Elementary Color

Red, yellow, and blue—the familiar “primary colors”—may look like the foundation of color theory. Milton Bradley opens by challenging that very certainty, asking how artists and scientists can talk about color when they do not even share its terms.

In this late-nineteenth-century effort to bring art and science onto common ground, Bradley begins with light, the solar spectrum, and the colors reflected from material surfaces. He argues that color can be taught and studied systematically, provided people have shared standards and a language for recording what they see. Artists may trust their eyes; scientists may test perception—but their findings have too often passed one another by. Bradley’s proposed instruction seeks to make color knowledge communicable, from the classroom to artists working far apart. What might become visible once color has a common language?

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