Josef Albers
(Bottrop, 1888 - New Haven, 1976)
After studying painting in Berlin, Essen, and Munich Josef Albers entered the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. In those years his works attempted to subvert the static character of painting aiming to highlight the instability of forms. In order to do this, Albers repeated abstract geometric patterns, using almost exclusively primary colors. The creations belonging to this period include prints, furniture designs, metal works, but, above all, collages of colored glass which allow continuous variations of light.
Due to the Nazi repression, in 1933 the Bauhaus was forced to close. Albers then emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen in 1939, teaching in North Carolina until 1949. In 1950 he moved to New Haven to teach at Yale University, eventually retiring in 1958. In these years Albers focused on different series of paintings, made from similar geometric drawings that give an effect of ambiguity, whose purpose is to systematically explore the effects of perception.
His most famous series, Homage to the Square (begun in 1949), is made of simple, repeated, and overlapping squares, colored with different shades creating an optical effect of depth. Albers was not only a painter, he is in fact also remembered as one of the major theorist of Abstract Art: he gave many lectures and published several books and articles in which he investigated the intrinsic logic governing colors. His theories had a fundamental influence on generations of young artists, setting up in particular the foundation of art abstraction. His teaching allowed him to have among his pupils Richard Anuszkiewicz, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Robert Motherwell, Ray Johnson, and Susan Weil.
Albers continued to paint and write in New Haven with his wife, the textile artist Anni Albers, until his death, on 26 March 1976.
Among his solo and group exhibitions we can mention: Josef Albers Graphikwerke (Galerie Goltz, Munich, 1919); Josef Albers: Glasbilder (Bauhaus, Dessau, 1932); Exhibition of Glass and Oils by Josef Albers (Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1936); Prints by Josef Albers (Smithsonian Institution, Division of Graphic Arts, Washington, D.C., 1950); Albers: Homage to the Square and Transformations of a Scheme (Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1952); Documenta I (Kassel, 1955); Josef Albers: Homage to the Square (MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964); Albers (Galleria L’Attico, Rome, 1967); Venice Biennale (Venice, 1968; 1970; 1986); Documenta 4 (Kassel, 1968); Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1971-1972); Josef Albers: A Retrospective (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988); Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1994); Albers and Moholy–Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (Tate Modern, London, 2006); Anni y Josef Albers. Viajes por Latinoamérica (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2006-2007); Alfabeti di luce (Galleria Erica Ravenna, Rome, 2007); Le luci di dentro (Galleria Erica Ravenna, Rome, 2011); One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, (MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016-2017)
