Albers, Joseph (1888 – 1976)

German born US painter, designer, and influential teacher of art. Joseph Albers was born to a family of artisans in Bottrop Germany and inherited a family tradition of careful, exact workmanship. He began his study of the art in 1908 and first experimented with printmaking in 1915.

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)

Erlanger, Joseph (1874-1965)

Erlanger is a US physiologist and educator who, in collaboration with Herbert Gasser, developed techniques for recording nerve impulses using a cathode ray oscilloscope. In 1944 they shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for demonstrating that different fibers in the same nerve cord can have different functions.

Born in San Francisco, Joseph Erlanger studied at the University of California (1895) and the John Hopkins Medical School (1899), where he worked for a seven years. From 1900 to 1906, he was an assistant in physiology at the university under William H. Howell.

Erlanger was appointed professor of physiology at the University of Wisconsin (1906-1910) and there began a successful collaboration with his student Gasser. He founded the department of physiology at the University of Wisconsin’s, new medical school. In 1910, he accepted an appointment as professor and head of physiology at Washington University in St. Louis,(1910-46), and Gasser joined him soon after.

Priori to 1921, Erlanger’s research focused primarily on the cardiovascular system. While a medicals students, he designed improvement to the sphygmomanometer a device for measuring blood pressure in the fingers.

At Wisconsin Erlanger and Gasser studied various means of applying electronics to physiological research. They devised a method of applying electric responses occurring in an individual nerve fiber and were able to record them using the oscilloscope. This happened in 1922.

An amplified impulse produced a characteristics wave form on the screen, which could then be studied. In 1932 Erlanger and Gasser found that the fibers within a nerve conduct impulses at different rate, depending on fibers thickness, and that each fiber has a different threshold of excitability. Different fibers produced different wave forms on the screen, indicating that different types of impulses were being passed.

This lead to their formulation of the law that the velocity of nervous impulses is directly proportional to the diameter of the nerve fiber.
Erlanger, Joseph (1874-1965)