Islamic Aesthetics & Josef Albers
What I loved from travelling and experiencing different cultures was connecting the dots of all the information and studies I got between my field in Design and Arts within my culture and faith — wherein similarities or connections were discovered that are less spoken of. While putting words into discoveries of intangible heritage and essence proves difficult, this is perhaps my small steps into clearing my mind and discober connections, as my blog.
During my masters in Product Design at Sapienza University of Rome, we were introduced to Josef Albers, an influential artist and educator of the 20th century. Initially a member of the Bauhaus movement in Germany during the 1920’s, the school was forced to close during the reign of the Nazi Regime where he moved to the United States in 1933, before finally settling in the faculty at Yale University in 1950 as the chairman of the Department of Design.
Devoting the entirety of his work towards the study of the perception of colour through colour interactions, his signature work is his Homage to the Square’s series. Produced by applying colours with a palette knife on a white panel, and by repeating the same geometric form of the square, Albers investigates the perceptional phenomena and optical effects of interacting colours within the same spatial composition; where he concluded that these compositions and different proportions effects human experience and psychology only through optical experiences; creating various illusions humans are susceptible to — which he demonstrated through his art.
Alber’s infamous book Interaction of Color first published in 1963 changed the way people thought about seeing, where he wrote about how engaging with materials in a subjective manner:
‘As we begin principally with the material, color itself, and its action and interaction as registered in our minds, we practice first and mainly a study of ourselves’.
On Islamic Aesthetics
Albers study of the psychological effect of colours and shapes on human perception was a practiced field in the Islamic aesthetics (al-husn الحُسن) (aesthetics meaning philosophy of beauty from Latin). As some restrictions were placed on figural representation, early muslims artists were encourged into redefining ‘beauty’. This led to centuries of elaborate understandings and systems that formulated an aesthetic theory that intended to privilege the imagination’s ingenious abstracting capacities over naturalistic representation. A system that could be transformed into endless base and variations combining art and technicality, as well as the comprehensiveness between all the arts into one proportions: from geometry to poetry and music to the sciences — an approach that Josef Alber’s school, Bauhaus, was figuratively built upon on the early 20th century.
The aim of muslims artists was not to capture a perceived reality, but glimpses of perceptional beauty. Beauty, which in itself, was loved and celebrated as al-Ghazali quoted “Everything the perception of which gives pleasure and satisfaction is loved by the one who perceives it”. Hence theories of beauty based on an agreeable harmony of proportions and colours instinctively appealing to the human soul or heart are frequently encountered in the writings of post 11th-century Muslim authors (Necipoglu, 1996).
Ibn Haytham (Alhazen, 965 CE — 1040 CE) defined visual beauty in his “Book of Optics” (1021 CE) as a complex interaction of 22 properties that effects the preceptor, and of those properties, two were capable of producing “in the soul an effect such that the form appears beautiful”, which were ‘Light’ and ‘Colour’, specifically the proportion and harmony (al-tanasub wa al-itilaf التناسب والائتلاف) between them with the other properties. And as light is the ultimate source of visual beauty and the precondition of vision, al-Haytham added that colour, too, can produce beauty by itself, for bright colors “appeal to the beholder and please the eye.” When arranged with regard to proportion, the aesthetic value of colorful designs increases considerably since “bright and pure colours and designs are more beautiful when regularly and uniformly ordered than when they have no order.“ In al-Haytham’s theory of vision, the beauty of visual form derives from the diffusion of light and color from visible objects whose rays obey geometric laws embodying harmonious proportions. This aesthetics of light and proportion recalls Plato’s reference in the Philebus to a timeless beauty of pure geometric forms and colours whose beauty is not relative but absolute.
While Ibn Sina (Avecinna, 980–1037) defined perception as “the abstraction by the percipient subject of the form of the perceived object in some manner,” where geometrics forms where the purest mental abstraction involving the intervention of internal senses. Using abstract sterilized geometric forms as bases of design in harmonious proportions as a geometrical bridge between material and spiritual, it anticipated the Islamic non-narrative designs to the future abstraction in modern art.
In summary, I find the pure essence of Modern Art that started in the 1900s as a rebound to Islamic aesthetics that focused on finding beauty in proportions and contemplation, instead of focusing on technicalities and realism. Perhaps it matches the stance on “reflection” (tafakur تفكر) from the Quran about the simple yet proportional beauty and essence of God that is found around us:
˹They are˺ those who remember Allah while standing, sitting, and lying on their sides, and reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth ˹and pray˺, “Our Lord! You have not created ˹all of˺ this without purpose. Glory be to You! Protect us from the torment of the Fire. (Quran 3:191)
Note: This humble study is unconventional and intriguing; hence I will definitely return to study more of, and discuss about it once I find further sources in the future.
Sources:
• Albers, homage to the square (article) (no date) Khan Academy. Available at: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/post-war-american-art/postwar-abstract-art/a/albers-homage-to-the-square (Accessed: 29 August 2023).
• Albers, J. (2013) Interaction of Color. New haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bauhaus (1998). Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannca.com/topic/Bauhaus (Accessed: 3 September 2023).
• Fakhry, M. (1983). A History of Islamic Philosophy. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
• Goichon, A. (1971). “Ibn Sina.” In The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New ed. Vol. 3: 941–47. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
• Ibn Al-Haytham. (1989). The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham: Books I-III, On Direct Vision. Translated with a commentary by Abdelhamid I.Sabra. 2 vols. London: Warburg Institute.
• Ibn Khaldun. (1967). The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 2nd ed. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. 3 vols. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Original edition, New York: Pantheon Books, 1958.
• Ibn Sina, A. & Husayn C. (1951). Livre des directives et remarques. Translated by A. M. Goichon. Paris: J. Vrin [originally titled Kitab al- cishdrdt wa al-tanbihdt]. 1952. Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation/Kitab al-najat, Book 2, Chapter 6. Translated and edited by Fazlur Rahman. London: Oxford Univ. Press
• Josef Albers and The Interaction of Color (2016) IdeelArt.com. Available at: https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/josef-albers (Accessed: 29 August 2023).
• Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square (no date) Artsy. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/artist-series/josef-albers-homage-to-the-square (Accessed: 29 August 2023).
• Josef Albers: Homage to the square: With rays (1970) The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489056 (Accessed: 29 August 2023).
• Necipoglu, N. (1996) The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Oxford University Press.
• What are Josef Albers’ homage to the square paintings? (2022) Public Delivery. Available at: https://publicdelivery.org/josef-albers-homage-to-the-square/ (Accessed: 29 August 2023).
