| |
Josef Albers
1888-1976
Josef and Anni Albers were artistic adventurers who were both pioneers of twentieth-century modernism. Josef Albers (1888-1976) was an influential teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist—now best known for the Homages to the Square he painted between 1950 and 1976 and for his innovative 1963 publication The Interaction of Color. Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer, and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wallhangings.
The couple met in Weimar, Germany in 1922 at the Bauhaus. This new teaching institution, now so renowned for its effects on all modern design, had been founded two years earlier, and emphasized the connection between artists, architects, and craftspeople.
Before enrolling as a student at the Bauhaus in 1920, Josef had been a school teacher in his hometown of Bottrop, in the northwestern industrial Ruhr region of Germany. Initially he taught a general elementary school course; then, following studies in Berlin, he taught art. In the course of his teaching years, he developed as a figurative artist and printmaker. Once he was at the Bauhaus, he worked primarily in stained and sandblasted glass, first making glass assemblages from detritus he found at the Weimar town dump, then sandblasting glass constructions and designing large stained-glass windows for houses and buildings. He also designed furniture, household objects, and a typeface, and developed a keen eye as a photographer. In 1925 he was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty and become a "master" there. By 1933, when pressure from the Nazis forced the school to close, Josef Albers had become one of its best-known artists and teachers.
Anni Albers came to the Bauhaus as a young student in 1922. Throughout her childhood in Berlin, she had been fascinated by the visual world, and her parents had encouraged her to study drawing and painting. Having been brought up in an affluent household where she was expected simply to continue living the sort of comfortable social life enjoyed by her mother, she showed great courage in going off to an art school where living conditions were rugged and the challenges immense. She entered the weaving workshop because it was the only one open to her, but soon found her way. She and Josef, eleven years different in age, met shortly after her arrival in Weimar. They were married in Berlin in 1925—and Annelise Fleischmann became Anni Albers. At the Bauhaus, Anni experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly colored designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and components of structure became the source of beauty.
In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to the city of Dessau to a streamlined and revolutionary building designed by Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the school. In Dessau, the Alberses lived alongside the families of artist teachers Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Schlemmer, and others in one of the masters' houses designed by Gropius. In November 1933 Josef and Anni Albers emigrated to the USA where Josef had been asked to make the visual arts the center of the curriculum at the newly established Black Mountain College near Asheville in North Carolina. They remained at Black Mountain until 1949. Josef continued his exploration of a range of printmaking techniques and took off as an abstract painter, while continuing as a captivating teacher and writer. Anni made extraordinary weavings, developed new textiles, and taught, while also writing essays on design that reflected her independent and passionate vision. During this time Josef and Anni Albers traveled widely both in the United States and Mexico, a country that captivated their imagination and had a strong effect on both of their art. In 1950, the Alberses moved to Connecticut. From 1950 to 1958 Josef Albers was chairman of the Department of Design at the Yale University School of Art. There, and as guest teacher at art schools throughout America and in Europe, he trained a whole new generation of art teachers. Meanwhile he wrote, painted, and made prints. In 1971, he was the first living artist ever to be honored with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was still working on his Homages to the Square at the time of his death in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976. Following the move, Anni Albers continued to weave, design, and write. In 1963 she happily began to explore the new medium of printmaking and produced a group of lithographs and screenprints of great spatial and textural complexity. Her seminal text On Weaving was published in 1965. Like Josef, she focused above all on her work—happy to pursue it at a remove from the trends and shifting fashions of the art world. In 1984, Anni wrote, "... to comprehend art is to confide in a constant."
1888 Josef Albers born March 19, Bottrop, Ruhr District, Germany.
1902–05 Josef Albers attends preparatory teachers' training school (Präparandenschule) in Langenhorst.
1905–08 Josef attends teachers' college in Büren; receives teacher's certificate.
1908–13 Josef teaches public school at the Josephschule in Bottrop, and in nearby towns of Dülmen and Stadtlohn.
1908 Josef visits museums in Munich and the Folkwang Museum, Hagen; sees paintings by Cézanne and Matisse for the first time.
1913–15 On leave of absence from his position as school teacher, Josef travels to Berlin where he studies at the Royal Art School and becomes certified as an art teacher in 1915. Visits Berlin museums and galleries. Executes first still-life paintings and linocut prints in 1915.
1916 Josef studies lithography part-time at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Essen. Makes first lithographs. Begins independent work in stained glass.
1917 Josef executes his first commission, a stained glass window Rosa mystica ora pro nobis for St. Michael's Church in Bottrop. It is later destroyed.
1918–19 Josef attends the Royal Bavarian Art Academy in Munich where he studies drawing with Franz von Stuck and attends Max Doerner's course in painting techniques.
1920 Josef enrolls at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Takes Preliminary Course under Johannes Itten and pursues independent study in stained glass.
