117 The Color Research & Theory Collection ECKHARD BENDIN Color as multidiscipline There is barely any other aspect of our lives and our knowledge that has the topicality and complexity of color, reflected and refracted in all fields of scholarship as it is. It is due to these properties that color has long since ceased to be the subject of only one academic discipline, as was the case regarding philosophy centuries ago. Just as light and color are connected to all areas of life, nature, technology, science, art, culture and education, recent analysis shows that the path of color theory initially led through the most differentiated investigations in many individual disciplines. It then continued on towards an increasingly multidisciplinary field of knowledge that has become almost boundless (Welsch/Liebmann 2003; Kuehni/ Schwarz 2007). Today, an interdisciplinary color theory which has established itself as a modern science examining the interrelationships of light and color, seems more necessary than ever. This is especially true since in the past, all endeavors of individual disciplines quickly reached their limits and were being challenged to extend them. An impressive example was the increasing shift of philosophy towards the natural sciences in the 19th century. This was particularly apparent as regards physiology, which in Leipzig, led to the emergence of psychophysics, experimental aesthetics and experimental psychology. The history of the impact of Goethe’s theory of colors also bears witness to how necessary the holistic overview of essential facts appears to be. Time and again, eminent natural scientists have turned to color and taken up positions regarding the subject. Among them are Nobel Prize winners such as Wilhelm Ostwald, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg, who, in a lecture on the theory of color as propounded by Goethe and Newton, challenged scientists − in the light of modern physics − by pointing out to them the necessity of transcending boundaries and establishing and defending fresh connections, in the interest of life and communication. Today, among the largely subject-specific University collections, an interdisciplinary collection that transcends boundaries is something of a rarity. The Color Research & Theory Collection can therefore be seen as something special. Unlike other collections, it strives for a multidisciplinary connection of teaching and research content. This, however, is only natural, because color − this ancient field of experience and knowledge − can no longer be dealt with by just one discipline. Color is an elementary, sensual, morally perceptible and biologically and culturally effective phenomenon. As such, it is generated by nature through the interplay of light and matter and therefore in the first instance, linked to physics, chemistry and biology. In short, it cannot exist without them. Color theory, by contrast, as a comprehensive science of color and what it conveys has always been a fundamental concern of the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and artistic disciplines. Color was integrated into these fields and was the focus of specific subjects. The elementary aesthetic potential of color, however, attracted Zeugner’s “Renewed Baumann-Prase Chart” Leipzig 1989/90 Six of the twelve sectional planes of his draft of a “Renewed Baumann-Prase Color Chart” with a total of 864 samples, mixed with gyroscopic mixing (Zeugner estate). Only where science discovers relations to life itself at the utmost limits of its previous way of research, will its meaning become comprehensible. Heisenberg 1941
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