Grade 11/12 Art - Day 29

Painting Analysis - The Work of Josef Albers

"Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see." - Josef Albers

From theartstory.org:

Josef Albers was instrumental in bringing the tenets of European modernism, particularly those associated with the Bauhaus, to America. His legacy as a teacher of artists, as well as his extensive theoretical work proposing that color, rather than form, is the primary medium of pictorial language, profoundly influenced the development of modern art in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s.

Albers's 1963 book Interaction of Color provided the most comprehensive analysis of the function and perception of color to date and profoundly influenced art education and artistic practice, especially Color Field painting and Minimalism, in the twentieth century.

His series Homage to the Square, produced from 1949 until his death, used a single geometric shape to systematically explore the vast range of visual effects that could be achieved through color and spatial relationships alone.

"Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming"

"Three concentric squares are laid on top of each other in diminishing scale.  The marine blue fills the outer square while the smallest green square sits below the centre.  The interaction of the colours is disorientating after a long viewing, giving the illusion that the squares are moving in and out of the picture plane.  In this sense the work prefigures Op Art, which experiments with visual perception.  ...Square's were part of a enourmous series that was more concerned with the medatative potential offered by the interplay of colours, than the colour theory.  Albers used colour as a metaphor for human relationships, wanting his work to be seen on an informal, intuitive level, not as rigid visual geometry."
Source: The Twentieth Century Art Book, Phaidon Press Limited

"Homage to the Square: Stepped Foliage"

Follow this link to go to our own National Gallery of Canada, to view an Albers work in our national collection!

http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=1245