Josef Albers was born on March 19, 1888, into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen in the industrial Ruhr district of Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany [1]. He was the only child of a house painter, Lorenz Albers. His Westphalian family tradition was crafts, blacksmiths on his mother’s side, carpenters, and handymen on his father’s side. He became an influential teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist—now best known for the Homages to the Square he painted between 1950 and 1976 and for his innovative 1963 publication “Interaction of Color [2].” He died at the Yale New Haven Hospital in 1976 at the age of 88.
Albers attended the Teachers College in Büren and became an instructor in several Westphalian primary schools from 1908 to 1913. He then decided to pursue formal art studies and enrolled at the Royal Art School (Königliche Kunstschule) in Berlin from 1913 until 1915. After finishing this program, he moved to Essen and Munich and continued to study art for the next four years. From 1916 to 1919, he worked as a printmaker at the vocational art school (Kunstgewerbschule) in Essen. In 1918, he received his first public commission for a stained-glass window for a church in Essen. In 1919, he went to Munich to study at the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst). In 1920, he enrolled as a student in the preliminary course (Vorkurs) of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus and studied painting. He joined the Bauhaus in 1922 as an instructor in the basic design and experimented with glass paintings and stained‐glass windows from broken bottles. He met his future wife, Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann (1899–1994) in Weimar, Germany, in 1922 at the Bauhaus [3]. Josef and “Anni” Albers, who later became known for her elegant woven tapestries and fabric designs, were married in Berlin in 1925.
Albers was promoted to professor in 1925 when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. The Nazis forced the school to shut its doors in 1933, and as a result, most of the artists dispersed and left the country including Albers who immigrated to the USA. He was offered a job as head of a new art school, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in November 1933 where he remained until 1949. In 1950, Albers left Black Mountain and joined Yale University in New Haven as head of the department of design until he retired from teaching in 1958. He developed a reputation as a gifted and innovative teacher with unconventional ideas about the use of materials. According to one of his former students, Robert Rauschenberg, “Albers was a beautiful teacher, but an impossible person. His criticism was so devastating that I wouldn’t ask for it. But 21 years later, I’m still learning what he taught me.” [4] His theories of color relationships became the basis for art courses taught throughout the country.
63.1 Interaction of Color
Example plate from Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color [2]
Some considered his format of squares within squares as monotonous and repetitive, but he thought that the simplified geometric presentation was the way to make colors “yield” their essence. “Just putting colors together is the excitement of it,” he once told an interviewer. “The way green submits to blue, for instance, or vice‐versa. What interests me is the way they marry, interpenetrate and produce the baby, the color that is their product together…. When you see how each color helps, hates, penetrates, touches, doesn’t, that’s parallel to life [1].”
To give his colors maximum intensity, he applied them—with few exceptions—unmixed, over a white Masonite ground, which he preferred to canvas because, he said, canvas “ran away from the touch.” The perception of color—as conditioned by changing light, shape and placement—remained his abiding interest, and because he felt that form “demands multiple performance,” he would work for many years on a single series, such as his “Homage to the Square.”
Although Albers’ book “Interaction of Color” is considered to be widely influential, it has been suggested that his general claims about the color experience and the system of perceptual education are misleading. In particular, his belief in the importance of color deception is likely related to a misconception about esthetic appreciation of color, in contrast to a better appreciation of the additive and subtractive color mixture, as well as the tonal relations of colors, simultaneous contrast, and the Weber–Fechner law [6].
In his last years, his paintings began to generate a substantial income, but he and his wife continued to live modestly. In 1971, his work was honored by a retrospective show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the few ever given to a living artist. In the same year, Albers founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, [3] a nonprofit organization to further “the revelation and evocation of vision through art.”
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. As a teacher and theoretician as well as a painter, Albers had a wide influence on several generations of artists that extended into the realm of sculpture, architecture, and industrial design. Albers continued to paint and write, staying in New Haven with his wife until his death in 1976.