Josef Albers (1888-1976)
Josef Albers was born to a family of craftsmen in Bottrop in the Ruhr region of Germany in 1888. He studied art in Munich and Berlin from 1913 to 1920, but his most significant education took place in Weimar, Germany at the Bauhaus, an association of artists, craftsmen, and architects committed to a creed of merging craft techniques with creative aspects of fine art. In 1923 he became a teacher at Bauhaus making the first bent laminated wood chair and created some of the first ever stacking tables. Due to Nazi pressure Albers and his associates dissolved Bauhaus in 1933 and Albers and his wife moved to the United States where he took a teaching position at Black Mountain College, North Carolina.
To American artists his methods were innovative but shocking because he eliminated copying from nature or from the work of other artists. He hated chaos and was adamantly opposed to the freedoms of Abstract Expressionism. Albers became known primarily for his “Homages to Squares” and it was this series “Homage to the Square” that brought Josef Albers public acclaim and was, in fact, the core of his one-man retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. Albers died in Connecticut in 1976.