The plastic artist Josef albers He was born on March 19, 1888 in Bottrop, Germany.
From 1905 to 1908, he studied at Büren to become a teacher and then taught in Westphalian primary schools from 1908 to 1913. After attending the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. Albers He studied art in Essen and Munich before entering the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. There, he initially concentrated on glass painting, and in 1929, as a day laborer, he reorganized the glass workshop. In 1923, he began teaching Vorkurs, a basic design course. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he became a teacher. In addition to working in glass and metal, he designed furniture and typography.
After the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States. That same year, he became head of the art department at the newly created, experimental Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Albers continued teaching at Black Mountain until 1949.
In 1935, he made the first of many trips to Mexico, where he learned about the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. He and his wife, artist Anni Albers (1899-1994), would visit Mexico and other Latin American countries more than a dozen times between 1935 and the late 1960s. On each visit, Albers He took hundreds of black and white photographs of the many archaeological sites and monuments visited. He often created photo collages with these images, such as Monte Alban (circa 1956), grouping multiple prints and sometimes postcards of various sizes in gridded compositions on cardboard sheets.
In 1936, he held his first one-man show in New York at JB Neumann’s New Art Circle. Albers He became a United States citizen in 1939. In 1949, he began his iconic series Tribute to the Plaza, an example of which is the 1969 oil on Masonite painting, also titled Tribute to the Plaza.
Albers He lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States and, from 1950 to 1958, served as chair of the design department at Yale University, New Haven.
In addition to painting, printing and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles and books on art. As a theorist and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists. An important exhibition of Albers, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, traveled through South America, Mexico and the United States from 1965 to 1967, and a retrospective of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971.
The exhibition Josef albers in Mexico is presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017-18). Albers He lived and worked in New Haven until his death on March 25, 1976.