A career in context: Josef Albers and Winsor & Newton (Part II) by Mathew Gibson

‘Homage to the Square’ the famous series of paintings, which made extensive use of Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour, was created by Josef Albers, the 20th Century German born American artist. This article by Winsor & Newton Global Resident Artist, Mathew Gibson, follows Albers’ career and influences, from the febrile creative arena that was the Bauhaus through to being Head of Design at Yale University and becoming the first living artist to have a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971.

To read more about the ‘Homage to the Square’ series, their context, production, see Mathew Gibson's first article.
     
Born in North West Germany in 1888, Albers trained as a Primary school teacher, and then undertook Fine Art training with the salon painter Franz von Stuck in Munich. In 1920 Albers read a pamphlet on a new art school in the central German town Weimar. “I was 32, but I went to the Bauhaus. Threw my old things out the window, started once more from the bottom. That was the best step I made in my life.”

Offering courses in painting, graphics, theatre and stage design, the Bauhaus concept was to combine art, craft and technology: industrial design was taught alongside painting and both were to be at the service of society. According to Bauhaus director, architect Walter Gropius, ‘the artist should be trained to work with industry.’ Bauhaus was influenced by the Russian movement Constructivism, which sought to make art out of its component parts, these being line, form, colour and shape.  

© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2011.

In 1925 Bauhaus moved to Dessau and Albers was appointed Professor of ‘Vorkurs’, the preparatory class, alongside the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The concept of a preparatory year was the Bauhaus’ abiding innovation in education that can still be felt in the Foundation years offered at Art schools today. The atmosphere at the Bauhaus was charged with the artistic rivalries and in-fighting of its staff which included artists, designers and architects of the stature of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Mies van der Rohe.

The early modernist, art and crafts approach was abandoned at the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 when a slicker, more ‘form follows function’ approach was adopted. This would go on to become the Bauhaus, or international style; the clean lines, elegant shapes and a lack of decoration that were so influential on modern architecture and design. This was an important formative period for Albers, whose engagement with transparent colour as a material, and his practical, hands-on approach to making art, were to be lifelong themes.

	Assessment of work from Albers’s Preliminary Course, 1928-1929 Photo by Umbo (Otto Umbehr) © Phyllis Umbehr/Galerie Kicken Berlin/ DACS 2011.

In 1933, the third incarnation of the Bauhaus in Berlin was obliged to close under intense pressure from the newly elected Nazi party. For some time, Josef and Anni Albers had been lobbying contacts in the United States to enable them to move there and in the same year they were able to do so. They were the first of a number of artists to leave the Bauhaus and disseminate its ideas around the world, particularly in the United States. Moholoy-Nagy went to the Chicago Institute of Design, Mies van der Rohe also settled in Chicago, while Gropius taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Appointed to run the painting programme at the innovatory Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Albers’ stated intention on arrival was, ‘to open eyes’. He introduced rigorous Bauhaus methods in drawing, colour and design to the previously ‘free,’ liberal college. His students included Cy Twombly, Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg, who said, “I consider Albers as the most important teacher I’ve ever had, and I’m sure he considered me one of his poorest students.”*

	Josef Albers  'Homage to the Square' (1976), Oil on masonite, 24 x 24 inches  The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (1976.1.524)  © 2011 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/  Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany.

On arrival in the United States Albers took up abstract painting and, in 1950, began the famous ‘Homage to the Square’ series. Starting aged 63 he went on to make over 1,000 pieces. Albers removed all extraneous issues to allow the viewer to concentrate on the one, central issue of how colours interrelate. His use of Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Colour is known as Albers annotated the back of his canvases with the colour and manufacturers name. At the same time as starting the ‘Homage to the Square’ series, Albers moved to Connecticut to take up the post of Director of Design at Yale University.

He was appointed emeritus professor after his retirement from teaching in 1958 and in 1963 Yale University published ‘Interaction of Color’, a book laying out Albers’ colour classes at Black mountain and Yale. As Achim Borchardt – Hume remarked “Interaction of Color was one of few serious attempts to revise accepted color theories.” ** It took the Bauhaus approach of emphasizing process over correct answers, something taken for granted today but innovative at the time. The basis of Albers’ course is that colour is unstable and contextual, so no prescription or formula is reliable. These ideas and the book itself were widely adopted in American art schools and remain extremely influential. Albers’ experimental approach and emphasis on process is also validated in the success of his most notable students. Neither Eva Hesse nor Robert Rauschenberg can be said to have emulated Albers; rather they have adopted a focus on experimentation and process which comes from Albers and the Bauhaus.

The largest exhibition to date of Albers work is currently showing at the Galleria Civica di Modena in Italy until the 8th of January 2012.

* Horowitz and Danilowitz: Josef Albers: To Open Eyes. The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale. London and New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2006

** Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New world, (ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume) Tate Exhibition Catalogue, 2006