Person

Josef Albers

He painted squares inside squares for over 25 years to show that no color is ever seen on its own.

Lived: 1888–1976
Taught: Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Yale
Series: Homage to the Square, from 1950

Josef Albers (1888–1976) began as a schoolteacher and stained-glass maker in Germany. He joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, taking Johannes Itten's preliminary course, and stayed on to teach, leading part of that course himself from 1923. When the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, he and his wife, the textile artist Anni Albers, moved to Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

In America he became one of the century's most influential art teachers. His Black Mountain students included Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa, and from 1950 to 1958 he headed the design department at Yale. His method, carried over from the Bauhaus, was to look first and theorize later: students moved colored papers around until they could see what color was doing.

In 1963 he published that method as Interaction of Color, a set of exercises showing that a color almost never looks like itself: it shifts with its neighbors (simultaneous contrast), with its area and with the light. One exercise makes a single color look like two; another makes two different colors look the same.

His own painting tested the same idea. Homage to the Square, begun in 1950, runs to hundreds of paintings and prints of three or four nested squares, with the paints recorded on the back. Side by side, the same yellow or grey keeps changing character. In 1971 he became the first living artist given a solo show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Swatches

Inner square (Homage-style example) #F2C81F
Middle square (example) #EAA221
Outer square (example) #8E7F71

Colors

Sources

Albers, J. (1963). Interaction of Color. Yale University Press.
Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Josef Albers: biography.
Wikipedia, 'Josef Albers'.
Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 'Homage to the Square' (series begun 1950).

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