Collection: Albers Josef

(Bottrop 1888 - New Haven 1976)

Josef Albers was a painter, printmaker, photographer, and designer known for his crucial role in the development of the Bauhaus, his innovations in geometric abstraction, and his explorations into the subjective experience of color.

From Germany he moved to the United States in 1933 with his wife, the artist Anni Albers, where he was a professor at the well-known avant-garde institution Black Mountain College.
From 1950 and for the next twenty-five years, Albers devoted himself to what would become his most famous work, a body of over a thousand paintings, drawings, prints and tapestries: the Homage to the Square series, based on a mathematically determined format of multiple squares, which appear overlapping or one inside the other.

Among the most influential creative personalities of the 20th century, his research has in fact inspired many other significant names (including Peter Halley, Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg), in 1971 Albers was the first living artist to be honored with a personal retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.