Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1971

Josef Albers: The Interaction of Color

Location: 2nd Floor Gallery Time Period: On view through August 22, 2021

The Bechtler Museum of Mod Art'south newest exhibition, Josef Albers: The Interaction of Colour is inspired by the Bechtler Museum's rare High german edition of The Interaction of Color, featuring 81 silkscreen color studies that serve every bit a record of Alber's experiential way of studying and didactics color.

Born in Germany in 1888, Josef Albers was one of the most influential artist-educators of the 20th century. Best known for his iconic colour square paintings, his exploration and expansion of circuitous color theory principles and dedication to experiential teaching based on observation and experimentation, radically altered the trajectory of arts education in the Us.

Xl-five years later the artist'southward decease, this exhibition presents a selection of works from The Interaction of Color, which was originally conceived of as a handbook and teaching assist for artists, educators and students. On view in the Bechtler's intimate second-floor gallery, the exhibition features 42 double-folio screen prints, each demonstrating the ways in which colors tin can interact and influence each other. Albers suggested that color is best studied via experience, underpinned by experimentation and observation. Visitors run into examples of different colour study exercises that demonstrate principles including color relativity, vibrating and vanishing boundaries, and illusion of transparence and reversed grounds.

After enrolling at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920 as a maker of stained-glass, Albers soon began instruction in the foundational preliminary course (Werklehre) of the department of blueprint. In 1925, the year that the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, he was promoted to professor and taught alongside artists such as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1933, under pressure from the Nazis, the Bauhaus was forced to shutter and the American architect, Phillip Johnson, made the introductions to secure Albers and his wife Anni (a Jewish German born textile artist and printmaker) an invitation to teach at the newly formed Blackness Mountain College simply outside of Asheville, North Carolina. This experimental college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's principles of educational activity and a belief in republic and freedom.

The Albers arrived at Black Mount in 1933 and remained at the College until 1949. As the caput of the painting plan, Albers set out with the primary goal "to make open up the eyes" and in this pursuit, he adult a unique anti-hierarchical teaching method rooted in liberalism and strategies of defamiliarization. In his courses, Albers often talked well-nigh the formal elements of an artwork, such as color, as though it were live, and linked the behavior of colors to elements of homo behavior while encouraging the development of an artistic practice that prioritized participation, human connexion, and empathy.

"Moving from unproblematic to circuitous, the colour exercises in the portfolio were non intended as a stock-still body of wisdom to exist handed down from a professor to a educatee," said Anastasia James, Curator, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. "These studies were to be understood as a guide for ongoing investigations and explorations of the possibilities of colour and the results of their interaction and influence on each other in our own private perceptions."

Today, Albers's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, amid others. He was the outset living artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art in 1971. His 1963 The Interaction of Color remains one of the most influential texts used in contemporary arts didactics.

Josef Albers: The Interaction of Color Educator Guide

Featured Images

Josef Albers V-3 Lighter and/or Darker – Light Intensity, Lightness from The Interaction of Color portfolio, 1963, printed 1973 Screenprint on paper © Yale University Press, 1963. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Printing.

Josef Albers Ix-1 Color Mixture in a Paper – Illusion of Transparence from The Interaction of Color portfolio, 1963, printed 1973 Screenprint on paper © Yale University Press, 1963. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.

Josef Albers XVI-3 Color Juxtaposition – Harmony, Quantity from The Interaction of Color portfolio, 1963, printed 1973 Screenprint on paper © Yale University Press, 1963. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.

Josef Breitenbach Josef Albers Teaching His Color Class at Black Mount College II, 1944 Photo © Yale Academy Press, 1963. Reproduced past permission of Yale University Press.

Photographer unknown Josef Albers teaching at Yale University, 1952 Photography Courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

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