Josef Albers, the master of the abstract and color

March 19, 2020 at 08:30 p.m.

 

El March 19th 1888 the famous is born German artist and teacher Josef Albers.

Albers, studied painting under the tutelage of Franz von Stuck at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and continued his studies from 1920 to 1923 at the Bauhaus Weimar.

There, he enrolled in the preliminary course taught by Johannes Itten and attended the glass painting workshop.

This is how Walter Gropius appointed him a member of the Bauhaus teaching staff and later professor of furniture design and glass work.

At that time, Josef Albers also he married Anni Albers, then a Bauhaus student.

From 1925 to 1927-28, he led the preliminary course at the Bauhaus Dessau together with László Moholy-Nagy.

After the latter's departure in 1928, Albers became the sole director of the preliminary course and also the head of the carpentry workshop.

At the Bauhaus Berlin, he taught drawing and lettering classes until the school's dissolution in 1933, under pressure Nazi.

 

The master of the abstract 

 

Josef Albers migrated to the United States teaching at the faculty of Black Mountain College (North Carolina), where he coincided with students like Clara Portset, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson, Susan Weil, Donald Judd and Merce Cunningham.

In 1935, he traveled, with Anni Albers for the first time to Cuba and Mexico, being impressed with the architecture. They even met the Mexican architect Luis Barragán and his work.

Consummate designer, photographer, typographer and poet, Josef Albers, stood out for his abstract work.

In this way he made various pictorial works on the theory of form and color, giving rise to his series Homage to the Square, inspired by Mexico.

From 1950 to 1958, Albers headed the Design Department at Yale University, where he taught Richard Anuszkiewicz, Eva Hesse, and Richard Serra.

In addition, he received the Konrad von Soest Prize from the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe in 1958, the AIGA Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York, in 1964, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968.

In 1973, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, not forgetting that he received a total of 14 Honoris Causa doctorates in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Josef Albers lived and worked in New Haven with Anni Albers, until the day of his death, the March 25th 1976, but not before representing a transition between traditional European art and North American art.

 

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