Josef Albers
The first living artist to be granted a solo exhibition at both MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Albers was also one of the 20th century's most influential teachers. In 1949 he began work on Homage to the Square, a series of prints and paintings that became his greatest and most sought-after contribution to modern art. In the past ten years the value of these works has increased dramatically.
Albers's career can be thought of as a bridge between European and American Modernism. His work is defined by a tightly focused investigation into the interaction of colours. Working within a vocabulary of simple geometry, his paintings and prints explore a remarkable array of spatial relationships, with each colour appearing to advance and recede within the picture plane. He once claimed that "...every perception of colour is an illusion, we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another."
He first studied and then taught at the iconic Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, initially working in stained glass before being promoted to professor of design. In 1925 he married Annelise Fleischmann, who would go on to become the most influential textile designer of the 20th century. Under political pressure from the Nazis, the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, prompting the couple to emigrate to the United States.
Settling in North Carolina, Albers was hired by the newly founded Black Mountain College, a now legendary institution that embraced a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to education. When he arrived there was no art department and he spoke almost no English. During the following decades the college's faculty and alumni would grow to include some of the century's most important figures, such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage and Franz Kline. A gifted teacher, Albers's ideas were widely disseminated through several generations of artists, with important ramifications for the development of non-objective art. He was appointed by Yale University in 1950 to head their department of design, retiring in 1958.
The more than one thousand works that make up Homage to the Square represent one of the great singular projects of modernist thought. In choosing a single geometric shape that he insisted was devoid of symbolism, Albers was able to dedicate himself to his conviction that insight could only be attained through "continued trying and critical repetition."
His oil on masonite painting 'Homage to the Square: Temperate' sold for more than $3 million at Sotheby's London in 2017. Interest in Albers's work continues to grow, and in 2022 he and his wife Anni were the subject of a major museum show at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern in Spain. His prints offer collectors the chance to acquire museum quality original work by a legendary artist who worked alongside Kandinsky and Willem de Kooning.
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