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Josef AlbersGerman and American artist, designer, poet
Date of Birth: 19.03.1888
Country:  USA |
Content:
Biography of Josef Albers
German and American artist, designer, and poetJosef Albers was an American artist and art teacher, originally from Germany. He focused on studying the essence of color and its impact on the viewer, and developed a theory of perception that greatly influenced the emergence of Op Art. Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany, into a family of craftsmen. From 1908 to 1913, he worked as a teacher at a public school in the Ruhr region. At the age of 25, he entered the Royal School of Art in Berlin, passing the art teacher exam upon graduation. From 1916 to 1919, he taught in Bottrop before moving to Munich to study drawing at the Franz von Stuck courses. The lithographs and woodcuts he created during this time were influenced by expressionism and cubism.
Bauhaus School
In 1920, Albers arrived at the Bauhaus school in Weimar at the age of 32, making him the oldest student there. Initially, Albers experimented with abstract diaphanies, transparent images on glass, using materials he found in piles of construction waste. In 1922, he began experimenting in the glass workshop and in 1923 became an assistant to László Moholy-Nagy. Under his influence, Albers' glass paintings underwent changes, using only square windowpanes to create geometric images using sandblasting. In 1925, Albers moved to Dessau and obtained a professorship. In the same year, he married Anni Fleischmann, a student in the weaving course. In the following years, Albers created glass paintings in his developed "thermometer style" and designed sketches for furniture, metal vessels, and everyday glass objects. After László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928 due to internal conflicts, Albers took over the preparatory course. As the successor to American designer Marcel Breuer, he led the furniture workshop and in 1930 became the deputy director (the position of director was held by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the time). He continued to experiment and push boundaries until the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933.
Black Mountain College
Through the initiative of Philip Johnson, an employee of the Museum of Modern Art, the Albers couple received an invitation to work at the newly opened Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina in 1933. Over the course of 16 years of teaching at Black Mountain College, Albers nurtured many young artists. Among his students were Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Motherwell. Albers considered "the visual formulation of our reactions to life" as the main principle of his teaching. In Asheville, he created the "Homage to the Square" series, in which he first realized color variations within a fixed form. In his numerous graphic works, he tried to grasp the ambivalence of linear geometry. Curvilinear lines were replaced by straight angles and squares in his drawings. In his "Variations" series starting from 1947, he analyzed the effects of color changes on the representation of external forms.
Yale University
In 1950, Albers began working at the School of Art at Yale University, where he headed the Department of Architecture and Design. He retired in 1958 but continued to give lectures for two more years. At Yale University, Albers completed his major work, the "Homage to the Square" series, which started in 1950 and shared similarities with the works of Russian constructivist Kazimir Malevich. The "Homage" series represented the quintessence of Albers' color experiments and vividly reflected the positions of his theory of perception, such as the illusionistic effect of lines on spatial volume. These ideas greatly influenced the emergence of movements such as Op Art, Kinetic Art, Color Field Painting, and the New Abstraction. Based on an unchanging geometric grid representing color planes lying on top of each other, Albers demonstrated the dependence of color perception on factors such as position, surroundings, quantity, and intensity of lighting. In total, he created over a thousand variations on this theme.
Interaction of Colors
In 1961, the first exhibition of Albers' works was organized at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Two years later, his theoretical work "Interaction of Colors" was published, summarizing his achievements in the field of visual arts. In his seventies, Albers, an honorary doctor of fourteen different schools and academies, settled in Orange, Connecticut. A year later, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making Albers the first living artist to be honored in this way. In the last years of his life, Albers created monumental panels for public buildings. He developed new variations of the "Homage to the Square" series based on the uniformity of colors, creating an effect of light, airy haze. Six days after his 88th birthday, Albers passed away in New Haven, Connecticut.
