Josef Albers (Bottrop, Germany, 1888 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1976) is considered one of the greatest painters of the 20th century thanks to his contribution to a revolutionary idea of painting and to a new way of conceiving the use of colour. Indeed, Albers devoted many years of his life to researching the relationships between colours and forms, leaving an indelible mark on the art world, which recognizes him as one of the founders of Op Art, or Optical Art.
In 1920, he enrolled at the Staatliches Bauhaus, a school of art, architecture, and modern design committed, after the First World War, to rebuilding a more modern Germany.
From 1925, he became head of the furniture workshop, where he designed prototypes of design objects intended for mass production. His most famous model, notable for its innovative character, was Armchair (Model Ti 244). The chair addressed the need for affordable furniture that could be produced simply and efficiently, making it particularly suited to the post-war period.
During his years at the Staatliches Bauhaus, Josef Albers taught alongside colleagues of the calibre of Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.
In 1933, following the forced closure of the Bauhaus, he and his wife Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann, known as Anni - an artist and textile designer whom he met in the Bauhaus context and with whom he would establish a foundation years later - moved to the United States, where they would live and work for the rest of their lives.
Albers continued teaching, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later, among his various appointments, at the Cincinnati Art Academy, the Pratt Institute in New York, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and finally at Yale. Among his students were several artists who went on to become some of the most influential figures of the 20th century, including Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Eva Hesse, and Cy Twombly.
Albers’s teaching regarded colour as being in constant movement, emphasizing its relativity and its role in creating visual relationships, particularly those that produce optical disorientation. Albers’s aim was also to develop a methodological approach for his students that could be applied to all materials and media. In his teaching, he placed practice before theory: “what counts,” he argued, “is not the so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—the act of seeing.” Within this framework, he refined his abstract style and became increasingly interested in the psychological effects generated by the interaction of two or more juxtaposed colours. From this teaching emerged his 1963 book Interaction of Color, one of the most influential texts in art education, and one that remains relevant today.
In 1949, he began the Homage to the Square series, on which he worked continuously for 27 years. The series consists of three or four coloured squares superimposed upon one another and positioned toward the lower centre of the composition. Painted on Masonite and framed with thin strips of stainless steel, these works multiply chromatic combinations while investigating the relationships between colours. “Repeated experiments with adjacent colours demonstrate that each colour pattern subtracts its own hue from the colours it brings with it and therefore influences [them].” By repeatedly using a single geometric form, Albers was able to investigate the broad range of perceptual phenomena that could be achieved simply by juxtaposing different colours within a limited range of spatial compositions.
These paintings emerged during a period dominated by Abstract Expressionism and by monumental, gestural paintings. Albers’s works offered a contrast: they were smaller, based on controlled gestures and repeated geometric forms. In the 1960s, the Homage to the Square series became widely celebrated, and the art world recognized Albers not only as an acclaimed educator, but also as an artist, writer, and philosopher.
Part of this recognition came from a series of commissions for large-scale public works, some taking the form of architectural elements and others of murals. One of Albers’s earliest architectural works was a wall created in 1950 for Harkness Commons at Harvard University’s Graduate Center.
His murals included works for the Corning Glass Building (The Structural Constellations, 1959), the Time and Life Building at Rockefeller Center in New York (Two Gates, 1960), and the Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building, in Manhattan (1963).
Albers was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions. In 1964, Albers: Homage to the Square, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was presented in Venezuela and subsequently shown at museums throughout the Americas. Another important exhibition was the solo exhibition The Responsive Eye (1965), curated by William C. Seitz at MoMA, which established Albers’s works as an outstanding example of Optical Art.
Numerous institutions hosted exhibitions of his work, both in the United States and internationally, particularly in Europe: the Mint Museum of Art (1944), Cincinnati Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Virginia, Yale University Art Gallery (1949), San Francisco Museum of Art (1953), Kunsthaus Zürich (1956), Landesmuseum Münster (1958), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1961), Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (1963), and Museum Folkwang in Essen (1963).
One of the greatest recognitions of Albers’s career came with the major retrospective organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971, which established him as the first living artist to receive a retrospective at this prestigious institution.