Josef Albers

Josef Albers linked the European avant-garde with the American. A student of the Bauhaus in Germany (1920 - 1925), he also taught there (1925 - 1933). When the Bauhaus was closed in 1933, he came to the U.S. and began teaching at Black Mountain College and later at Yale University. He influenced a generation of American artists, who went on to develop Color-Field painting, Minimalism, and Op art. The Museum’s paintings are from his series of experiments with the perceptual effects of color juxta-positions and sequences. The orange squares of Excentric radiate and expand against the blue outer square, while the cooler colors of Concentric draw the eye inward toward the grey center, which seems to recede.