Josef Albers Painted the Same Square for a Quarter Century to Prove the Eye Lies

Josef Albers

Photo: Jthill84 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 19, 1888 Bottrop
Died	March 25, 1976 (88)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany · AIGA Medal · Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

On the back of almost every Homage to the Square, Josef Albers wrote down what he had used: the manufacturer, the exact tube of paint, the varnish, sometimes the primer. The fronts are among the least confessional pictures of the last century, three or four flat squares set one inside another, laid on with a palette knife straight from the tube and never mixed. The backs read like a laboratory notebook. That split is the whole man. He wanted painting to be as accountable as carpentry, and he spent his working life showing that the instrument everyone trusts without a second thought, the human eye, cannot be held to account at all.

He came from tradesmen. His father, Lorenz, was a house painter and handyman in Bottrop, a coal town in the Ruhr, and his mother’s people were blacksmiths. Long before he called himself an artist the boy could engrave glass, wire a room and fix a pipe, and he never lost the conviction that a material teaches more than a theory does. He taught primary school in small Westphalian towns, then trained as an art teacher in Berlin and learned stained glass in Essen under the Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker. His first public commission, which came as the First World War was ending, was a church window in his hometown called Rosa mystica ora pro nobis.

Born in Bottrop on 19 March 1888, he was thirty-two, older than most of the class, when he enrolled in Johannes Itten’s preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Two years later he joined the staff as a glass maker, and Walter Gropius soon gave him the job that would define him: teaching newcomers how materials behave before they were allowed to make anything. Paper was folded and scored until it could stand up on its own. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925 Albers became one of its masters, married a weaving student named Anni Fleischmann and worked alongside Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. He designed furniture and a stencil alphabet built from squares, triangles and quarter circles.

The Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933. Anni came from a family of Jewish origin, and the couple had every reason to go. Philip Johnson, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, arranged an offer from a college that barely existed yet, Black Mountain, in the hills of North Carolina. Albers arrived that November with very little English. When a student asked what he was going to teach, he said “to open eyes”, and the phrase became the motto of everything he did afterwards. Over the next sixteen years his classroom held Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson, and he brought Willem de Kooning and Merce Cunningham in to teach the summer sessions.

In 1950 he moved to Yale to run the department of design, hired Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter and Alvin Lustig to build up what was still a fledgling graphic design programme, and taught Eva Hesse and Richard Anuszkiewicz before he retired from teaching in 1958. By then the squares had begun. Homage to the Square eventually ran to hundreds of paintings and prints, almost always on Masonite, always three or four squares in one of four fixed arrangements, so that the only thing left to change was colour. A red that looked warm beside one grey turned bruised beside another. The format was a controlled experiment, and it kept returning the same result. Colour, he wrote, “is almost never seen as it really is”.

Yale University Press published Interaction of Color in 1963, a first edition of 2,000 copies with 150 silkscreen plates. It is a set of exercises rather than a theory: put this square of coloured paper on that one and watch it change. The book has never really left art schools and design studios. He also carried the grids into public buildings. Two Structural Constellations was engraved in gold leaf in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in 1959, Two Portals framed the entrance of the Time & Life Building two years later, and Manhattan, a glass mural 28 feet high and 55 feet wide, went into the lobby of the Pan Am Building. In 1971 the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave him a solo exhibition, the first it had ever given a living artist.

The rigour had a price, and his students paid it first. Rauschenberg later named Albers the most important teacher he ever had, and their relationship was tense, at times openly combative. Albers held that “when you’re in school, you’re not an artist, you’re a student”. The theory has met harder critics than the students. In 1981 the writer Alan Lee argued that Interaction of Color rests on basic errors about how colours mix and how contrast works; the colour-vision scientist Dorothea Jameson replied that Lee had misread both Albers and the behaviour of real pigment. Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography of Anni, published by Yale this year, adds a quieter correction: it describes a marriage of opposites that lasted five decades and a weaver who stayed studiously self-effacing while her husband took the larger share of the attention.

Bottrop took its time. The town’s 1958 retrospective of its best-known son hung in the atrium of a vocational school, because the city had no museum to put it in. In 1970 it made him an honorary citizen, the same year he and Anni moved to a house in Orange, Connecticut, where both kept working in a private studio. He set up the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 1971. He died in his sleep at Yale New Haven Hospital on 25 March 1976, a few days after turning 88. The Quadrat museum centre in Bottrop opened that September without him; seven years later Anni attended the opening of the Josef Albers Museum inside it and gave it works from his estate.

Fifty years after his death the squares are travelling again. The Quadrat has spent its own anniversary year handing visitors sheets of coloured paper to make homages of their own. David Zwirner showed Josef Albers: Duets in Paris and Los Angeles in the first half of 2026, and at Villa Panza in Varese the FAI and the Albers Foundation have hung twenty-nine works from the Variant/Adobe and Homage to the Square series in eighteenth-century rooms until 10 January 2027. The notes on the backs still argue with the calm on the front. What Albers left is a set of instructions for catching your own eyes in the act of being wrong, and every room that hangs the squares runs the test again.

Tags: art, artists, painters, abstract art, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers

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