Josef Albers
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was a German-born artist and educator. Albers is best known for his juxtaposed hued abstraction paintings and colour theories. As an artist, Albers explored several disciplines, including photography, typography, architecture, murals, and printmaking. As an educator, Albers taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, and he was the Director of the Department of Design at Yale University from 1950 to 1958.
Born in Bottrop, Germany, Albers studied art in Essen and Munich before enrolling himself at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. In 1925, Albers moved to Dessau, Germany, and later to Berlin with the Bauhaus. While there, he started to teach courses alongside established artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, with whom he collaborated with Albers for several years.
When the Bauhaus forced closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, Albers immigrated to the United States in 1939. Albers became the head of the art department at the newly established and experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In his time there, his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Susan Weil.
He remained the head of the painting department at Black Mountain College throughout his tenure, which ended in 1949. That same year, he began his iconic Homage to a Square series that explored chromatic interactions with nested squares. In 1950, he became the head of the design department at Yale University and continued to teach and lecture at various colleges and universities until he retired from teaching in 1958.
In 1963, Albers published “Interaction of Color,” a book conceived as a handbook for artists, instructors, and students. It presents Albers’ unique perceptions and experiments with colours and geometric abstraction. It further provides the descriptions of primary, secondary, and tertiary colours; and a range of connotations that Albers assigned to specific colours on his triangular colour model. Albers’ work incorporated European influences from the Constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, which were influential to the American abstraction art movement in the 1950s to 1960s. His retrospectives were held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Albers was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until he passed away in 1976. The same year, the Josef Albers Foundation was established. In 1983, a museum dedicated to the artist opened in Bottrop, Germany.