Finally I found a book I’ve been looking for for a couple of years; it is apparently really rare even though it was written by a Nobel prize winner: Wilhelm Ostwald. This very active man was especially famous as a chemist, and he was one of the last great scientists of his day to be converted to the concept of the atom. Apart from this he was an amateur painter, which incited him to pursue all kinds of scientific research into colours and shapes. In art circles I suppose he is best known for his colour theory, his 1918 book “Harmonie der Farben” (The Harmony of Colours) and his double-cone shaped 3d colour model of 1916.

In this book “Die Harmonie der Formen” (The Harmony of Forms, Verlag Unesma, Leipzig, 1922) he sets out to show the laws of form in the same way as he had outlined the laws of colour six years before. The result is a geometric study of form, in some ways similar to the form theories of Klee and Kandinsky, but very different too. Quite a strange book, but I haven’t really looked at it in depth yet.