Collection: Josef Albers

(Bottrop 1888 - New Haven 1976)

Josef Albers was one of the most influential masters of 20th-century art, a precursor of both Optical Art and Minimal Art.
His life intertwined inseparably artistic practice and teaching: after the first years as a primary school teacher, he was a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, an experience interrupted in 1933 by the closure imposed by the Nazi regime. In Germany, he created abstract and geometric stained glass with great formal rigor, panels in white, black, and red, and series of drawings and engravings built on systematic variations of line and color. Emigrating to the United States, he taught at Black Mountain College and then at Yale University, where his reflection on color reached full maturity. The most well-known result of this research is the book Interaction of Color (1963), in which Albers demonstrates how the perception of a color radically changes depending on the adjacent colors: a visual and intellectual investigation together, far from any purely decorative effect.
It is in this context that the series Homage to the Square was born, which Albers worked on for over twenty-five years, from 1950 until his death. Each work in the series presents three or four boxed squares, arranged according to precise proportions and rigorous tonal relationships: variations in format, color, and brightness produce effects of depth, vibration, and movement that make each impression unique while maintaining the consistency of the structure. The series is also the matrix of an intense graphic production: Albers derived original serigraphs of great quality from it, in which the control of flat color and chromatic relationships found in the serigraphic technique the ideal tool. He also created lithographs and aquatints, confirming his interest in original printing as an autonomous language and not merely as a simple reproduction of the painting.