The importance of the Goethe triangle in art education

When teaching about colour, including colour systems is an essential complement to engaging students through practical experience. This can be done using various colour models, each of which has explicatory strengths and limitations. An essential aspect of teaching and learning colour is the understanding of the historical contexts from which the knowledge of colour has emerged. In this article, we analyse one of the historically most puzzling and didactically significant models: the Goethe triangle. In art education, the historical aspect of the Goethe triangle is often mistakenly attributed or even ignored, which leads to its incorrect use in art education. We examine the historical perplexity of the Goethe triangle, the issues of colour that this model illustrates exceptionally well (tertiary colours and colour chords) and, referring to the textbooks for colour education in Slovenian primary schools, demonstrate the proper and improper art educational use of the Goethe triangle.