Goethe’s zur Farbenlehre (1810) and Arthur Segal’s Das Lichtproblem in der Malerei (1925)
Goethe’s zur Farbenlehre (1810) and Arthur Segal’s Das Lichtproblem in der Malerei (1925)

Summary/Abstract: Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810) and Arthur Segal’s Das Lichtproblem in der Malerei (1925) deal with the various assessments, considerations and usages of Goethe’s Theory of Colours on the background of the aesthetics of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The paper follows Goethe’s appreciation of his own research and theory of colours throughout his lifetime, as it emerges from his Conversations with Eckermann. This contribution frames Goethe’s artistic activities as an interpretative context of his theories of the colour spectrum. A special attention is paid to the relationship between Goethe and the painter Philip Otto Runge, with whom he had an exchange of letters and conversations about the chromatic spectrum. The relevance of Goethe’s work is further examined from the point of view of early modernist artists such as John Mallord William Turner, but also from the point of view of later theories of colour such as the one of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who strongly influenced the emergence of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. After presenting the protracted criticism of Goethe’s colour theory by Wittgenstein, who doubted the factual truth that Goethe’s theory was influential upon artists, the paper addresses the way in which the Theory of Colours was assimilated and distorted in Kandinsky and especially in the theory of the Romanian-born painter Arthur Segal. The latter published in 1925 Das Lichtproblem in der Malerei and invoked both Newton and Goethe in order to articulate a theory of the utopian, optical equilibrium in painting, a theory based on the Goethean ideal of a world of perfect colour harmony, possibly emerging only in painting.

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