Josef Albers (Bottrop, Germany, 1888 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1976) was a German-American artist and educator known internationally for his geometric abstractions and his systematic investigation of color. Born into a family of craftsmen, he trained first as a schoolteacher before studying painting in Munich, and in 1920 enrolled as a student at the Weimar Bauhaus.
In 1925, when the school moved to Dessau, Albers was named a Bauhaus master and began teaching design; after the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure, he immigrated to the United States in 1933. Together with Anni Albers, he founded the art department at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he led the painting program until 1949 and taught students including Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. From 1950 to 1958, Albers chaired the newly created design department at Yale University in New Haven, where his students included Richard Anuszkiewicz and Eva Hesse.
In 1949, Albers made his first linear Structural Constellation engravings and began his studies for the Homage to the Square paintings, the series that would occupy him for the rest of his life. In 1963, he published Interaction of Color, a landmark analysis of color theory that has shaped art education ever since. Albers was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, and in 1971 became the first living artist to be given a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; a further major retrospective opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1988, on the centenary of his birth. His work is held in the collections of major museums worldwide, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, established by the couple, continues to place significant gifts of their work in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.
