Josef Albers
TO SEE WITH CLOSED EYES
“If one says “Red” - the name of the color - and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” - Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963)
One of the most influential and innovative painters and printmakers of the twentieth century, German-American artist Josef Albers (1888-1976) is best known for his seminal Homage to the Square series of the 1950’s and 60s; a series of about 2,500 paintings and prints exploring how a colour, applied straight from the tube, changes radically, depending on the colours that are paired with it. Along with his writings, these works are considered invaluable contributions to color theory. “Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon—it is the very heart of painting,” Albers once explained of color relationships. “Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.” The son of a painter-decorator, born in Bottrop, a small mining town in the north-west of Germany, Albers studied art in Essen before moving to Munich’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts where, quite by chance, he came across a circular, announcing the opening of a new school: “Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without those class distinctions that build an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artist.”
It was that entreaty that took him to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920, at the age of 32, where he was a student of the famed colorist Johannes Itten (1888-1967). Albers would later remark, “Itten thought I had no colour … I was told to go first to wallpainting because glass painting is a branch of wall painting … I did not agree … I had learnt wall painting in my father’s workshop.” Albers soon began teaching the preliminary design course, or Vorkurs, and in 1925, the year the Bauhaus moved to its iconic building in Dessau, its founder, Walter Gropius, invited him to become a professor. Albers took over Itten’s course and co-taught with László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), alongside other members of the faculty Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Wassily Kandinksy (1866-1944) (By far the schools busiest teacher, Albers was giving 20 hours of classes a week, compared to Moholy-Nagy’s eight, Klee’s five and Kandinsky’s three.). It was a time of inter-generational conflict (to some extent shaped by the German politics of the late 1920s), where “young”became a code-word for a new generation of Bauhaus students who, with Hannes Meyer (1889-1954), the Bauhaus’ then director, were in opposition to the outlook of older students and faculty. So worried were Albers and Kandinsky that they denounced Meyer as a communist (despite barely a jot of evidence), leading to his summary dismissal in July 1930.
Study to Homage to the Square - Looking Out, oil on Masonite (1954) by Josef Albers Photograph: ©Phillips
Study for Homage to the Square: Awakening, oil on Masonite (1963) by Josef Albers Photograph: ©Phillips
After the Nazis gained ascendancy in the Dessau elections, the Bauhaus lost its funding with artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky derided as “degenerate”. In 1933, with one fascist editorial describing it as “one of the most prominent places of Jewish-Marxist ‘art’ manifestation”, the Bauhaus was finally forced to close. The school’s third and final director, the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), called the students and tutors together and, over bottles of champagne, he told them all to leave the country. Albers and his wife, Anni (née Anneliese Fleischmann) — herself an influential artist and Bauhaus alumna — emigrated across the Atlantic; in later life Albers recalled how hurt he was that his art wasn’t included as part of the Nazi’s Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition (In what would be a sick twist of irony, one of Alber’s Bauhaus students, Fritz Ertl, went on to become an architect for the SS and designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz.). On the recommendation of the architect Phillip Johnson (then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art), both Albers and his wife were offered positions at the experimental new arts college, Black Mountain, near Asheville, North Carolina: “Germans to teach art near here” ran a less than effusive caption in the Asheville Citizen. Albers became head of the painting program, counting among his students such iconic artists as Eva Hesse (1936-1970), Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Richard Anuszkiewicz (b. 1930), and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). He continued to teach a version of the Vorkurs, which at Black Mountain was called Werklehre and was described in the college prospectus as teaching “the development of the feeling for material and space.” It was also at Black Mountain that he launched the first colour course in an American art school curriculum. “Albers was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person,” Rauschenberg once remarked. “I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I am still learning what he taught me, because what he taught had to do with the entire visual world…I consider Albers the most important teacher I’ve ever had, and I’m sure he considers me one of his poorest students.”
Homage to the Square, oil on Masonite (1962) by Josef Albers Photograph: ©Phillips
Albers became a US citizen in 1939. In 1949, at the age of 62, he began what would become his signature series, the Homage to the Square; presenting the square as the ideal vehicle for his explorations into colour. Until his death in 1976, he produced hundreds of variations, each a collection of squares within squares — sightly gravitating towards the bottom edge — which, through the simplification of form, focus on the the interplay of shape and colour. The Homages are disarmingly simple, and one might think at first glance, Albers operated within a very narrow conceptual framework; it was in fact one of extraordinary perceptual complexity. In 1965, he wrote of the series: “They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-called, texture. Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings – in proportion and placement – these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways.”
Late in life Albers was asked why in the early 1960’s he suddenly increased the size of his Homages from 16x16 inches to 48x48. Was it a reaction to the vastness of his new homeland, the United States? “No, no,” Albers replied. “It was just when we got a station wagon.” Albers Homage series paved the way for a whole generation of Op artists like Victor Vaserely (1906-1997) and Bridget Riley (b. 1931) who through large-scale optical illusions, pushed the limits of two-dimensional media. Albers began his Squares in paint, but soon came to depend on screenprinting, as it offered an evenness and clarity of colour; he didn’t paint with the robust impasto of the abstract expressionists (he told students “You might as well rub shit on canvas” as try to paint like Jackson Pollock) and as a result his Homages suffer when reproduced in photographs, with mechanical reproduction obscuring signs of the paintings’ handmade nature; the noted critic Clement Greenberg disparaged Albers’ work for what he called its “inability to rise above merely decorative motifs.”
Study for Homage to the Square: Wet and Dry (1969) by Josef Albers Photograph: ©Phillips
After his time at Black Mountain College, Albers lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States, until in 1950 he was invited to direct a newly formed department of design at Yale University School of Fine Arts. There Albers would become arguably the most influential art teacher in 20th-century America. His methods were direct, he believed in the notion that we learn best by experience, and that the role of a teacher was to ask questions, and not provide answers; true to its Latin root e-ducere — to lead or to lead out — his idea of education was to draw out of his students the creativity that’s part of being human. “Art is a demonstration of human life,” he said. “Art is revelation instead of information.” In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art.
In 1963 he released Interaction of Color, promoted by Yale University Press for its unconventional format, its “un-bookness”. Based in his theories of an internal logic governing colour, it remains one of the most influential texts used in contemporary arts education. The deputy director of Yale University Press, Howard Sayre Weaver, cautioned, “Before it will be truly rewarding, Interaction of Color—like Josef Albers himself—will be demanding. It is to be looked through and used, as a sort of grand passport to perception.” Albers was an important influence on generations of young artists; “He taught you to see,” said the painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), words echoed by many of his students. In 1971 Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Departing from the Abstract Expressionist trends of his time, Albers’ life work was centered around colour experimentation — his pervasive influence, both as an artist and theoretician, continues today, his works held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. “Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature,” Albers once said. “I prefer to see with closed eyes.”