Artist 101

1.

Beginnings

Josef Albers was born in the German town of Bottrop in 1888 in a family of craftsmen. His father was a carpenter and decorator, while his mother came from a family of blacksmiths. Albers learnt glass engraving, plumbing and wiring during his childhood, a practical education that gave him enormous confidence in the handling of materials as an artist later in life.

Albers began training as a primary school teacher in his hometown in 1905, and taught there between 1908 to 1913. He then trained as an art teacher at Berlin’s Königliche Kunstschule. In 1916 he began working as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbschule in Essen, learning the craft of stained glass with the Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker. In 1918 he received his first public commission, a stained-glass window for a church in Essen. In 1919 Albers moved to Munich, where he joined Franz von Stuck’s painting class at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst.

A year later, Albers enrolled in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus Weimar, taught by Johannes Itten. He also attended a glass workshop where he began working on what he called “wall glass paintings”, made from fragments found in Weimar, and stained glass. In 1922 he met his future wife Anni, who was also a student there and whose artistic outlook would be deeply influential for Albers throughout his career.

2.

Bauhaus & Teaching

In 1923, the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, appointed Albers to teach the school’s preliminary course. This happened before Albers had even completed his own training there, a testament to the artistic talent and knack for educating that Gropius observed in him. Albers’s teaching followed the Bauhaus principles: a lack of distinction between arts and crafts, the precept “form follows function”, a preference for simplicity, and the desire to bring design to the masses. During his time at the Bauhaus, Albers worked across metal, furniture and typography, but his glass works stand out particularly in his early production.

Albers taught at the Bauhaus across its Weimar, Dessau and Berlin incarnations, up until the school was shut down following the rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933. Anni and him then emigrated to the USA, where he was appointed head of a new art school in North Carolina: Black Mountain College. He taught there until 1949 and his courses attracted aspiring artists such as Willem de Kooning, Ruth Asawa and Robert Rauschenberg.

Teaching would remain a key aspect of Albers’s professional life, and he held numerous guest professorships at prestigious universities including the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the Cincinnati Art Academy in Ohio, Yale University in New Haven, the architecture department of the Universidad Católica in Santiago de Chile, and the Ulm School of Design in Germany.

3.

Travel

Josef and Anni Albers arrived in Mexico in the winter of 1935-36. It would be the first of many visits, a total of 14 between then and the late 1960s, to what they considered a “country of art like no other” and “the promised land of abstract art”. They liked driving across famous archaeological sites, such as Teotihuacán, Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, and took hundreds of photographs of the monumental constructions, temples and statues, amassing a large collection of sculptures and ceramics in the process.

Albers kept a meticulous record of their travels, including maps, letters, journals, photocollages and even films. These travels and the materials gathered in them were key to the development of Albers’ work, steering it in a new direction. The facades of the pre-Columbian architectural structures inspired geometric experimentations, while the colours of the Mexican landscape and the artefacts they collected influenced his palette, as can be seen important works such as his series Variant (or Adobe) (1946–66) and in Untitled Variant/Adobe (Grey, Black, Red) (1947).

4.

Late Career | Homage to the Square

Albers’ masterpiece, in terms of ambition and scale, is arguably his Homage to the Square series. It encompasses hundreds of paintings, prints, tapestries, studies and preparatory drawings on the same theme, which he tirelessly worked on from 1950, coinciding with his move to Connecticut to head the department of design at Yale University, until his death in 1976.

The composition of Homage to the Square is relatively simple: just four superimposed squares, like a geometric take on a Russian doll, conveyed in a plethora of vivid colours. The paintings, instantly recognisable and coveted by collectors, were hand-painted in rich oils on masonite. The simplicity of the composition is key as it allowed Albers to tease out the relationship between colour and shape in infinite interactions, exploring the subjective experience of looking. His 1951 Homage to the Square: Study to Young Prediction – to be offered at the Post-War & Contemporary Art sale on 15 October in London – does just this in using a very rare colour combination that only featured in four of his works, across a series of hundreds of pieces.

Albers had been fascinated by the compositional and phenomenological qualities of colour from the days of his early wall glass paintings. Throughout his career he explored how colour and shapes impacted perception, even publishing a treatise on the subject titled Interaction of Colour in 1963.

“Every perception of colour is an illusion,” Albers said. “We do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another. [...] This play of colours, this change in identity, is the object of my concern. It leads me to change my colour tool, my palette, from one picture to the next.”

5.

Collecting

There’s always a tremendous appetite and demand for Albers’s work due to his timeless relevance and his important place in the history of modern art. This has been further cemented by the quality of his works coming to market and by regular exhibitions at some of the best international museums. In 2017-18, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented the show Josef Albers in Mexico exploring the enduring influence of the country in his work. More recently, in September 2021, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris opened the exhibition Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life.

In recent years Bonhams has offered a number of important works by Albers, including his 1965 Study for Homage to the Square, this time in green and grey hues, sold for £350,062 at Bonhams London in 2020. Another stunning oil on masonite in shades of green, Contented Green (1948-1955) sold in 2019 at Bonhams London for £362,562, and from the same series, Untitled Variant/Adobe (Grey, Black, Red) achieved £237,562 – a record for an Albers work on paper.

Meanwhile, for those hoping to start collecting Albers, drawings and some works on paper have more accessible prices, fetching five figures. For example, his 1955 Untitled (Drawing of a Structural Constellation) sold for £16,250 at Bonhams London in 2018.

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