Josef Albers

Josef Albers was a painter, poet, sculptor, and theoretician, best known for his iconic series of abstract paintings, the Homage to the Square series. He also was an educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century.

Born on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Germany, Albers enrolled as a student at the newly opened Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1920. The Bauhaus, which advocated for the synthesis of fine art and craftsmanship, soon became one of the most influential design schools in Germany. In 1922 Albers became a faculty member at the Bauhaus and was promoted to professor in 1925. Around this time, he also married Anni Fleischmann, who was a student at the school. During this period, Albers explored many different media like furniture design, glasswork, metalwork, typography, and photography. Some of his notable works from the time include sandblasted flashed glass artworks like Impossibles (1931) and Rolled Wrongly (1931). After the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers and his wife immigrated to the United States.

On the recommendation of architect Philip Johnson, both Albers and Anni were offered positions at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He served as the head of the painting department between 1939-1949, and he taught the likes of Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg. While he was teaching, Albers continued to develop his artistic practice. In 1947 he began working on the series Adobe/Variants, which was inspired by Mexican architecture. The series combined two characteristics of Albers’s art: his exploration of color theory and his background in design and architecture. Paintings from the series like Variant/Adobe: Familiar Front (1948) and Red Wall (1947-1956) explored how different colors interact when placed next to one another.

In 1950, Albers left Black Mountain College to head the design program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. From this point, Albers mainly focused on two key series: Homage to the Square and Structural Constellation. In the series Structural Constellation, Albers created various compositions of rotationally straight lines, that can be described as two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional objects. Structural Constellation deals with perceptual ambiguity: the artist’s carefully planned configurations like Structural Constellation: Alpha (1954) depict a floating geometric form that can simultaneously be viewed in multiple ways. From 1949 Albers began working on his signature series of prints and paintings, Homage to the Square. Paintings from the series like Homage to the Square: Apparition (1959) and Study for Homage to the Square: Departing in Yellow (1964) are based on a compositional scheme of squares in different colors and arrangements. Through the various examples in the series, Albers examined his color theory and how colors interact when placed next to one another. Correspondingly, he documented these effects in his writings, and in 1963, he published the book Interaction of Color (1963), which provided a complex explanation of principles of color theory. The book is considered a masterwork in art education, and it remains an essential source of color theory.

In the later stages of his career, Albers also created murals. In 1959, his mural Two Structural Constellations (1959) was engraved in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in Manhattan. His monumental mural, Manhattan (1963), that was an homage to New York, was installed in the Pan Am Building in New York City. Albers died at the age of 88, on March 25, 1976, in New Haven, Connecticut.