Josef Albers
Based on Wikipedia: Josef Albers
In 1949, a sixty-one-year-old German émigré began painting squares inside of squares. He would continue doing this, obsessively, for the next twenty-seven years until his death. The series would eventually comprise over a thousand paintings, all with the same title: Homage to the Square.
This might sound like the setup for a joke about modern art's supposed absurdity. But Josef Albers wasn't being lazy or provocative. He was conducting one of the most rigorous experiments in visual perception ever undertaken, and in the process, he would transform how we understand color itself.
The Craftsman's Son
Albers was born in 1888 in Bottrop, a small industrial town in Germany's Ruhr Valley. His father Lorenzo worked variously as a housepainter, carpenter, and handyman. His mother came from a family of blacksmiths. This was not an artistic household in any conventional sense—it was a practical one, where people made things with their hands and solved problems with tools.
But this background would prove essential. Young Josef learned to engrave glass, do plumbing, and run electrical wiring. These weren't hobbies; they were the family trade, passed down through generations. The experience gave him something that would distinguish his later teaching: an unshakeable confidence in the manipulation of physical materials, and a belief that making things was not separate from thinking about them.
He spent his twenties as a schoolteacher in Bottrop, a steady if unremarkable career. But something was stirring. He began training as an art teacher in Berlin, then studied printmaking in Essen, where he learned stained-glass making from a Dutch artist named Johan Thorn Prikker. In 1918, at age thirty, he received his first public commission: a stained-glass window for a church in his hometown, titled Rosa mystica ora pro nobis—"Mystical Rose, pray for us."
It was religious art. It was craft. It was the expected path for someone of his background.
Then, in 1920, at the age of thirty-two, Albers did something unexpected. He enrolled as a student at a radical new art school in Weimar called the Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus Revolution
The Bauhaus, founded just a year earlier by architect Walter Gropius, was attempting something unprecedented: to reunite art and craft, to eliminate the distinction between fine art and functional design, to create a new kind of artist who could shape the entire visual environment of modern life.
The school attracted visionaries and eccentrics. Its faculty would eventually include some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy. The students were young, passionate, and convinced they were building a new world.
Albers, at thirty-two, was older than most students and already an experienced teacher himself. But he came as a student nonetheless, enrolling in the preliminary course taught by Johannes Itten, a mystical Swiss painter who had students do breathing exercises and eat garlic to purify themselves before making art.
Albers must have seemed like an odd fit. He was practical where others were theoretical, patient where others were revolutionary. But Gropius saw something in him. After just two years as a student, Albers joined the faculty in 1922, teaching newcomers the principles of handicrafts—how to work with materials, how to understand their properties, how to think through making.
It was a perfect role for a craftsman's son.
Glass and Geometry
Although Albers had studied painting, his official position at the Bauhaus was as a maker of stained glass. This wasn't a demotion; at the Bauhaus, the hierarchy between media was deliberately flattened. A well-designed teapot was as worthy of serious attention as an oil painting.
Albers approached glass not as a craft tradition to be preserved but as a problem to be solved. How does light pass through colored glass? How do colors change when layered? How can flat pieces of glass create the illusion of depth? These weren't aesthetic questions—they were almost scientific ones.
In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, and Albers was promoted to professor. That same year, he married Anni Fleischmann, a student at the school who would become one of the twentieth century's most important textile artists. It was a true partnership of equals—two people who shared a way of seeing the world through materials and their possibilities.
At Dessau, Albers taught alongside giants. His "form master" for the glass workshop was Paul Klee, the Swiss painter whose whimsical yet rigorous work was transforming modern art. They cooperated for several years, Klee handling the theoretical and formal aspects while Albers managed the practical craft instruction.
Albers also designed furniture and continued his glass experiments. He was becoming a complete Bauhaus artist: equally comfortable with theory and practice, with unique objects and mass-producible designs.
Exile and Reinvention
In 1933, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close. The school's internationalism, its modernism, its Jewish faculty members—everything about it was anathema to the new regime. The artists scattered. Many fled Germany entirely.
Albers and Anni emigrated to the United States, arriving with limited English but with something invaluable: a recommendation from Philip Johnson, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Johnson arranged for Albers to become head of a new art school at a place called Black Mountain College in the mountains of North Carolina.
