The objective of my thesis is to extend the scholarship on colour in painting by focusing on how it is employed within the structuring framework of the orthogonal grid in the paintings of three contemporary artists, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter. Form and colour are essential elements in painting, and within the “essentialist” grid painting, the presence and function of colour have not received the full discussion they deserve. Structuralist, post-structuralist and anthropological modes of critical analysis in the latter part of the twentieth century, framed by postwar disillusionment and skepticism, have contributed to the effective foreclosure of examination of metaphysical, spiritual and utopian dimensions promised by the grid and its colour earlier in the century. Artists working with the grid have explored, and continue to explore the same eternally vexing problems and mysteries of our existence, but analyses of their art are cloaked in an atmosphere and language of rationalism. Critics and scholars have devoted their attention to discussing the properties of form, giving the behavior and status of colour, as a property affecting mind and body, little mention. The position of colour deserves to be re-dressed, so that we may have a more complete understanding of grid painting as a discrete kind of abstract painting. Each of the three artists I have examined here employed colour and grid in strategies unique to their work and its purposes. Ad Reinhardt arrived at his 1960s “black” paintings out of a background that included strong political beliefs, resistance to the dominant strain of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, and a deep interest in eastern religions and Buddhism. Agnes Martin shared Reinhardt’s interest in Buddhism and eastern religions, but chose to move toward the light in the atmospheric colour of her paintings, speaking of the quest for perfection of the mind in her writings and interviews. Gerhard Richter’s colour charts, a longstanding major subset of the vast range of this prolific artist’s work, speak to a need to go beyond his love of painting to the ungraspable substance of colour itself. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 12:34:58.813

This thesis describes a computational approach for analyzing the color aesthetics of images from the perspective of color theory. Our work has been informed by the works of Johannes Itten, one of the most influential theorists of color aesthetics. To the best of our knowledge, developing computational models that are based on Itten's theories is our unique contribution to Computer Vision. We focus on three aspects of color usage in visual art, namely modulation, contrast of hue and cold-warm contrast. For modulation, we introduce the color palette, a novel 3D visualization of the chromatic information of an image in the HSL space and propose a set of simple descriptors for evaluating color modulation. For contrast of hue, we assess the spatial color composition of the homogeneous regions. For cold-warm contrast, we assess the spatial color composition of the homogeneous regions and the hue adjacencies. Further, we assess the relative warmth of the homogeneous regions and adjacent hues. We also propose a visualization, namely a 3D histogram to visualize the patterns of the contrasts in an artist's paintings. We validate our methods by comparing our results with Itten's descriptions and comments. We hope that this computational approach improves the color-based features used in the aesthetic classification of images. / Graduate / 0984

Basic information: Kučerová, Petra: FRIEDL DICKER-BRANDEIS - DIDACTIC LINKS (Diploma Work) Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education, Art Education Department Content: The theoretical part deals with the inheritance of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis in the context of particular life stages. Monitoring is the artistic development of Brandeis, the principles of the Bauhaus and Johannes Ittena didactics. On the basis of preserved relic and historical sources are specified and documented the nature of methodology applied in Terezin. Content are observed with regard to the current didactics of arts and methods can be ispiring. Teaching part is devoted to contemporary educational and social institutions in which teaching practice has been implemented and these pictures were made at the art part of the thesis. Key words: Friedl Dicker - Brandeis, Johannes Itten, a preparatory course, Terezin, memories, free art, study, dictation

This thesis is concerned with the artists Tora Vega Holmström and Adolf Hölzel. Hölzel taught students in painting in the Dachau art colony, where TVH attended his classes in 1903. A thorough investigation of her notes provides us with novel information concerning his teaching and his theoretical outlook on art.
Their correspondence extended 30 years past her stay in Dachau and over the years their relationship evolved into a cordial friendship between two likeminded colleagues. Tora Vega Holmström often came to visit Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart, where he had come to teach at the art academy. She became a member of the group of avant-garde artists known as the Hölzel circle („Hölzel-Kreis“). 
On a visit to Sweden in 1911, Adolf Hölzel came into contact with the Swedish progressive educational movement at the community college ”Hvilan” in Scania, which was led by Tora Vega Holmströms father. We establish that through Hölzel, there was an indirect influence from this institution on the methods of teaching employed in the early Bauhaus in Weimar. Throughout the 1920s, Tora Vega Holmström spent time in France and became a intermediary between the cubists in Paris and the Hölzel circle in Stuttgart. Through a brief analysis of some of her works we show how firmly her style of painting is grounded in Hölzel’s formalism and his theories of colour.