Color Theory

Color Theory

Josef Albers

Josef Albers was born on March 19, 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany. He studied in many places such as Berlin, Essen, and Munich. In 1920 he enrolled at the famous Bauhaus in Germany, by 1922 he was teaching at the Bauhaus, and by 1925 he was promoted to professor. When the school was forced to close in 1933 by the Nazi’s, Albers immigrated to the United States where he found work at the Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina. Albers ran the painting department till 1949. In 1950 Albers became the head of the department of design at Yale where he taught until he retired in1958, and then was named Emeritus professor of art a title he held until the day he died in 1976.

1968 was a big year for Josef Albers, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and also published his book Interaction of Color. In 1971 Albers was the first living artist to be given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York.

“Albers's earliest works were figurative drawings and paintings. His style became increasingly abstract at the Bauhaus where he began to explore abstraction and color, his primary lifelong preoccupations. He was fascinated by the ambiguities of visual and spatial perception. This preoccupation is central to his famous Homage to the Square series begun in the 1950s and continuing until his death. In this series, color assumes the main role of producing deceptive and unpredictable effects, causing multiple readings of the same hue depending on what colors surround it. Albers did not mix colors, putting the colors on the painting right out of the tube. He forced his viewers into a changing and dynamic relationship with his work, rather than accepting one visual truth.”

Sources

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef albers

www. Kunstwissen.de/fach/f-kuns/b mod/albers.htm

www. Tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/albers

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