Black Mountain was an experiment within an experiment. Founded in 1933—the same year the Bauhaus closed—it was a small liberal arts college organized around progressive principles. There were no grades, no required courses, and the arts were considered central to all education. It was, in many ways, the American Bauhaus.
For Albers, who spoke little English and had to communicate largely through demonstration, Black Mountain was an opportunity to refine his teaching into something almost physical. He couldn't rely on eloquent lectures; he had to show students what he meant. This constraint became a strength. His teaching grew more direct, more visual, more focused on actual experience rather than explanation.
The Teacher's Teacher
The list of artists who studied under Albers at Black Mountain reads like a who's who of postwar American art: Ruth Asawa, who would become famous for her wire sculptures; Robert Rauschenberg, whose "combines" would help launch Pop Art; Cy Twombly, whose scrawled canvases would redefine drawing; Ray Johnson, a pioneer of mail art and collage.
Albers also invited major artists to teach summer sessions, including the painter Willem de Kooning and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence came to teach. The college became a crossroads where European modernism met American energy.
Susan Weil, one of his students, later remarked that Albers was "his own academy." He had a saying that students remembered for decades afterward: "When you're in school, you're not an artist, you're a student." This wasn't meant to be discouraging. Albers was intensely supportive of self-expression—but only after students had learned to truly see. First you learned the grammar; then you could write poetry.
His relationship with students could be combative. Robert Rauschenberg, who would later become one of the most famous artists in the world, found Albers's classes frustrating and contentious. Their personalities clashed. Yet Rauschenberg would later identify Albers as his most important teacher. The rigor mattered more than the comfort.
Yale and the Widening Influence
In 1950, Albers left Black Mountain to head the design department at Yale University. He was sixty-two years old and embarking on what would become the most influential phase of his teaching career.
At Yale, he worked to expand the graphic design program, hiring designers like Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter, and Alvin Lustig. The department became a powerhouse, training a generation of designers who would shape American visual culture.
His students at Yale included Richard Anuszkiewicz, who would become a leading Op artist; Eva Hesse, whose sculptural work would transform minimalism; and Neil Welliver, who would become known for large-scale landscape paintings. The range of his students' eventual styles is striking—they didn't become Albers imitators. They became themselves, but with a rigorous understanding of perception that Albers had instilled.
Albers retired from teaching in 1958, but he remained active at Yale. In 1962, he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for an exhibition and lecture on his work. He collaborated with the architect King-lui Wu on various projects, including distinctive geometric fireplaces and a façade for one of Yale's secret senior societies.
The Science of Seeing
In 1963, Albers published what would become his most enduring contribution to art education: a book called Interaction of Color.
The book begins with a radical claim: color "is almost never seen as it really is." We think we see colors objectively, but we don't. Every color is changed by the colors around it. A gray square looks lighter against a dark background and darker against a light background. The same red can look orange or purple depending on its neighbors.
This wasn't just theory. Albers had been conducting experiments with his students for decades, asking them to make one color look like two different colors, or two different colors look the same. The exercises were deceptively simple and endlessly revealing. Students discovered that everything they thought they knew about color was provisional, context-dependent, subject to revision.
The first edition of Interaction of Color was an extraordinary object: only two thousand copies were printed, and it contained one hundred fifty silk-screened color plates. It was meant to be experienced, not just read. Later editions made the text more widely available, and the book has never gone out of print. It has influenced generations of artists, designers, and educators. A recent edition is even available as an iPad app, allowing readers to manipulate the color exercises themselves.
Albers wasn't the first to study color perception—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German poet, had written about color theory more than a century earlier, and Michel Eugène Chevreul, a French chemist, had done pioneering work on simultaneous contrast. But Albers translated these insights into a teaching method that was practical, experiential, and endlessly productive.
Homage to the Square
While all this teaching was happening, Albers was also making his own art. And starting in 1949, that art became almost monomaniacally focused on a single format: nested squares.
The Homage to the Square series consists of paintings in which three or four squares of solid color sit inside one another. The squares are not centered—they're positioned according to mathematical relationships that Albers calculated precisely. The bottom margins are always larger than the top, giving each painting a subtle sense of gravity.
Albers worked on these paintings for twenty-seven years, producing over a thousand of them. He painted on Masonite—a smooth, hard pressed-wood panel—using a palette knife rather than brushes. This gave the color surfaces a flat, impersonal quality, free of visible brushwork or personal gesture.
