He presents their life and work like never before, from their early days at the Bauhaus in Germany to their notable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States during their highly productive years in Connecticut. Their groundbreaking work not only brings together European and American Modernism but is still relevant today, as David Zwirner wrote :
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is considered one of the most influential abstract painters of the 20th century as well as a leading designer and educator. He always studied in Freemason and used a palette knife with oil paints.
He was born in Bottrop and studied in 1919 at the Konigliche Bayerische Akademie of Bildenden Kunste in Munich and then became student of the school in 1920 in the Glass Laboratory, and since 1923 he has been teaching design at the legendary preliminary course of Bauhaus. He was one of the most influential artists-educators to immigrate to Germany.
Albers was born in Germany and studied and taught at the experimental Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin and was a practicing artist in design, typography, photographer, painter, printmaker and poet. Albers was professor and chair of the Design department at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, from 1948 until 1950 or 1950 until 1958. He began a 10 year tenure as head of the Department of Art at Yale University.
In 1925 Albers moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau, Germany, where he was appointed master. Proposed by architect Philip Johnson, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art. Albers served as director of a new art school at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he directed the painting program until 1949. He left Black Mountain College in 1950 to head up the design program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Albers began work on a series of prints and paintings known as “Dedication to the Square” since 1949. He founded the Joseph and Annie Albers Foundation in 1971 (almost five years before his death), a non-profit organization that he hoped would help “uncover and awaken vision through art”.
Josef Albers (born March 19, 1888 in Bottrop, Germany — died March 25, 1976 in New Haven, Connecticut ; USA ), painter, poet, sculptor and art theorist, important innovator in styles such as color field painting and op art, studied painting and engraving in Berlin, Essen and Munich and taught primary school in his hometown of Bottrop.
Half a century later The Interaction of Color (Public Library) with its vivid visual exercises and mind-blowing optical illusions remains an indispensable model for the art of vision: color is almost never seen as it actually is, as physically.
When Bauhaus closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure many of its artists fled as refugees from the country.Albers and his wife, the artist Annie Albers, were invited to teach at the newly formed Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the same year.
The couple eventually moved to Connecticut in 1950 when they moved to Yale University. Albers resisted the movement of the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau and then to Berlin, even after the departure of Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1928, and left Black Mountain and was President of the Department in 1950.
