Josef Albers Papers

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was a German-born American artist, art educator and theorist. He was born in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany and enrolled in the Bauhaus in 1920. Three years later he joined the faculty, where he taught alongside Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Lazslo Moholy-Nagy. In 1925, Albers married Annelise Fleischmann, a Bauhaus student. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, the pair immigrated to the United States, joining the faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers headed the painting program there until he left to head the Department of Design at Yale University in 1950. He retired from teaching in 1958, but continued to create art and write about art until his death in 1976.

Josef Albers worked in many mediums as a designer, painter, printmaker, and photographer, but is best known for his abstract paintings, particularly his series Homage to the Square. He was a highly influential educator; his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, and Eva Hesse. In 1971, he was the first living artist to be honored with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Albers’ wife Anni (1899-1994) was a well-known textile artist and also worked as a printmaker and art educator.