Color theory has been shaped by a long line of scientists and artists. Sir Isaac Newton built the first color wheel in 1666 after using prisms to refract white light into its component spectrum. Michel Eugène Chevreul, the nineteenth-century French chemist, explained simultaneous contrast and profoundly influenced painters by demonstrating how adjacent colors alter each other's appearance. Johannes Itten, a Swiss artist and Bauhaus teacher, refined the twelve-hue color wheel and identified seven distinct types of color contrast: contrast of hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, and extension. His book The Art of Color remains a foundational text in color education.
Josef Albers, a German-American Bauhaus educator, took the next step in his influential 1963 book Interaction of Color and his Homage to the Square painting series. He argued that color is fundamentally relative — the same color looks different depending on its context — a lesson that reshaped modern design education and inspired generations of artists exploring perception. Albert Munsell contributed a more scientific framework with the Munsell Color System in 1905, organizing color in three dimensions — hue, value, and chroma — to provide a perceptually uniform way to identify colors.
Artists have applied and extended these theories in powerful ways. The Impressionists, informed by Chevreul, abandoned dark earth-toned palettes for pure, side-by-side colors and used complementary hues for shadows rather than black, capturing the vibrancy of natural light. Van Gogh pushed color into emotional territory, juxtaposing intense complements like yellow and violet in The Night Café. The Fauves, led by Henri Matisse, used arbitrary, non-naturalistic color for expressive power, as seen in Woman with a Hat. Mark Rothko later enveloped viewers in luminous, soft-edged color fields meant to evoke profound emotional and spiritual states, while Yves Klein patented International Klein Blue and dedicated entire canvases to a single ultramarine hue as a kind of pure, immaterial experience. Historically, ultramarine pigment itself — ground from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan — was more valuable than gold, reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary and other sacred subjects.