German born US painter, designer, and influential teacher of art.
Before 1920 Albers divided his time between teaching and art studies. He then entered the newly created Bauhaus school, which aimed at the union of all the arts with modern architecture and with industry.
When Albers began to teach there three years later, it had become the most important school of design in Germany.
At the Bauhaus, Albers rejected the emotional self-expression and representational style of his early work in favor of constructivist art built up by intellectual calculation and the use of simple geometric forms.
The glass pictures and windows that he created represented careful investigation into relationships of line, colors and shape. He also designed utility object and furniture, including the first laminated chair for mass production.
When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers moved to the USA, where he spread Bauhaus ideas through his teaching at Black Mountain College. From 1950 to 1958 he was chairman of the department of architecture and design at Yale University.
Here he began the long series of painting and lithographs for which he is best known: Homage to the Square. Of all geometric forms Albers preferred the square for its non-natural man-made quality.
The works in this series consists of superimposed squares of color and reflect his preoccupation with the interaction of colors.
This work and his creation of visual ambiguities and illusions by the juxtaposition of colors anticipated of art.
Albers, Joseph (1888 – 1976)
