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Josef Albers, (b. March 19, 1888, Bottrop, now in West Germany—d. March 25, 1976, New Haven, Conn.), painter, poet, and influential teacher and theoretician of art, important as an innovator of such art styles as Colour Field painting and Op art. From 1908 to 1920 Albers divided his time between art studies in Berlin, Essen, and Munich and teaching elementary school in his native town, In 1920 he became a student at the newly formed Bauhaus, soon to become the most important school of design in Germany. His most important creations of that period were compositions made of coloured glass. His first glass pictures were made with shards of coloured transparent glass and were to be placed in windows (“Figure,” 1921). Later examples (“Fugue,” 1925) were made from sheets of superimposed layers of coloured opaque glass, on which Albers’ designs were Cut by commercial sandblasters. After 1923, when he became a teacher at the Bauhaus, Albers rejected all art based on self-expression and emotion in favour of art based on purely intellectual calculation. He created a style characterized by the reiteration of abstract rectilin
195ear patterns and the use of highly saturated primary colours (red, blue, and yellow) along with white and black.
In 1933, when the Nazi government of Germany closed the Bauhaus, Albers left Germany for the U.
. He organized the fine-arts curriculum at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where he taught until 1949. The next year, he began a 10-year tenure as chairman of the Art Department of Yale University.
After moving to the U.S., Albers concentrated on several series of works that systematically explored the ambiguous relationships between the physical object of art and its psychological effect. In his series of engraved plastic “Transformations of a Scheme” (1948— 52), and in the series of drawings “Structural Constellations” (1953—58), he created complex linear designs, each subject to many possible spatial interpretations. His paintings, onthe other hand, explore colour relationships. His best known series of paintings, “Homage to the Square,” restricts its repertory of forms to superimposed squares of colour carefully calculated so that the colour of each square appears to alter the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the other squares.
Like his paintings, his poems play with various modes of reality, but they are distinguished by a sense of lyricism and gentle irony. They were collected and published in Poems and Drawings (1958). His Search versus Research (1965) was a series of three lectures.
