Josef Albers

Josef Albers painted the same square inside a square for twenty-five years to prove that colour is never what it is. He was a Westphalian schoolteacher who came to the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, worked in glass because it was the cheapest material available to him, and rose to master - the first student to be appointed one. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933 he was invited to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and left within weeks, arriving with no English. He taught there for sixteen years and then ran the design department at Yale. His teaching mattered as much as his painting: Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland and Ruth Asawa all passed through his classes, and Rauschenberg said he was the most impossible teacher he ever had and that he learned everything from him. Homage to the Square, begun in 1950, is a series of hundreds of canvases with three or four flat squares nested off-centre, painted straight from the tube with a palette knife, in which each colour visibly changes according to what surrounds it. Interaction of Color, published in 1963, is built entirely from exercises rather than theory and is still in print. His wife Anni Albers was a weaver of the first rank and taught alongside him at Black Mountain; the two made fourteen trips to Mexico and he said it was the promised land of abstract art. He designed the murals and glass assemblages of his Bauhaus years and returned to glass rarely afterwards. Structural Constellations, his line engravings, run parallel to the squares. He was the subject of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1964, the first living artist given one there in the design department s history. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation runs from Connecticut.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history