ALBERS AND THE SQUARE by Joan K. Yanni

ALBERS AND THE SQUARE

by Joan K. Yanni

How many squares are there in the Albers painting in the 20th-century American gallery?  Can you remember without checking? This painting, simple as it looks, represents an important influence in American art.

Homage to the Square: Soft Resonance (67.27) is made up of four superimposed colored squares.  The bright yellow central square is surrounded by pale lime green—or does the yellow spill out and reflect in the green?  Around the green is a field of gray—or gray green?  And around the gray is a thin border of white. The painting is one of a series of almost 1000 paintings and prints created by Albers to illustrate the interaction of colors.  According to the artist, each painting is "a  stage on which colors play as actors influencing each other…" The paintings are an intellectual and experimental approach to art.

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was born in Bottrop, Germany, in the industrial Ruhr district.  He studied at the Royal Art School in Berlin, the School of Applied Art in Essen, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and, in 1920, attended the preliminary course at the newly-formed Bauhaus in Weimar. He soon began teaching the foundation course at the Bauhaus—a course dealing with the attributes of space, light, color and their interactions, both in the art of the past and the abstract art of the 20th century.  Through research for this course, and an early apprenticeship in a stained glass workshop, Albers developed his lifelong interest in problems of light and color. At the Bauhaus he also designed furniture, stained glass, metalwork and typography.

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, was the revolutionary merger of an art academy and an arts and crafts school, with an emphasis on functionalism. It was based on the principle that good design must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. Classes were offered in crafts and commercial and industrial design as well as in sculpture, painting and architecture.  The Bauhaus was based on the teaching of 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts, and that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world. The Bauhaus style was marked by absence of ornament and ostentation.

Albers was the longest-serving member of the Bauhaus when it was closed under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. That same year, he and his wife Anni, a Bauhaus fiber artist and printmaker, were asked to teach art at the newly formed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  He was the first  of the  Bauhaus teachers—who included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Lionel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Mies van der Rohe—to leave Germany for the United States. Albers and his wife remained at Black Mountain College until 1949, when he left to become head of the department of art at Yale University.  His classes and his paintings had a pronounced effect on younger artists, who increasingly used optical effects and bold color in their works.  He had become one of the best-known and most influential art teachers in the USA.

In the Homages, Albers focuses on the characteristics of color and its changing character in different light and in relation to other colors; the ability of two colors to seem three; and the ability of juxtaposed colors to suggest space, as one seems to move forward, the other back.

Albers painted his squares in a precise arrangement, always working on the rough side of wood fiberboard panels, primed with at least six coats of white liquitex. Under a careful arrangement of fluorescent lights (warm/cool/warm/cool over one work table and warm/warm/cool/cool over another) he worked on each painting in alternate light conditions, applying unmixed paint straight out of the tube with a palette knife, often starting with the center square and working outwards.  Despite their seemingly mechanical execution, these paintings remain mysterious and varied in mood and color.

Like Mondrian, Albers was one of the founders of that school of modern painting concerned with geometric abstraction, color-field, and optical art, demonstrating that through association, colors are modified in the viewer's eye.  His scientific theories and rational approach to teaching and art have almost obscured the fact that he has created many works of art—prints as well as paintings—that are valuable for their beauty alone.

On his retirement from Yale in 1958, he continued to live near New Haven and to paint, exhibit, write, lecture and work on large commissioned sculptures for architectural settings, such as the Pan Am and Time-Life Buildings in New York City. All of his work emphasizes simple geometry and technical proficiency.

In addition to Homage to the Square: Soft Resonance, MAG owns prints by Albers.  In October an exhibition of prints by both Josef and Anni Albers, part of a promised gift from the collection of Gallery friend Anne-Marie Logan and her late husband Robert, UR '50, will be on view in the Lockhart Gallery.  Two of these are trial proofs dedicated by Albers to Mrs. Logan when they worked together at Yale.

Source: Grove Dictionary of Art, Encarta Encyclopedia, curatorial files.