Josef Albers: Life and Work

While Josef Albers' Bauhaus colleagues Klee and Kandinsky are household names, Albers himself has remained inscrutable. He is best known as the painter of the Homages to the Square, a series of over 2,000 seemingly tightly controlled experiments in the interaction of colour. Yet he did not begin these pictures until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, maker and theorist, much of it pursued in the United States following the Nazi dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933.
Misunderstanding of the Homages reflects a wider misreading of Albers' life and work. Married to the textile artist Anni Albers, his papers include letters from fellow artists John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Eva Hesse; colleagues such as Buckminster Fuller and Philip Johnson; and fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so, too, were his interests.