Josef Albers
(German-American, 1888-1976) Josef Albers was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century modernism, whose practice bridged painting, printmaking, design, and pedagogy. Born in Bottrop, Germany, he trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, where he later taught until the school’s closure under pressure from the Nazi regime in 1933. That same year, Albers…
Josef Albers
(German-American, 1888-1976)
Josef Albers was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century modernism, whose practice bridged painting, printmaking, design, and pedagogy. Born in Bottrop, Germany, he trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, where he later taught until the school’s closure under pressure from the Nazi regime in 1933. That same year, Albers emigrated to the United States with his wife, the artist Anni Albers, beginning a long and distinguished teaching career first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later at Yale University.
Albers’s art is defined by an uncompromising clarity of form and a lifelong commitment to the study of color. His most celebrated series, Homage to the Square, initiated in 1950, became a systematic yet deeply expressive exploration of chromatic relationships. Through the disciplined format of nested squares, he investigated how colors shift, resonate, and transform in relation to one another. This investigation extended into printmaking, where Albers embraced the technical precision of the medium to refine his optical experiments.
Beyond his artistic production, Albers’s teaching had a profound impact on generations of artists, from Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly to Richard Serra. His writings, particularly the seminal Interaction of Color (1963), remain cornerstones of art education. Today, Albers’s work is represented in major collections worldwide and continues to exemplify a unique balance of rigor and sensitivity—a vision that shaped the language of modern abstraction.