a sociable liar, constantly changing its story according to the company it keeps. Max Lüscher carried this instability into psychology, devising a test in which a person’s preference for certain coloured cards supposedly revealed emotional states and personality traits. The test became popular in business and clinical settings, although its scientific standing has remained disputed. Together, Itten, Albers and Lüscher helped transform colour from a matter of pigments and pleasing arrangements into a complicated drama involving perception, emotion, context and the unsettling possibility that even a small grey square may not be what it seems.
