Josef Albers (1888–1976) is considered one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century, as well as an important designer and educator. Albers's artistic career, which bridged European and American Modernism, consisted mainly of a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of colour and spatial relationships. Working with simple geometric forms, Albers sought to produce the effects of chromatic interaction, in which the visual perception of a colour is affected by those adjacent to it. Albers's precise application of colour also created plays of space and depth, as the planar coloured shapes that make up the majority of his works appear to either recede into or protrude out of the picture plane.
Read MoreAlbers was born in Bottrop, Germany, and studied briefly at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich in 1919 before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. In 1922, Albers joined the school's faculty, first working in stained glass and, starting in 1923, teaching design. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. During their time at Black Mountain, Albers began to show his work extensively within the United States, including solo exhibitions at Addison Museum of American Art, Andover (1935); J.B. Neumann's New Art Circle, New York (1936, 1938); The Germanic Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge (1936); the Katharine Kuh Gallery, Chicago (1937); the San Francisco Museum of Art (1940); and the Nierendorf Gallery, New York (1941). The Alberses remained at Black Mountain until 1949, and in 1950 moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct a newly formed department of design at Yale University School of Art. In 1950, too, he developed what would become his seminal Homage to the Square series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976. This body of work was featured in a major exhibition organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1964 that traveled to 22 venues in the United States and Latin America. Albers retired from teaching in 1958, just prior to the publication of his important Interaction of Color (1963), which was reissued in two volumes in 2013. Following numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, as well as his participation in documenta 1 (1955) and documenta 4 (1968), Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his career-spanning retrospective there in 1971.
More recent exhibitions include Painting On Paper: Josef Albers In America, which originated at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, in 2010 (travelled to Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat, Bottrop, Germany; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Kunstmuseum Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Moderna, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York); Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect, at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, in 2014 (travelled to Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway); and A Beautiful Confluence: Anni and Josef Albers and the Latin American World at Mudec, Museo delle Culture, Milan, in 2015–2016. From 2016 to 2017, The Museum of Modern Art, New York held One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers. Josef Albers in Latin America was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (through March 28, 2018). The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is planning a major survey exhibition of the work of both Josef and Anni Albers for 2019. Since May 2016, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has been exclusively represented by David Zwirner.
Text courtesy David Zwirner.
Related Press Albers opens eyes to Mexico 28 February 2018, The New Criteron It is possible that society has never been more poorly prepared than in the present cultural moment to appreciate an artist like Josef Albers (1888–1976). The German-American painter's deliberate, introspective, and contemplative art seems in many ways to be utterly incompatible with our overriding fascination with the big, the 'now,' the...
Related Press Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstraction 14 December 2017, The New York Times Art rarely thrives in a vacuum. It is by definition polyglot and in flux, buffeted by the movement of art objects, goods and people across borders and among cultures, and also by individual passion. This much, especially the passion part, is demonstrated by "Josef Albers in Mexico," a quietly stunning exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum...
Related Press Homage to Josef Albers: Writers Pay Tribute to a Pioneer of Minimalism 3 May 2017, Hyperallergic In Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon, David Zwirner has put together a comprehensive book that looks both generally and specifically at Albers' seminal Homage to the Square series, by way of various writers, including Nicholas Fox Weber, Elaine de Kooning, and Colm Tóibín. The contributors discuss their relationships to both the series and the...
Related Press Bright and Beautiful 11 April 2017, Modern Magazine In the 1930s, Josef and Anni Albers made the first of many trips to Mexico. There's a picture of Josef Albers taken by Anni at Mitla in Oaxaca about 1937. He's in profile, and behind him, filling the rest of the frame, are the frenetic, step-fret forms of the stone mosaics that drew archaeologists to the Zapotec site. The photo—these people...
