Josef Albers

Josef Albers always went back to basics. As a child, he gained skills in carpentry and commercial painting by helping his father with work. Albers began his career teaching young children when “learning through doing” was still a new concept in progressive education. This appreciation of everyday materials and experiential learning was fundamental to his own art and design and his pedagogical approach throughout four decades of teaching.

At 32, Albers found his artistic home at the Bauhaus, a new design, art, and architecture school committed to rebuilding modern Germany after World War I. He enrolled in Johannes Itten’s requisite preliminary course, which sought to liberate the imagination from artistic conventions. Itten believed that open-ended studies of form, color, texture, and contrast would develop students’ innate creativity and subjective expression before they advanced into specialized workshop training. When Albers was promoted from student to teacher, his foundation course kept Itten’s model of experiential learning but also incorporated investigations of materials and structured “free play.” Throughout his career, Albers created conditions for students to teach themselves: “Our art instruction attempts first to teach the student to see in the widest sense: to open his eyes to the phenomena about him, and most of all, to open to his own living, being, and doing.”¹

As head of the furniture workshop, Albers designed prototypes for mass production with “economy of labor and form” in mind.² His innovative Armchair (model Ti 244) embodied Bauhaus functionalist ideals—useful designs which emerged from understanding material properties, production constraints, and real-world needs. The late 1920s necessitated affordable, easily manufactured furniture, so Albers designed standardized bentwood components that could be shipped and stored in flat-packs and adapted to changing lifestyles.

Just months after the Bauhaus closed in 1933, MoMA architecture curator Philip Johnson helped Albers and his Bauhaus designer wife Anni Albers escape Nazi Germany by securing an invitation for the couple to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was not an art or design school, but the arts were central to Black Mountain College’s experimental curriculum. As Albers explained, “art is a province in which one finds all the problems of life reflected—not only the problems of form…but also spiritual problems (e.g. of philosophy, of religion, of sociology, of economy)…[making] art…a rich medium for general education and development.”³

The impact of this approach emerged in his students’ diverse achievements. Robert Rauschenberg reflected, “Years later…I’m still learning what he taught me, because [it] had to do with the entire visual world….[not] how to ‘do art.’ The focus was always on your personal sense of looking…. I consider Albers the most important teacher I’ve ever had.”⁴

Breakthroughs in Albers’s own artwork resulted from encounters with Mesoamerican art and architecture during numerous visits to Mexico, “a promised land of abstract art,” as Albers wrote to his Bauhaus friend Vassily Kandinsky.⁵ In To Monte Albán, ancient step temples served as a springboard for studying what line could do. Albers’s simple parallel lines create complex visual effects. As viewers perceive fluctuations from flat patterns to three-dimensional forms, they actively participate in the kind of perception Albers sought to cultivate.⁶

His Homage to the Square series, which he worked on from 1950 until his death in 1976, represented a systematic investigation of color. Each work featured three to four colors in concentric squares that he applied onto a laminate board directly from the paint tube with a palette knife. With this series, Albers created another way of enabling viewers to discover how colors appear to shift and transform based on adjacent hues or context. For Albers, “art is not an object, but an experience,”⁷ rooted in the artist’s affinity for everyday objects.

This methodical exploration of color in paint coincided with Albers becoming the head of the Design Department at Yale University in 1950; his book Interaction of Color encapsulates his teaching exercises for a wide audience. “To turn productive seeing into creative revelation is a most exciting educational task,” he wrote, “as creation is the most intensive excitement one can come to know.”⁸
>Dara Kiese, art historian, 2025

Note: The opening quote is from Josef Albers, “Training of Artists-Architects for Industry” (lecture, Conference on Design and Management, Aspen, CO, August 1951), Typescript, Box 84, Folder 8, The Papers of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Juan Manuel Fontán del Junco, Fundación Juan March, and Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, eds., Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect: March 28–July 6, 2014, Fundación Juan March, exh. cat. (Madrid: Fundación Juan March: Editorial de Arte y Ciencia, 2014), 273.