On the back of each painting, Albers recorded exactly which commercial paints he had used, including brand names and product numbers. This wasn't artistic eccentricity; it was scientific documentation. Each painting was an experiment, and experiments need records.
The series might seem monotonous in description, but in person, the paintings are startling. Colors that look similar in isolation turn out to behave completely differently when placed together. Squares appear to advance or recede, glow or go dull, depending entirely on their chromatic neighbors. The rigid geometry becomes a laboratory for visual magic.
Public Art and Album Covers
Albers wasn't only a painter of squares. Throughout his career, he created works in other media and for public spaces.
In 1959, a gold-leaf mural called Two Structural Constellations was engraved in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in Manhattan. For the Time and Life Building, he created Two Portals, a massive mural of alternating glass bands in white and brown that created an illusion of depth, measuring forty-two feet by fourteen feet.
Perhaps his most ambitious public work was Manhattan, created for the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building). It was a reworking of a piece he had first designed at the Bauhaus in 1929, a sandblasted glass construction he had called City. The giant abstract mural—twenty-eight feet high and fifty-five feet wide—featured black, white, and red strips arranged in interwoven columns.
The mural was removed around 2000 during a lobby redesign, but Albers had left exact specifications for its replication. In 2019, it was rebuilt and reinstalled in its original location, a posthumous restoration of one of his major works.
In a delightful footnote to his career, Albers also designed album covers for Command Records between 1959 and 1961. The record label, founded by Enoch Light, was pioneering new stereo recording techniques and wanted covers that matched their sonic innovation. Albers created seven covers featuring circles and grids of dots—forms he rarely used in his fine art. The album for Terry Snyder and the All Stars' Persuasive Percussion shows a tight grid of small black disks from which a few wander upward, "as if stray molecules of some light gas."
These records are now prized by collectors of mid-century modern design, valued as much for their covers as for their contents.
The Last Years
In 1970, Albers and Anni moved to Orange, Connecticut, where they continued working in a private studio. He was eighty-two years old but still productive, still painting his squares.
The following year, he became the first living artist to receive a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was a remarkable honor, a recognition that this German immigrant who had spent his life teaching and painting squares had become one of the essential artists of his century.
The painter Elaine de Kooning, wife of Willem, had written about Albers back in 1950, observing that however impersonal his paintings might at first appear, "not one of them could have been painted by anyone but Josef Albers himself." The paradox was real: working within the most rigid possible constraints, Albers had developed a style so distinctive that it was unmistakably personal.
He died in his sleep on March 25, 1976, at Yale New Haven Hospital, six days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He had been admitted for a possible heart ailment. The death was peaceful—unlike the revolutionary art and teaching that made his life remarkable.
The Legacy of Seeing
Albers is sometimes classified as an Op artist—part of the movement in the 1960s that explored optical effects and visual perception. But this is too narrow. He preceded Op Art by decades and influenced artists working in completely different modes.
The hard-edge abstract painters of the late 1950s and 1960s drew on his use of flat color and geometric forms. Conceptual artists learned from his interest in perception as a process rather than a fixed state. Minimalists absorbed his rigor and his willingness to work within extreme constraints.
But his deepest influence was through teaching. Albers is considered one of the most important art educators of the twentieth century, perhaps the most important. His approach—prioritizing experience over theory, vision over knowledge, making over talking—transformed how art is taught.
His famous dictum was: "What counts is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing." He didn't want students to know about color; he wanted them to see it, to experience how it actually behaves rather than how they expected it to behave.
This might sound mystical, but it wasn't. It was practical, almost scientific. Albers believed that looking carefully was a skill that could be developed through practice. And he believed that this skill—the ability to see what was actually there rather than what you assumed was there—was fundamental not just to making art but to living intelligently in a visual world.
The craftsman's son from Bottrop, who learned to engrave glass and run wiring before he ever thought about art, spent his life teaching people to see. That his lesson remains fresh—that Interaction of Color is still assigned in art schools, that his squares still stop viewers in their tracks—suggests he succeeded.
Color deceives continually, Albers wrote. But with patience and attention, we can learn to see through the deception. That's what he spent his life teaching, one nested square at a time.