Aesthetics

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Benham’s top

Benham's top is named after the English toymaker Charles Benham, who, in 1895, sold a top painted with the pattern shown. When the disk is spun, arcs of pale color — called Fechner colors or pattern induced flicker colors — are visible at different places on the disk. Not everyone sees the same colors. The phenomenon is not entirely understood. One possible reason people see colors may be that the color receptors in the human eye respond at different rates to red, green, and blue.

Nicolas Sperling

Nicolas Sperling is an artist who illustrated the book Hellenic National Costumes. Limited to three hundred copies only, this exquisite undertaking issued by Athens' Benaki Museum features fifty-five full page color illustrations housed in its original full tan linen over boards portfolio with ties. It was the first of two independent volumes (the second was published in 1954) and a supplement that totaled one hundred and eleven reproductions in all. Divided into the categories of "Gala Dresses and Town Dresses", "Dresses of Continental Greece", and "Dresses of Peloponnesus, Thessaly, the Island of Euboea, Epirus, and Macedonia", it artfully surveys traditional Greek folk costume of the early twentieth century.

Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter was perhaps the most interesting of the fifties color photographers in his use of form. One of the most effective gestures in Leiter’s work is to have great fields of undifferentiated dark or light, an overhanging canopy, say, or a snow drift, interrupted by gashes of color. He returned again and again to a small constellation of subjects: mirrors and glass, shadows and silhouettes, reflection, blur, fog, rain, snow, doors, buses, cars, fedoras. He was a virtuoso of shallow depth of field: certain sections of some of the photographs look as if they have been applied with a quick brush.