Josef Albers perhaps was the most famous of all the Bauhaus students ánd professors. He was actually both: starting as a student in 1920 and later teaching until moving to the United States when the Bauhaus school was closed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as he was unable to keep meeting the Nazi political demands.
But even before joining the Bauhaus as a student, Albers was working as an artist, a graphical and stained glass designer. At the Bauhaus Josef Albers initially wanted to study painting, but moved to stained glass (where he worked with Paul Klee) and other architectural disciplines. In the US he taught at several institutions, and always kept experimenting with painting, photography and different sorts of applied art.
In 1949 he started his series of paintings “Homage to the Square” on which he would work for some 25 years, creating over a thousand paintings. The paintings in the series consist of several squares in different shades of the same color, nested inside of each other. Albers used these paintings to study the way different colors interact with each other and the way the context in which a color is placed determines the perception of it.
👨🎨 Josef Albers (1888-1976)
🖼️ Homage to the Square: Red Va (1967)
🖼️ Homage to the Square: Suffused (1969)
🏛️ K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (@kunstsammlungnrw)
🎟️ Permanent collection
