Introduction to Sanford Wurmfeld’s Book Color Seminar
by Matthew Deleget

The following text was included at the introduction to the book Color Seminar by Sanford Wurmfeld published by MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, in 2019.

“The selection of color has always been a fundamental problem of painting. How artists solve this problem reflects why they paint and what they communicate to their viewers. Color theory is the result of a search for information about the human visual experience of color and an attempt to formulate relationships between this experience and its causes.”

In the spring of 1985, New York City–based artist Sanford Wurmfeld wrote the above words in the catalogue essay introducing a groundbreaking exhibition he curated for the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College entitled Color Documents: A Presentational Theory. Dozens of original treatises and diagrammatic plates were featured in the show describing European and American color systems published from the eighteenth century to the present, many loaned from his own comprehensive personal library. Created by both artists and scientists alike, these systems endeavored to empirically organize color stimulus according to direct visual experience.

On the heels of this innovative exhibition, Wurmfeld conceived and began offering his now legendary Color Seminar course at Hunter College, where he had been teaching since 1967 and served as Chairperson of the Art Department (from 1978 to 2006). Building and expanding upon concepts examined in earlier classes he taught—including Psychology and Art, as well as History of Color Theory—Wurmfeld’s new course brought concepts from divergent subjects such as semiotics, sign theory, and communication theory to the discussion of color experience in art. The course challenged participating students to look well beyond the then-standard art historical analysis of an artwork’s iconography and to equally consider its aesthetic qualities as well, namely color.

Geared to artists and art historians, Wurmfeld taught his Color Seminar each semester for the next twenty-five years, with his last class taking place in the spring of 2012, the year he retired. All told, more than five-hundred individuals participated in his elective course, and its extensive and continuing impact on contemporary art discourse, and on abstract painting in particular, cannot be overstated. From studios to classrooms, former students, now established artists in their own right, for years now have been teaching their own interpretations of this course in visual arts and curatorial programs across the country.

Wurmfeld’s own studio work has exhaustively investigated the subject of color and its capacity to elicit wide-ranging emotional responses in the viewer for more than five decades. He first began to explore color constructs in the spring of 1966 with a series of shaped abstract paintings and relief works organized around a restricted palette of just three colors. In subsequent decades, his purview expanded greatly to explore a broad array of color strategies across a wide variety of differing media, including painting, works on paper, sculpture, installation, and filmmaking. In 2000, Wurmfeld’s research culminated in his first Cyclorama, an immense and immersive elliptical color environment fusing together elements of painting, architecture, and time into a true Gesamtkunstwerk. He continues to investigate this distinctive format today and recently completed his third Cyclorama installment which will be premiered this coming fall at the Herron School of Art and Design Galleries in the Midwest, where I grew up.

I have had the great pleasure of collaborating with Sandy Wurmfeld here at the gallery for nearly a decade, so it is truly an honor to present his renowned Color Seminar transcribed in its entirety, and complemented by the artist’s subsequent reflections, in this handsome hardbound book. The publication begins with a discussion of afterimages and related experiments concerning the nature of color experience. It then works its way through theoretical ideas about color and the phenomenology of perception, finally ending with a discussion of color as content in twentieth and twenty-first century abstraction—what Wurmfeld terms “presentational art”— with its emphasis on artists crafting the viewer experience through an active analysis of color. The book concludes with a substantive bibliography of additional resources for readers to continue their own self-directed research into color history and experience. This will be our first volume in an ongoing series of artist-centered publications.

My hope for this book is that it will stimulate innovative ideas, provoke heated discussions, produce compelling new works of art, and ultimately become a fundamental resource for artists and arts thinkers, valued equally alongside key publications such as Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Edward R. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, among many others. I can only dream about what new color concepts and pathways forward this book will seed in artists, curators, historians, writers, and other creatives in the near and distant future. Twenty years from now, if I’m fortunate enough to still be around to discuss color concerns, I would be overjoyed to serendipitously find this book in the studios of artists, art school classrooms, libraries, and museum bookstores across the country and beyond.