Josef Albers

Josef Albers’s I–S f, completed in 1970, represents a masterclass in chromatic perception and compositional restraint. As part of the I–S portfolio—named after the celebrated print publishers Ives-Sillman—this screenprint embodies the culmination of Albers’s rigorous experimentation with the interaction of color, distilled through the lens of printmaking. The composition, structured through four precisely nested squares in saturated shades of orange and yellow, activates the viewer’s eye in ways that transcend its formal simplicity. Far from decorative, the work functions as a perceptual inquiry: how colors influence one another through adjacency, weight, and optical aftereffect.

The I–S portfolio, issued by Ives-Sillman—Albers’s longtime collaborators and key figures in the revitalization of screenprinting in postwar America—marks a turning point in the artist’s engagement with the medium. Unlike many artists who approached printmaking as a secondary or reproductive form, Albers treated it as a primary arena of investigation. The industrial precision of the screenprint process, particularly as handled by Ives–Sillman’s workshop, afforded him the means to test his theories under conditions of perfect repetition. Each impression became not a reproduction of an original, but a unique opportunity to observe color phenomena with laboratory-like control.

Within this context, I–S f takes on particular significance. The progression of hues from a deep, saturated orange at the center to increasingly radiant yellows at the edges generates an extraordinary optical vibration—colors appear to advance and recede, despite their flat application. The absence of modeling, shading, or texture forces the viewer’s eye to engage directly with the relationships between the hues themselves. This was central to Albers’s pedagogical and artistic philosophy: that vision is relational, and color exists not as an inherent property, but as an effect of surrounding conditions. The print medium, with its crisp edges and uniform surfaces, proved ideal for such disciplined experiments.

The timing of this work, produced in the early 1970s, places it in provocative dialogue with Andy Warhol’s own pioneering use of screenprinting. Though radically different in style and intent, both Albers and Warhol seized upon the screenprint as a tool for reimagining what art could be. Warhol, through serial imagery and pop iconography, used the medium to critique commodification and celebrity; Albers, conversely, harnessed its reproducibility to probe the nature of visual truth. Both artists found in screenprinting a way to decouple the hand from the image, allowing concept and perception to take precedence over gesture. That they arrived at this realization concurrently, though independently, speaks to the larger transformation of the print medium in postwar American art.

In sum, I–S f exemplifies the synthesis of visual clarity and conceptual depth that defines Albers’s late career. It is a product not only of a singular vision, but of a fertile collaboration with Ives–Sillman, whose role in shaping twentieth-century print culture cannot be overstated. The I–S portfolio stands as a testament to Albers’s belief that the print—far from being derivative—can serve as a site of invention, learning, and aesthetic revelation. Through works like I–S f, Albers invites us not simply to look, but to see. And in doing so, he reminds us that perception is the most dynamic medium of all.