Albers, Josef (redirected from Albers)

Albers, Josef (yō`zĕf äl`bĕrs), 1888–1976, German-American painter, printmaker, designer, and teacher, b. Bottrop, Germany. After working at the Bauhaus (1920–33), Albers and his wife, the textile designer and weaver Anni Albers, emigrated to the United States when Hitler came to power. Albers taught throughout the Americas and Europe, headed the art department (1933–49) at Black Mountain College, and was director of the Yale School of Art (1950–58), where he was responsible for major innovations in art education. An extremely versatile artist, he is best known for his Homage to the Square, a series of paintings and prints begun in 1949. These serene works, quasiconcentric squares of subtly related colors, form an extensive examination of color properties.

Bibliography

See his Interaction of Color (1963); studies by E. Gomringer (1968) and W. Spies (1971).

---

Albers, Josef

Josef Albers, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1948.

(credit: © Arnold Newman)

(born March 19, 1888, Bottrop, Ger.—died March 25, 1976, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) German-U.S. painter, poet, teacher, and theoretician. He studied and taught at the Bauhaus and in 1933 became one of the first Bauhaus teachers to immigrate to the U.S., where he taught at Black Mountain College and later at Yale. He developed a painting style characterized by abstract rectilinear patterns and primary colours as well as black and white. His best-known series of paintings, Homage to the Square (begun in 1950 and continued until his death), restricts its repertory of forms to coloured squares superimposed onto each other. The arrangement of these squares is carefully calculated so that the colour of each square optically alters the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the others. His research into colour theory was published in the influential Interaction of Color (1963).

---

Albers, Josef (1888–1976) painter; born in Bottrop, Germany. In 1933, fleeing from Nazism, he emigrated to America to continue his teaching career at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1933–49), and at Yale University (1950–60). A series of paintings, Homage to the Square, reveals his fascination with color relationships. He was influential in introducing the Bauhaus art school concepts from Germany, which stressed craftsmanship and a functional approach to design.