PC1989.5
Josef Albers
(German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square
Silkscreen, 1967
19.5" x 19.5" 		   
PC1989.4
Josef Albers 
(German, 1888-1976)
Constructions
Intaglio, 1971 
19" x 24" 
Josef Albers was trained as an art teacher in Bottrop, a small industrial city in the Ruhr district of Germany. It was during this period that his style, while still showing an influence of artists like Cezanne, began to show more precise articulation and visual spareness. It was in 1920 while Albers attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, constructing glass assemblages and stained-glass windows, that his style gradually developed into abstraction. Later in that decade, he moved to illusionistic, volumetric forms, combining straight lines and curves. His reputation had grown tremendously by this time, and he was invited to teach at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He remained there for sixteen years. In 1948, he was elected to the Advisory Council of the Arts at Yale University in New Haven, where he began his famous Homage to the Square series. He continued his career at Syracuse University, the University of Oregon, Smith College, the University of Miami, and the Tamarind lithography workshop 

Constructions was published late in Albers' life in 1971. It consists of highly structured arrangements of line segments in a single plane. Though the work is two-dimensional, the line arrangements are such that they are perceived immediately by most observers to be representations of three-dimensional objects in a space created by the intersection of various planes. By using this effect, Albers was trying to set up the illusion of motion. He described his intentions as follows: "Thus, they change in motion: from coming to going, in extension: from inward to outward, in grouping: from together to separated, in volume: from full to empty, or reversed. And all this to show extended flexibility." It is clear from this remark that Albers' primary objective was to create the complex illusion of motion for the viewer. He made it possible for lines tightly structured in a plane to flow with life in a multiplicity of movement.

Jonathan Sargent 

Albers, 1988, 287-292.