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Albers, Josef

A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art | Date: 1999

Albers, Josef (1888–1976). German-born painter, designer, writer, and teacher, who became an American citizen in 1939. He was born at Bottrop, Westphalia. From 1908 to 1918 he worked intermittently as a schoolteacher, and he studied art at the Royal Art School, Berlin (1913–15), the School of Arts and Crafts, Essen (1916–19), the Munich Academy (1919–20), and the Bauhaus at Weimar (1920–3). From 1923 to 1933 he was a teacher at the Bauhaus (in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin), his wide-ranging activities including stained glass, typography, and furniture design. When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Albers emigrated to the USA—he was one of the first of the Bauhaus teachers to move there and one of the most active in propagating its ideas. From 1933 to 1949 he taught at Black Mountain College, and from 1950 to 1959 he was head of the department of design at Yale University (the art gallery there has an outstanding collection of his work); he lectured at many other places and received numerous academic awards.

Although Albers had made lithographs and woodcuts in his student days, it was not until he settled in the USA that he took up oil painting. Some of his student prints had been Expressionist, but as a painter he worked in an entirely different vein, developing an art of intellectual calculation. From 1949 until his death he worked on a long series of paintings called Homage to the Square and it is for these uncompromisingly abstract pictures that he is best known; they consist of three or four squares of carefully planned size set inside one another, painted in flat, usually fairly subdued colours. He favoured the square so much because he believed that of all geometrically regular shapes it best distanced a work of art from nature, emphasizing its man-made quality. The colours in which they were painted often demonstrated the tendency of colours placed in proximity to expand or contract, advance or recede, in relation to each other. Albers's research in this area appeared in Interaction of Color (1963), the most important of his numerous publications (which also included a book of poems, 1958). His rational approach and disciplined technique were influential on geometrical abstract painters such as Op artists. America's leading Op artist, Richard Anuszkiewicz, studied under him at Yale.

Albers's wife, Anni Albers (1899–1994), whom he met when she was a student at the Bauhaus, was a weaver; her rectilinear designs have something of the severe economy of her husband's paintings. From 1963 he also made prints in various techniques.


© A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art 1999, originally published by Oxford University Press 1999.