Between the lines of color – Josef Albers
“ABSTRACTION IS REAL, PROBABLY MORE REAL THAN NATURE.” – JOSEF ALBERS
The line is Albers’s own, and few artists had more right to it. For a painter who spent decades on nested squares of flat colour, abstraction was not an escape from the world but a closer way of looking at it.
He is one of the figures who carried European Modernism across to America, and his work is a good place to begin for anyone new to it. Those who know it already will find it repays another look.
Albers was exact in method and patient in temperament. His subject was how colour behaves: how one tone changes beside another, and how flat shapes on a flat surface can seem to come forward or fall back. He worked with the simplest geometry so that colour could do the rest, and the paintings seem, at a distance, almost to breathe.
He was born in Bottrop, Germany, and entered the Bauhaus at Weimar in 1920, staying on to teach there. When the political climate in Germany closed in, he and his wife, Anni Albers, left for America.
At Black Mountain College in North Carolina they built the art programme, and Albers became one of the most respected teachers in the country. Solo exhibitions followed, from the Addison Gallery of American Art to the Germanic Museum at Harvard.
The series that defined him, Homage to the Square, began in 1950 and occupied him for the rest of his life: square within square, varied only in colour. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Retirement from teaching did not slow him. In 1963 he published Interaction of Color, still the clearest book on the subject, and in 1971 he became the first living artist to be given a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Josef Albers, ‘Study for Homage to the Square: Lone Light’, 1962. Courtesy of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
His influence has not faded. Recent exhibitions include Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim, Albers and Morandi: Never Finished in New York, which hung him beside Giorgio Morandi, and, in 2023, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants at David Zwirner in London.
Seen in person, the squares are quieter and more various than any reproduction suggests. They reward the slow look, which is what Albers asked of his students, and of everyone else.
See more art by Josef and Anni Albers:
( left to right on web, top to down on mobile )
Artwork 1: Josef Albers, ‘Homage to the Square: Guarded’, 1952
Artwork 2: Josef Albers, ‘New Gate’, 1951
Courtesy of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Please note the colors in the photos may not accurately represent the true colors of the artworks. The photos have been processed for this publication.
