Josef Albers

Josef Albers was born on 19 March 1888 in Bottrop, a working-class town in the Ruhr valley, into a family of Catholic craftsmen. His father Lorenzo was a housepainter, carpenter and handyman; his mother came from a family of blacksmiths. As a child, Albers learned practical trades — glass engraving, plumbing, wiring — alongside his schooling. From 1908 to 1913 he worked as a primary school teacher in Bottrop, then trained as an art educator at the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin. From 1916 to 1919 he studied printmaking at the Kunstgewerbschule in Essen under Johan Thorn Prikker, learning stained-glass technique. His first commission came in 1918: the Rosa mystica stained-glass window for St Michael’s Church in Bottrop.

In 1919 he went to Munich to study painting at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie. The following year he enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar, joining Johannes Itten’s preliminary course as a thirty-two-year-old student. Within two years Walter Gropius had appointed him to the faculty to teach the foundational design course — one of the few students ever to make that transition. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Albers was promoted to professor. He ran the glass workshop and taught the Vorkurs, the preliminary course, until the school was forced to close by the Nazi regime in 1933.

The same year, Philip Johnson — then a curator at MoMA — arranged Albers’s appointment as head of the newly formed art school at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He arrived in November 1933 with his wife Anni, speaking no English. He taught at Black Mountain for sixteen years. His students there included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson and Susan Weil. In 1950 he moved to Yale University in New Haven to lead the design department, where he hired Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter and Alvin Lustig to build the graphic design programme. He retired from teaching in 1958 and was named a fellow of Yale. He died in New Haven on 25 March 1976, six days after his eighty-eighth birthday.

Albers began the Homage to the Square in 1950, the year he arrived at Yale, and continued the series for the remaining twenty-six years of his life, producing over a thousand works. The format is fixed: three or four squares of flat colour, nested inside each other, each square shifted slightly below geometric centre so the lower margin is narrower than the upper one. The composition never changes. Only the colour changes.

The decision to lock down every variable except colour was deliberate. Albers had spent decades teaching the preliminary course, where the exercise was always the same: take a fixed set of conditions and vary one thing at a time. The Homage to the Square transferred that method from the classroom to the studio. Each painting is a record of what happens when three or four specific colours are placed in that specific spatial relationship — how the inner square seems to advance or recede, to warm or cool, to vibrate or sit still, depending on what surrounds it.

He worked on rough Masonite panels primed with at least six coats of white gesso. He applied unmixed paint direct from the tube with a palette knife, working from the centre outward — his father’s technique for avoiding drips. On the reverse of each panel he recorded the exact colours: manufacturer, line, tube number. The paintings were treated as experimental records, not unique aesthetic objects. A 1971 solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the first the Met had devoted to a living artist.

The glass works of the Bauhaus period (1920–32) are the least-known part of Albers’s output. Park (c.1923–24), made from found glass and glass samples in a copper-wire grid, has a formal clarity that anticipates the nested squares by thirty years. The Skyscrapers series (c.1929) used sandblasted coloured glass, produced by craftsmen from stencils Albers designed — an early example of separating design from fabrication. Skyscrapers on Transparent Yellow (c.1929) is held at the Kunstmuseum Basel.

The furniture from Dessau — the walnut and maple armchair of c.1927, the chrome tea glass holders of 1925 — belongs to the same period as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel designs and reflects the same Bauhaus question: what does this material want to be? Albers’s answer was less radical than Breuer’s, more attentive to the warmth of wood and the domesticity of objects in daily use.

The Command Records album covers (1959–61) sit outside the usual gallery context. Persuasive Percussion (1959) translates the Homage to the Square logic — a fixed grid, a single formal variable — into a commercial object with a mass audience. The dot grids are not decorations; they are visual arguments about rhythm and displacement, made available to anyone who walked into a record shop.

Formulation — Articulation (1972), the 127-print portfolio silk-screened with Norman Ives at Sirocco Screen-printing in North Haven, is the closest Albers came to a retrospective on his own terms. He arranged the prints out of chronological order, grouping them by colour relationships rather than date. It was published four years before his death and is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA and the British Museum, among others.