Interacting with Colour: Josef Albers and Winsor & Newton (Part I) by Mathew Gibson

A remarkable artist and teacher, Josef Albers’ life and career spanned the 20th Century and two continents. He was a Professor at the famous Bauhaus Art school in Weimar, Germany, where his colleagues included Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1933 he and his wife Anni emigrated to the United States where Albers went to run the newly formed Painting department at the radical Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

From 1948 Albers was head of the Design department at Yale where his students included Eva Hesse. Albers is perhaps best remembered for two reasons, a book published in 1963 called ‘Interaction of Color’ and a series of paintings, ‘Homage to the Square’ that he began in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976. In these paintings Albers made extensive use of Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour. The paintings are on display in important collections and major museums around the world, including MOMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

This is the first of two articles by Winsor & Newton Global Resident Artist, Mathew Gibson, which will look at the ‘Homage to the Square’ series, their context, production, and Josef Albers' reasons for using Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour. A large number of this series are currently on display in a major retrospective in Italy. Josef Albers retrospective, Galleria Civica, Modena, runs until 08.01.2012. For further details visit their website.

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.

At the Bauhaus in the early 1920s Albers made glass assemblages using broken bottles and shards of coloured glass that he found on the streets of Weimar. The Bauhaus brought all the art and craft disciplines under the umbrella of architecture and these assemblages would have been intended as stained glass designs. Experimenting directly with materials in this way led Albers into his version of Abstraction. He did not get there through formal innovations such as Cubism, but rather through a hands-on, practical approach that was to characterize his art and teaching throughout his career.

The ‘Homage to the Square’ series was the distillation of a single idea of particular importance to Albers. He regarded ‘colour as the most relative medium in art’* and developed the series to explore this relativity. He discarded all else, such as composition and self-expression. Looking at an Albers painting means discovering the relations between the colours for oneself. The viewer ‘creates’ the experience of the painting; it has no history or politics. In keeping with the socially idealistic ethos of the Bauhaus, Albers believed that the heightened perception of the kind demanded by looking at his paintings would result in an improved awareness of the world.

Josef Albers made over a 1,000 works in the series ’Homage to the Square’. They range in size from 12” to 48” square. Each painting is composed of three or four coloured squares, each square ‘nesting’ inside a larger one. Albers would prime masonite (hardboard), then divide the painting vertically and paint just one side, arranging the colours as he wanted, before completing the whole picture.

He used oil paint straight from the tube and applied it with a palette knife. Using a palette knife ensured that there were no ‘expressive’ brush marks. The reasons for his using un-mixed, high quality oil paints were two-fold. First, they were readily available, which suited the democratic nature of art instilled in Albers at the Bauhaus. Secondly, Albers’ experience of glass at the Bauhaus (‘I wanted to work with coloured light’) was extended into the paintings.

The early paintings in the ‘Homage to the Square’ series are confrontational rejections of accepted color theory, colors clashing in seemingly inappropriate ways. As the series develops, the colors become more harmonious and contemplative, the later paintings moving towards the sublime and contemplative, demanding of meditation.

Nicholas Fox-Weber is Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in New Haven, Connecticut. He was with Albers as he developed his last paintings in the ‘Homage to the Square’ series, just before his 88th birthday. Albers showed Mr. Weber a painting he was working on; it had a dark-blue central square which he referred to as the Cosmos, and an outer square, painted in Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green, which he referred to as the Earth.

It was his intention to make the two colours ‘span’ the intermediary square. They would do this by the hues being of the exact same light intensity, something he claimed had never been done before. Albers told Mr. Weber that, ‘even as wonderful a colorist as Turner had never matched two exact light intensities.’** On completion of the painting, Mr. Weber remarks how the flow of colours worked, ‘like magic’. Albers linked his fingers together in praise of how the two colours ‘spanned’ the central square, the Earth and Cosmos combined with no hard edges.

This painting, the one illustrated, turned out to be the last Albers made in the series, he died in March 1976. It is currently on display in the retrospective in Modena, the largest ever exhibition of Albers' work. The paintings from the series that are owned by Tate Modern also include substantial use of Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour.

*Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006
**Nicholas Fox-Weber, Cosmic Josef (unpublished), 1976

Bibliography:

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

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006

Nicholas Fox-Weber, Cosmic Josef (unpublished), 1976