‘Color Problems’: Rediscovering a Forgotten Female Pioneer of Color Theory
A publisher and a record label have teamed up to reissue a visionary work by 20th-century artist and scholar Emily Noyes Vanderpoel.
Josef Albers is famous for using color in innovative ways. But the woman who was doing pioneering work with color decades before him was overlooked by her contemporaries and largely forgotten by history.
In 1902, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published a book called Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color. It provided an overview of the prevailing concepts in color theory — the study of color combinations and how people perceive them — and incorporated striking illustrations and original analysis. (It also included a series of concentric squares of various contrasting colors, predating Albers’s famed Homage to the Square series by over 50 years.)
Vanderpoel infiltrated a male-dominated area of study, in part by framing the book as “a painting manual, under the guise and genre of flower painting and the decorative arts — subjects considered appropriate for a woman of her time,” explains the team at Circadian Press, which is in the final days of a Kickstarter campaign to republish the book. Despite her prescience, Vanderpoel never received popular recognition.
Thanks to the Kickstarter project, that’s about to change.
Keegan Cooke, the founder of Circadian Press, learned about Color Problems from a friend, and his interest was immediately piqued. “I tracked down a copy, and the more I dug into it, the more I felt like this story was not being told,” he says.
The book had entered the public domain, and Cooke found that pages from Color Problems were often reproduced (almost exclusively in black and white) without giving credit to the artist. “The woman who created it [had become] separate from the content,” Cooke says. “So often these images would be repurposed for calendars or postcards, and there would be no context for it. That needed to be rectified.”
To correct the record, Cooke partnered with his longtime friend and collaborator Caleb Braaten, founder of the Brooklyn-based record label Sacred Bones, to republish this volume in all its full-color brilliance. They launched the project on Kickstarter; over 2,200 backers have supported it so far.
Cooke knew he wanted to reproduce the book in a form as close to the original as possible, “with all the experiential details, the feel of it, and the mystery of this object.” In addition to publishing the book in softcover, those who back the Kickstarter project can pledge for a limited-edition hardcover, only available during the campaign.
The Sacred Bones team was equally excited to take on the challenge. “We [wanted to work] on a project that we felt had universal appeal, because most of the Sacred Bones books are things that printers won’t print and bookstores won’t stock,” says Carrie Schaff, the label’s book manager and project coordinator. After primarily publishing darker titles for niche audiences — like Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye’s Final and Darkest Era and Death is Not The End: The Work of Alexander Heir — Schaff says the team was eager to work on Color Problems.
“It’s something that people all over the world [can appreciate],” Schaff says. “[It’s] the kind of art where anyone who looks at it has an emotional experience. I feel like Emily Noyes Vanderpoel herself knew that back when she made it.”
Sacred Bones has collaborated on Kickstarter projects in the past — including on a documentary about a 1980s “anti-cult” — and Braaten felt that Color Problems would be a good fit for Kickstarter. “People get excited about sharing stuff that happens [on Kickstarter],” Braaten says. “That has ultimately been the success of our project: we’ve been able to get [the book] to an audience that normally, we probably would not be able to get it to.”
As the Kickstarter campaign heads into its final days, Cooke says he is gratified by the public support and excitement around the project. “I’m always hesitant to ask for help,” he says. “This has been a really amazing exercise for me: seeing what happens when you put something into the world and let people run with it and enjoy it in their own way.”
