Josef Albers Use of Colour

Josef Albers: use of colour

(March 19, 1888 – March 25, 1976)

German-born American artist, printmaker and educator Josef Albers, is best acknowledged for his insight into teachings of colour.  In 1949 he produced until his death the series ‘Homage to the Square’, which used a square to analytically explore the range of visual effects achieved through colour and spatial relationships.

In 1963 he published ‘Interaction of Colour’, which half a century later, remains to be one of the most influential and essential blueprints into the ‘art of seeing’. It combines an exploration not just into the art and practical application of colour, but it also recognises the science and phycology behind this intangible material. At the time, it was an experiment, which was both radical and daring from Albers, and sought to develop a new approach to studying colour. Instead of theoretical belief, he sought to consider experience and developmental analysis (aka trial and error).

At Black Mountain College, Albers launched the first colour course in a curriculum at an American art school. Despite, at first, relying on the conventional introductory approaches of colour for his students, such as the colour wheels and styles of Ostwald, Schopenhauer and Goethe; Albers soon moved on to his own stylistic approaches of teaching. He wanted to encourage an understanding of colour for the individual, making his students produce their own colour studies from a series of exercises he set. This allowed them to determine the differences in hues, tones and intensity, from their own comparison and trial-and-error, rather than from definitions and diagrams.  As such, Albers taught colour shaped by his own hands on learning techniques.

Albers played a vital role in bringing the principals of European modernism, especially those associated with the Bauhaus, to the United States. It was his extensive theoretical work that states colour was the primary medium of pictorial language, and not form, that influenced the developments of modern art in 1950 and 60s America.

Screenprint of Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Dedicated, 1955. Oil on Masonite, 43 x 43 in. (109.2 x 109.2 cm). Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This screenprint was pasted in as the frontispiece to the catalogue of the exhibition Josef Albers: Paintings Prints Projects at the Yale University Art Gallery, April 25–June 18, 1956.

Further links for Albers:

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-albers-josef.htm

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/16/interaction-of-color-josef-albers-50th-anniversary/

 Advertisement for Interaction of Color, New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1963, 14.

Screenshots showing the interactive Plate IV-4 from the digital iPad App of Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, iPad ver. 1.5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Yale University Press.