Color Seminar

Drawing upon his quarter-century tenure at Hunter College, where his legendary Color Seminar profoundly shaped multiple generations of artists and art historians, Sanford Wurmfeld’s book articulates a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding color’s phenomenological complexity while simultaneously positioning chromatic experience as a crucial site for investigating the ontological conditions of contemporary abstract painting. Through careful attention to both the physiological mechanisms of perception—particularly the generative role of afterimages in constituting visual experience—and the broader philosophical implications of what he terms “presentational art,” Wurmfeld constructs a rigorously argued case for color’s centrality to late modernist aesthetic discourse, one that illuminates the historical trajectory of twentieth-century abstraction and provides contemporary practitioners with sophisticated methodological tools for crafting intentional viewing experiences through systematic chromatic analysis. This intellectually ambitious project, which synthesizes decades of pedagogical innovation with extensive theoretical research, culminates in an invaluable scholarly resource that has already begun to reshape institutional approaches to color education across the United States, as evidenced by the numerous former students who have adapted Wurmfeld’s pioneering methodology to their own teaching practices in visual arts programs nationwide.

Published by Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2019

Essay by Sanford Wurmfeld, with an introduction by Matthew Deleget

Designed by Tim Laun

Editorial production by SNAP Editions

112 pages