Faber Birren

From Philosopedia

Faber Birren (1900 - 1988)

Birren grew up in Chicago and attended the Art Institute of Chicago from the age of 12 until he was 20. He then studied at the University of Chicago. By the age of 30 he had become a color consultant and relocated to New York.

Birren probably wrote more books on color than anyone else — in fact, about twenty-five. His first, Color in Vision, had already been published by 1928, and his final substantial work, The History of Colour in Painting, appeared in 1981.

In 1934, Birren produced two works on the subject: Color Dimensions and The Printer's Art of Color, in both of which he introduces his own colour-system. This he describes as a "Rational Color Circle" which groups 13 colours around a grey which does not itself appear at the centre. The circle's colours are yellow, yellow-leaf green, green-leaf green, green, turquoise, blue, violet, red-violet, red, red-orange, orange and orange-red. The thickly drawn lines in the diagram accentuate the psychological primary colours attributable to Ewald Hering, the dotted lines refer to mixtures, and the thinly drawn continuous lines represent secondary colors.

The Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color] is at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The collection has materials ranging from the 16th century to the contemporary with important editions by Renee Descartes, Isaac Newton, Moses Harris, M.E.Chevreul, and C.S Greenough, among others. The Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color is considered one of, if not the, foremost gathering of works on color.

When he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, Birren and his wife were members of the Unitarian Universalist Society in nearby Stamford. Another member, Warren Allen Smith, was book review editor of The Humanist and reviewed Birren's Terra: An Allegory (1953).