Collection: Josef Albers (1888-1976)

Josef Albers was one of the generation of European artists who fled Germany in the early days of Hitler and, through their work and teaching, helped to establish the United States as the center of modern art. His stark, geometric studies in color relationships untimately gave rise in the 1960's to op and minimal art. Albers was influential as a teacher as well as and artist. His lifelong interest was, in his own words, "making colors do something they don't do themselves." He worked in many media, but color was always the focus of his attention. Born in Bottrop, Westphalia in 1888, Albers first sudied at the Royal Art School in Berlin, and then at the School of Applied Art in Essen. At Essen he did his first work in lithography and woodcuts, influenced by the expressionists of the day. After a year at the Art Academy in Munich, he moved to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he studied from 1920 to 1923. He joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1923 and, with Moholy-Nagy, a geometric painter, took over teaching the basic art course. Much of the research Albers did for his teaching proved to be seminal in developing ideas manifested in his early work in glass, and in the paintings of his mature years. In his glass paintings of the 1920's one can see Albers's transition from free-form compostions to formal rectangular patterns, with the relationship of one color to another very carefully planned. Using color overlays on opaque milk glass, he created what might be called glass-wall paintings. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers immigrated to the United States. For the next 16 years he headed the art department of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Like the European geometric abstractionists, primarily Mondrian and Malevich, Albers sought to strip the elements of abstract painting to their most fundamental form. In 1949, he began a series of paintings, known as "Homage to the Square," in which he systematically explored the relationship of color squares within color squares. This was among his most important work. From 1950 to 1959, Albers was chairman of the department of design at Yale University, a position that drew even wider attention to his theories and experiments in color. Albers's monumental book, "The Interaction of Color" (1963), summarized his artistic philosophy. Although retired, he continued working until his death in 1976.

MEMBERSHIPS: American Abstract Artists, American Institute of Graphic Arts, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Print Council of America

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland, Kunstmuseum, Zurich, Switzerland, Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York City, Museu de Arte Moderna, Eio de Janeiro, Brazil, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Zellman, Michael David. 300 Years of American Art. Hong Kong: The Wellfleet Press, 1987, p.830.