Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born multifaceted artist who worked across several disciplines including printmaking, typography and photography. He is best known for his abstract paintings and his association with the Bauhaus movement.
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born multifaceted artist who worked across several disciplines including printmaking, typography and photography. He is best known for his abstract paintings and his association with the Bauhaus movement.
Albers was a disciplined painter whose work focused heavily on colour and composition and contributed greatly to colour theory. We love how Albers’ rich paintings are both an educational feat and a delight to the eye. Albers is renowned for his signature Homage to the Square series that focuses on the interaction between colours.
As well as a successful art career, Albers is known as one of the most influential visual art teachers of the 20th Century. Having trained at the Bauhaus as a stained glass maker from 1916 to 1919, Albers taught the preliminary course of handicrafts there, before being promoted to Professor later in his tenure. After the Bauhaus closed following pressure from the Nazi movement in the 1930’s, Albers moved to America where he became head of the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers’ students included the likes of Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa. In 1963, Albers published his book Interaction of Color that suggested colour is only understood through experimentation. This theory was heavily reflected in his own work, where he meticulously recorded each colour he used on the back of every painting. Albers’ work can be found all over the world in the collection of galleries such as the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
