118 The Color Research & Theory Collection the highest level of attention in the complexity of architecture, art, and design. Here, it was widely used and reflected upon as a visual event and a creative medium. In today’s world of media, the use and significance of the media of light and color have attained a remarkable degree of breadth and diversity. Just think of the multitude of new disciplines and professions in media and communication design. These disciplines and professions can no longer do without basic insights such as those provided by a multidisciplinary color theory. Goethe already referred to the difficulties of a holistic overview in the introduction to the historical part of his Theory of Colors. In it, he complains about the difficulties involved in isolating the theory of colors, which permeates everything, from other knowledge, while still holding it together. He identifies the challenge that science must necessarily be thought of as art if we expect any kind of wholeness from it. However, in this manner he also points the way: “In order to...approach such a demand, ...one must not exclude any of the human powers in scientific activity. The abysses of intuition, a sure vision of the present, mathematical depth, physical accuracy, height of reason, sharpness of intellect, an agile yearning imagination, loving delight in the sensual, nothing can be dispensed with.” (Goethe 1810, vol. 2, p. 119 f). A good 100 years later, Ostwald − looking back on decades of color research and the awareness he gained in the process that he was inevitably and simultaneously being confronted with artistic questions − also invoked the possibilities and opportunities of a growing integration of science and art. From the Color Forum to the Collection It is therefore not surprising that the idea for the Collection evolved from a specialist discipline such as architecture, with its focus on life’s complexities, and also from an interdisciplinary tradition of thought. Since its foundation in 1992, the Dresden Color Forum (Dresdner Farbenforum), an interdisciplinary conference and publication series at the Institute of Foundations of Design and Architectural Delineation at TUD Dresden University of Technology, has taken on a wide variety of overarching subjects in a series of conferences and exhibitions, connecting various experts and interested parties through knowledge exchange and personal encounters. For the first time after a 30-year hiatus, the Forum brought together color scientists and designers from East and West as well as from several European countries at a conference in East Germany. The first meeting was followed by further conferences every two years, including the symposium “On the Significance and Impact of Wilhelm Ostwald’s Theory of Color”. This event was held in 2003 in Großbothen near Leipzig in cooperation with the Wilhelm Ostwald Society to commemorate the 150th birthday of the Saxon Nobel Prize winner and color researcher. In the publication series Dresdner Farbenforum, six conference volumes were published between 1992 and 2003, with 94 papers by 75 authors, including the documentation on the Ostwald Symposium 2003 (Bendin 1996–2001; Bendin 2003). Since 2001, the Dresden Color Forum has increasingly devoted itself to a concern that had been insufficiently documented and reappraised in the past: The specificity and history of the development of color theory in Central Germany. It was essentially shaped by natural scientists and humanists, artisans, entrepreneurs, architects, artists and educators. Among them were well-known protagonists such as Goethe, Runge, Schopenhauer, Hering, Ostwald and Itten. However, as industrialization progressed, many lesser-known personages in the field of color theory also contributed significantly to the development of Central Germany into a melting pot of modern color theory until the middle of the 20th century. They include: ◼ the chemists Stöckhardt, Möhlau, Krais, Ristenpart and König ◼ the physicists Ulbricht, Klughardt, Richter and Buchwald ◼ the physical chemists Ritter, Seebeck, Luther and Goldberg ◼ the printing technicians Gleitsmann, Förster and Neugebauer ◼ the mineralogists/crystallographers Goldschmidt and Rösch ◼ the physiologists Purkinje, Fechner, Wundt and Matthaei For how difficult it is to isolate the theory of colors, which only permeates through everywhere, from the rest of knowledge and yet to hold them together again, will be palpable to anyone with insight. Goethe 1810, Vol. 2, Introduction, p. XI. It was inevitable that in connection with colors technical and artistic questions occupied me at the same time...and the increasing realization that nothing is inaccessible to science forced me to set my sights on the science of art. Ostwald 1927, p. 407
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