What Is Goethe's Theory of Color, and Why Does Waldorf Use It?

In his Theory of Colours, published in 1810, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe argued that color is born where light and darkness meet. He also wrote, at length, about how each color feels to us: yellow warm and gladdening, blue cool and drawing us after it. Rudolf Steiner edited Goethe's scientific writings as a young man, and he later urged the first Waldorf teachers to study this book. That's why Waldorf painting starts with what colors feel like, long before any color wheel. Physics explains color differently, through Newton's work on the spectrum, and it's fair to know both.

Goethe's theory of color in plain words

Goethe is best known for poems, plays and Faust. But he spent years on color. The Theory of Colours is a long book in three parts: a teaching part (the "didactic" section), an attack on Newton, and a history of color ideas.

His starting point was simple. Colors, he wrote, "are acts of light." Pure, strong light is colorless. Darkness is colorless. Color appears between them.

He gave everyday examples. Look at the sun through a little haze and it looks yellow. Through thicker haze, as at sunset, it deepens to red. Now turn the other way. Look at the dark of space through air lit by daylight, and you see blue. Goethe noted that from high mountains the sky looks deep blue, and it grows paler as you come down into the valleys.

So in his picture, yellow is the color nearest the light and blue the color nearest the dark. He set them as two poles, which he called plus and minus. On the yellow side he put light, warmth and nearness. On the blue side, shadow, coolness and distance. Green comes when yellow and blue mix. And when either yellow or blue grows stronger and deeper, he wrote, it starts to lean toward red.

How colors feel

The part of the book Waldorf teachers care most about is the sixth section, on the "effect of colour with reference to moral associations." Goethe meant how a color acts on our feelings.

Of yellow in its purest state he wrote that it has "a serene, gay, softly exciting character." Look at a grey winter landscape through yellow glass, he suggested, and "the eye is gladdened, the heart expanded and cheered."

Blue he found harder to pin down. It is "a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose." Just as the sky and far mountains look blue, he wrote, "a blue surface seems to retire from us." We love to look at blue "not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it."

He also noticed that the eye answers each color with its opposite. His own experiment, from the start of the book: hold a small piece of bright colored paper in front of a white surface, look at it steadily, then take it away. Another color appears on the white. From his color circle: "yellow demands purple; orange, blue; red, green."

You can try this with your child in two minutes. Cut a small red square, hold it against white paper, and both stare at it for a slow count of 30. Then pull the square away and keep looking. A greenish ghost will often appear where it was.

Why Waldorf uses it

Steiner knew Goethe's science closely. From 1884 to 1897 he edited Goethe's scientific writings for a large German edition and wrote introductions to them, now collected as his first book.

When he trained the first Waldorf teachers in Stuttgart in August 1919, he came back to it. He wanted children to "live in the world of colors" as early as possible, and he said this would work best "if teachers would thoroughly familiarize themselves with what Goethe gives in the didactic part of his theory of colors." He pointed them to what Goethe says about "the challenging nature of red" and "the quiet, introspective feeling that the soul experiences when it sees blue."

That advice still shapes the classroom. The Goetheanum's curriculum guidance for art says Waldorf art teaching "takes its lead from Goethe's Theory of Colours, especially the 'Didactic Section'," where Goethe describes the effects of colors on us.

Where you'll see it in Waldorf painting

Once you know Goethe's descriptions, you start to hear them everywhere in Waldorf painting.

In the color stories. In Waldorf color stories, yellow is the one who wakes first and spreads out, blue waits quietly at the edges, and red arrives strong. Those are Goethe's colors, turned into characters a 6-year-old can feel.

In the order of the colors. Many grade 1 teachers bring yellow and blue first, then let them meet and make green, then bring in red. That's close to Goethe's two poles and the color that rises between them.

In wet-on-wet painting. Children paint colors, not objects, and let one color flow into another. Wet-on-wet watercolor is where most of this happens.

In light and darkness. The Goetheanum's guidance suggests grade 3 painting can explore how yellow, blue and red arise out of light and darkness. Older children often come back to light and dark in charcoal. In veil painting, layers of thin color are laid over each other, and painting teachers often describe them in terms of light and dark.

For the whole path from kindergarten to grade 8, see how Waldorf painting changes by grade.

What physics says

It's worth being plain about this, because your child will meet the other view in any science book.

In 1672, Isaac Newton reported his prism experiments to the Royal Society. He argued that white light is "a Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays": a mix of colors that bend by different amounts when they pass through glass. He set out the full work in his Opticks in 1704. The historian of science Patricia Fara describes Newton's 1672 paper as "the foundation of modern optics."

Goethe "flatly rejected" Newton's claim, Fara writes. He held a prism right up to his own eye and watched colored fringes appear where black met white, and built his theory from what he saw. British scientists dismissed it. Fara adds that Goethe's ideas were still "very influential on German science and art" in the 1800s.

Physics today follows Newton. The blue sky Goethe wrote about is explained by light scattering in the air. As NASA puts it, blue light "is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves." At sunset, light passes through more air. More of the blue is scattered away, and the reds and yellows come through.

So there are two ways of looking at color. Newton's asks what light is and measures it. Goethe's asks what color is like to the person seeing it. Waldorf painting draws on the second, and it doesn't need to reject the first. The science comes in grade 6, when many Waldorf schools teach optics through experiments in the grade 6 physics block.

Reading Goethe yourself

You don't need to read Goethe to paint with your child. If you'd like to, Eastlake's 1840 English translation is free on Project Gutenberg. Skip the polemic against Newton and go to the sixth section, on the effects of color. It's only a few pages, and it reads more like a painter's notebook than a science book.

For more on the man who brought these ideas into the classroom, see who was Rudolf Steiner.

A way to begin

Try one color this week, the way Goethe did. Put a single jar of yellow on the table, wet a sheet of paper, and paint it together. Before you rinse the brushes, ask your child one question: what does yellow feel like? Write down what they say. Next week, do the same with blue. You'll have started where Goethe started, with a color and a feeling.