Josef Albers
: Albers was born in Bottrop, Ruhr, Germany on March 19, 1888. Originally trained as a schoolteacher, Albers joined the Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic in 1920. He was one of the Bauhaus' longest tenured teachers, leaving only in 1933 as the Nazi government pressured the school to close. He and his wife, artist Anni Albers, came to the United States soon after to teach art at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where they remained until 1949. During this period, Albers' work focused mainly on printmaking and painting. Albers was appointed Chair of the Department of Design at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his retirement in 1958. He continued to paint until his death in New Haven, Connecticut on March 25, 1976.
(Source: Grove Dictionary of Art Online)
b. 1888, Bottrop, Germany; d. 1976, New Haven, Connecticut
Josef Albers was born March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Germany. From 1905 to 1908, he studied to become a teacher in Büren 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 studied art in Essen and Munich before entering the Bauhaus [more] in Weimar in 1920. There, he initially concentrated on glass painting and in 1929, as a journeyman, he reorganized the glass workshop. In 1923, he began to teach the Vorkurs, a basic design course. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he became a professor. 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 established, experimental Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Albers continued to teach at Black Mountain until 1949. In 1935, he took the first of many trips to Mexico, and in 1936 was given his first solo show in New York at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle. He became a United States citizen in 1939. In 1949, Albers began his Homage to the Square series.
He lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States and from 1950 to 1958 served as head of the design department at Yale University, New Haven. In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art. Thus, as a theoretician and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists. A major Albers exhibition, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled in 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, New York, in 1971. Albers lived and worked in New Haven until his death there on March 25, 1976.