Colour Is Optics

The Russian artist Mikhail Karasik (born 1953) specialises in graphics, in particular, art books of lithographs. A series of graphic works was used as the starting point for this library exhibition, which he made in response to a manual on colour theory by Mikhail Matyushin, Spravotsjnik po tsvetoe (Reference on Color), which was published in 1932. These lithographs were supplemented with other manuals about colour by Josef Albers, Paul Schuitema and Jasper Johns, amongst others. In this way the exhibition provides a summary of the theme of colour in the twentieth-century history of art. All the works come from the LS collection and the library collection of the Van Abbemuseum.