1922 Josef completes his preliminary work at the Bauhaus and is appointed a “journeyman” and placed in charge of the Bauhaus glass workshop. He designs and executes stained-glass windows for Walter Gropius’s Sommerfeld and Otte houses in Berlin and for the reception room of Gropius’s office in Weimar. In the furniture workshop, Josef designs a table and bookshelf for the reception room of Gropius’s office. He meets Anneliese Flieschmann.
1923 Itten leaves the Bauhaus and Josef takes over teaching of the Preliminary Course in material and design together with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Josef designs display cabinets to be used in the first official Bauhaus exhibition.
1924 Josef's first published writings appear, his essay "Historisch oder Jetzig," in a special Bauhaus issue of the magazine Junge Menschen.
1925 Josef and Anni are married on May 9 and travel to Italy on their honeymoon. The Alberses move with the Bauhaus to Dessau. Josef is appointed a Bauhaus Master.
1926–27 Josef develops sandblasted glass paintings and designs large scale glass windows fabricated by the Berlin firm of Gottfried Heinersdorff, Puhl and Wagner. The windows are installed in the Grassi Museum, Leipzig and the Ullstein Printing Factory in Tempelhof, Berlin. These windows are destroyed during World War II. He also designs an upholstered bentwood armchair, glass and metal household objects, and a universal typeface which is published in the magazine Offset. He designs furniture for the Berlin apartment of the Albers’s good friends, Drs. Fritz and Anna Moellenhoff.
1927 In July Josef and Anni travel on vacation on a banana boat to Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
1928 Josef lectures at the International Congress for Art Education in Prague. His seminal article Werklicher Formunterricht, expounding his educational philosophy and method, is published in the journal Bauhaus. Josef takes over teaching the entire Preliminary Course after Moholy-Nagy leaves the Bauhaus. He directs the Bauhaus furniture workshop after the departure of Marcel Breuer and designs a second upholstered armchair. Gropius resigns as Bauhaus director and is replaced by architect Hannes Meyer.
1929 Josef shows twenty glass paintings in exhibition of Bauhaus masters in Zurich and Basel. His armchairs are exhibited at the Gewerbemuseum in Zurich. He heads the wallpaper design workshop for two years while its director, Hinnerk Scheper, is away in Moscow. In the summer Josef and Anni travel to Avignon, Geneva, Biarritz, and Paris. Josef records these travels in photographs. In August they travel to Barcelona where they visit the International Exposition and its German Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe.
1930 Josef continues his Bauhaus teaching under the new directorship of Mies van der Rohe. He becomes assistant director of Bauhaus. In the summer the Alberses travel to Spain and Italy. Josef again documents their travels in photographs.
1931 Josef designs a hotel living room with furnishings for the large Berlin Building Exhibition; and begins his first sustained serial work, the Treble Clef gouaches.
1932 Funding is withdrawn from the Bauhaus by the city of Dessau and the school is forced to move to Berlin. Josef and Anni move to an apartment at 28 Sensburgerallee, in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. Josef has his first solo show at Bauhaus: a comprehensive exhibition of his work in glass from 1920–32.
1933 In August, after harassment by the Nazi authorities, Josef joins remaining faculty members in officially closing the Bauhaus. He resumes printmaking. On the recommendation of Philip Johnson and Edward M.M. Warburg at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Josef is invited to teach at the newly-founded Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he arrives on November 28. Josef describes his mission there as “To open eyes.”
1934 Josef is invited to give three lectures at the Lyceum Club, Havana, Cuba. The Alberses travel to Cuba with their Black Mountain College colleagues and friends Ted and Bobbie Dreier. Josef’s recent work is exhibited concurrently.
1935 The Alberses make the first of fourteen visits to Mexico. Josef makes his first abstract oil paintings.
1936–41 More than twenty solo shows of Josef’s work in American galleries including J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle and the Nierendorf Gallery in New York; The Germanic Museum at Harvard University; the Addison Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art; and the Katharine Kuh Gallery, Chicago. Work shown includes glass paintings from the Bauhaus period and new graphics and oil paintings.
1936 Josef makes a new series of abstract line drawings.
1937 Josef’s paintings are included in the first American Abstract Artists exhibition at Squibb Galleries in New York City in April.
1939 The Alberses become United States citizens. In June they travel to Mexico where Josef teaches at Gobers College in Tlalpan.
1941 The Alberses spend a sabbatical year in New Mexico and Mexico. In the spring Josef teaches Basic Design and Color at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
1942 Josef’s series of zinc plate lithographs, the Graphic Tectonics, begun as a series of drawings at Harvard in the summer of 1941 are executed in North Carolina.
1943 Josef begins a series of geometric painted abstractions.
1946 The Alberses leave Black Mountain College in October on a year-long sabbatical. They travel to Mexico via Canada, the Midwest, California, Texas, and New Mexico.
1947 Josef spends most of this sabbatical year painting in Mexico. He begins Variant (or Adobe) series of paintings which evoke the domestic adobe architecture of Mexico.
