Before 1920 Albers divided his time between teaching and art studies. He then entered the newly created Bauhaus school, which aimed at the union of all the arts with modern architecture and with industry.
When Albers began to teach there beginning in 1923, it had become the most important school of design in Germany. Albers taught furniture design, drawing and calligraphy.
The school instilled in Albers a deep appreciation for, and concern with, technical achievement and sophistication as well as a lifelong interest in exploring abstraction.
At the Bauhaus, Albers rejected the emotional self-expression and representational style of his early work in favor of constructivist art built up by intellectual calculation and the use of simple geometric forms.
His working philosophy was to build carefully and meticulously with study materials from base of simple, fundamental forms too increasingly complex shapes.
When the school was forced to close in 1933 he left for America, continuing his advocacy of Bauhaus concepts for sixteen years at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and later at Yale University.
From 1950 to 1958 he was chairman of the department of architecture and design at Yale University. Here he began the long series of painting and lithographs for which he is best known: Homage to the Square.
By the time of his death, he had made more than two hundred prints in a wide variety of mediums and had influenced generations of students in both Europe and the United States through his teachings.
Albers, Joseph (1888 – 1976)
