What Goethe Got Right About Color (For the Wrong Reasons): A Poet's Fight with Newton
Written by Rena Georgakopoulos-Ueta
Edited by Julia Xu
When Isaac Newton poked a pinhole in his window shade sometime in the 1660s, he didn’t know he was commencing a path toward a theory that would lead to trans-century beef with a German. This German, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the most influential German poet, playwright, novelist, and self-taught scientist from the 19th century, thought Newton's whole approach to color was pathetically executed, and so he set out to form his own theory of color. Goethe turned out to be wrong about almost every mechanical detail of optics. And yet he still managed to change the way artists approach color choices by noticing things about color that Newton's theory never touched.
Newton's ideas are the ones we learn in school. After Cambridge University shut down during the Great Plague, Newton retreated to his family's farm to run his famous prism experiments, catching sunlight through a pinhole and refracting it onto the wall with a prism. Instead of forming a circular point, the different colors bent, or refracted, by different fixed amounts, a property he called refrangibility. A second prism placed between the first prism and the wall recombined the colors into white light. This proved that white light was never pure to begin with, but rather already made of every color. Newton did not publish his observations until 1704, three decades after he had worked it out. Yet, once his book Opticks came out, it became the mathematical foundation of light upon which physicists would build.
In the 1800s, Goethe could not stand this. After a trip to Italy, where he asked painters about their color choices for depicting various subjects and never got a satisfying answer, he decided that the theory of color physics was not well-founded. He rejected Newton’s idea that white light secretly contains every color and argued that color is what happens at the boundary where light and darkness interact. In his system, yellow is light slightly dimmed by darkness, and blue is darkness slightly lightened by light; red and violet are more intense versions of each. In Goethe’s color wheel, yellow and blue serve as the two poles of color, opposites in a way Newton's spectrum never really accounted for.
Curated by Christina Chen (yc2953@cornell.edu).
To understand his theory, we can reference the sky and sun. Looking straight up at noon, you observe through the thinnest possible slice of atmosphere. This lack of “turbid medium” (a mixture of particles in the sky) which Goethe believed darkened light colors, made the sun appear close to white. Near sunset, the same light must cut through a much longer, thicker stretch of air near the horizon. By Goethe's logic, that thicker turbid medium darkens it from yellow to a deep red. The same particle-filled air works in reverse when considering the color of the sky. A thin atmosphere overhead barely brightens the darkness of space, so the sky stays a deep blue, while a thicker atmosphere near the horizon adds more light and washes the blue out to a paler shade.
While undoubtedly romantic, Goethe’s theories regarding the underlying mechanisms of the visuals of sunsets and sunrises are completely wrong. The real explanation is Rayleigh scattering, in which shorter wavelengths scatter more than longer ones as sunlight passes through gas molecules, not a turbid medium affecting light values. Goethe's physics thus quickly met its end in the physics world. But his observations, a thicker atmosphere meaning a redder sun and a thinner atmosphere meaning a deeper blue, line up with what we actually see, because he was describing the pattern in a way that forces us to consider the boundaries between lightness and darkness.
The same pattern holds for his less "scientific" claims. His idea that colors carry emotional weight— red as intensity, blue as a calm kind of melancholy, yellow as cheerful and closest to light—reads more like art theory than physics, because it is art theory. But that is also why his 1810 color wheel became a standard reference for artists and designers well into the twentieth century, long after physicists had pushed Goethe aside. Goethe’s theory may not hold up as physics, but its artistry deserves a voice to bring some emotional depth to how we think about the physical world.
Rena Georgakopoulos-Ueta ‘29 is in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at rig36@cornell.edu.