1948 Josef is invited to serve on the Advisory Council of the School of the Arts, Yale University. His first post-World War II exhibition in Germany, Josef Albers, Hans Arp, Max Bill, is held at Galerie Herbert Hermann, Stuttgart. In October Josef agrees to be rector of Black Mountain College which is experiencing troubled times.
1949 Josef resigns from Black Mountain College in March. He and Anni travel to Mexico City where Josef teaches at the University of Mexico. In August they return to New York City. Josef is appointed visiting professor at Cincinnati Art Academy and at Pratt Institute, New York, where he teaches color courses. Josef makes his first linear Structural Constellation drawings and his first studies—in black and white—for Homage to the Square paintings.
1950 Josef starts his Homage to the Square series of paintings. He is a visiting critic at Yale University Art School (January and February), and Visiting Professor, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (summer). In the fall he accepts the appointment as Chair of the Department of Design at Yale. The Alberses move to New Haven, Connecticut. Invited by Walter Gropius, Josef contributes to the interiors of the new Harvard University Graduate Center. Josef designs the brick wall America for the reverse wall of the fireplace in the commons.
1952 Josef has his first one person exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. The Alberses travel to Mexico and Cuba. Josef designs brick fireplaces for two Connecticut homes designed by his Yale colleague, architect King Lui Wu.
1953 The Alberses return to Latin America. Josef teaches in Department of Architecture, Universidad Catòlica, Santiago, Chile, and at Institute of Technology, Lima, Peru.
1954 In Hawaii, Josef teaches at the University of Honolulu. Josef is appointed visiting professor at Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, West Germany.
1955 Josef returns to Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm as visiting professor in the summer.
1956 Yale University Art Gallery mounts a retrospective exhibition of Josef’s work.
1957 Josef has an exhibition at Galerie Denise René, Paris.
1958 Josef retires from Yale University Art School, but remains as Visiting Critic until 1960. He continues to be invited as visiting teacher to art schools across America.
1959 Josef is awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship. His mural Two Structural Constellations is engraved in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in Manhattan.
1961 Josef designs the mural Two Portals for the lobby of the Time and Life Building in Manhattan and a brick altar wall for St. Patrick’s Church, Oklahoma City.
1962 Josef is awarded a Graham Foundation fellowship and an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Yale University, one of the first of numerous honorary degrees he will receive over the next fourteen years.
1963 Josef’s monumental mural in red, white, and black, Manhattan, is installed in the Pan Am Building in New York, and Repeat and Reverse is installed over the entryway of Yale's Art and Architecture building. Interaction of Color, with text and silkscreen plates based on the Albers color course, is published by Yale University Press. Josef is visiting artist at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles where he creates the Interlinear lithograph series.
1964 Josef is invited back to Tamarind as a fellow. Josef creates the series of eight Homage to the Square images, Midnight and Noon. The International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York organizes the exhibition Josef Albers: Homage to the Square which opens in Caracas Venezuela in March 1964 and travels to museums throughout the Americas through January 1967.
1965 Josef’s guest lecture series at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut is published as Search Versus Re-Search.
1967 Josef receives the Carnegie Institute award for painting at Pittsburgh International Exhibition. His painted mural Growth and brick Loggia Wall are installed on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technolgy.
1968 Josef receives the Grand Prix at the Third Bienal Americana de Grabado, Santiago, Chile, and the Grand Prix for painting from the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. He is elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The traveling exhibition Albers organized by the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster opens in Münster in April 1968 and travels in Europe through January 1970.
1970 The Alberses move from 8 North Forest Circle, New Haven to 808 Birchwood Drive, Orange, Connecticut. Albers is made an honorary citizen of his birthplace, Bottrop.
1971 Albers is the first living artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1972 Continuing his collaboration with architects, Josef designs a steel sculpture Two Supraportas for the facade of the new Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst and Kulturgeschichte in Münster. Other architectural works for this year are Gemini, a stainless steel relief for the Grand Avenue National Bank lobby in Kansas City, Missouri, and Reclining Figure, a mosaic mural for the Celanese Building in Manhattan destroyed in 1980.
1973 Publication of Formulation: Articulation, a screenprint portfolio that reprises Josef’s life’s work. Josef designs a free-standing sculptural wall for Stanford University. He receives the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
1975 Josef receives the Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Architects.
1976 At the invitation of a former student, the architect Harry Seidler, Josef designs the mural Wrestling for Seidler’s Mutual Life Center in Sydney, Australia. Josef Albers dies March 25 in New Haven, Connecticut.
1980 Josef’s Stanford Wall (designed in 1973) is constructed on the University campus.
1983 Anni Albers presides over the opening of the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany.
Available work by Josef Albers
If you would like to receive further information or if you need images, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery.
Please send requests via email to:
mail@ludorff.com
back to top
|
| |
