Albers, Josef

Albers, Josef (1888-1976), German-American painter, graphic artist, designer, and influential teacher, who explored colour relationships in his geometrical abstractions. Born in Bottrop, Germany, Albers attended art schools in Berlin, Essen, and Munich and then studied at the avant-garde Bauhaus laboratory-workshop from 1920 to 1923. He taught design at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1923 to 1925, in Dessau from 1925 to 1932, and in Berlin from 1932 to 1933. He emphasized functionalism in modern design. After the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Albers went to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he taught Bauhaus principles to his pupils, including the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage. When Yale University formed a department of design in 1950, Albers became its head, retiring from that position in 1958.

Albers's work is characterized by rectilinear shapes in strong, flat colours. The interplay of which heightens the abstract, purely optical effect of the composition. In his famous experimental Homage to the Square series (which Albers began in the early 1950s), progressively smaller forms are calculated to illustrate his theories of how changes in placement, shape, and light produce changes in colour. Albers's Interaction of Color (1963) exemplifies his exploration of colour. His work influenced Op Art and minimal art in the 1960s.