Josef Albersartist • printmakerBottrop (Duitsland) 1888-1976 New Haven CT (Verenigde Staten)

Born in 1880, German-American painter Josef Albers studied in Berlin, Essen, Munich and at the famous Bauhaus Institute in Weimar (from 1920), where he became a teacher five years later. Albers emigrated to the United States in 1933. As a teacher at Black Mountain College - with Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Motherwell as students - and as director of the Yale School of Art (1950-1958), he built a bridge between geometric abstraction and Post Painterly Abstraction. His work and theories also had an influence on the development of the Op Art. Albers became best known for his 'Hommage to the Square', a series of paintings and lithographs, with which he started in 1949. Central in this was the aesthetic experience evoked by the interaction of contrasted colors, in the form of squares in all kinds of variations. Albers uses the fact that chromatically close colors give the illusion of a third color. He arranges his color planes in such a way that the surfaces seem to come off their surface and float in the pictorial space, without descriptive and emotional connotations.