From Bauhaus to his ‘Colour Magic’: The Enduring Impact of Josef Albers

Josef Albers, widely regarded as the master of the square, is renowned for his groundbreaking exploration of colour, form, spatial relationships, and perception. Through his use of simple geometric shapes, Albers investigated chromatic interaction—the way colours shift and transform based on their surrounding hues. As he once said, “The aim of art is to reveal and evoke vision. I indicated indirectly that art is not an object, but art is an experience.”

In this article, we explore the groundbreaking career of Josef Albers, a pioneering artist and educator who continually pushed the boundaries of modern art. Notably, he was the first student from the Bauhaus to be invited by its founder, Walter Gropius, to join the faculty—a rare honour that marked the beginning of a distinguished teaching legacy. Decades later, Albers made history again as the first living artist to be honoured with a solo retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This article also examines Albers’s iconic Homage to the Square series, analysing the qualities that render these works so powerful, enduring, and significant in the history and evolution of modern art.

Josef Albers was born on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Germany, to a father who worked as a
master carpenter, house painter and plumber. His father taught him the materials and techniques of these trades, an experience that proved fundamental to Albers later on in his career. He enrolled in the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920, just one year after the school was established. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus was a groundbreaking German school that fundamentally reshaped modern art, design, and architecture by uniting form and function, bridging the gap between fine art and industrial design. The Bauhaus believed that well-crafted design had the power to enhance people’s lives, with simplicity and accessibility as its core principles. Studying at the Bauhaus profoundly transformed Albers’ artistic practice and as he noted about joining the school, “I was 32… I threw all the old junk overboard and went right back to the beginning again. It was the best thing that I ever did in my life”. The Bauhaus was a major source of inspiration for Albers’s iconic Homage to the Square series. One especially important influence was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours, published in 1810, which explores how colour behaves in relation to shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration. Widely taught at the Bauhaus, Goethe’s theory became a lasting foundation for Albers’s artistic approach and remained central to his practice throughout his career. Albers became a prominent figure in the Bauhaus movement, joining as a student in 1920 and graduating as a master in 1933, when the Bauhaus forced to close by the Nazi’s.

Today, Albers is best known as a painter, but he also designed furniture for Gropius’s office and created glass objects. Gropius honoured Albers by appointing him as the first Bauhaus student to become a member of the faculty. Albers worked with Paul Klee in the stained-glass workshop and was also the longest-serving faculty member when the school closed. One notable work was His Tea Glass with Saucer and Stirrer (1925), which capture the Bauhaus spirit and aesthetic. Albers extensively explored glass, and starting in 1925, his glass pieces became the first true expressions of his lifelong dedication to colour and geometry. Fabrik (Factory) (1925) is a prime example of this.

In 1933, shortly after he and his wife, artist Anni Albers, immigrated to the United States, they played a pivotal role in founding the art department at Black Mountain College. There, he became a key influence on the next generation of American artists, teaching notable figures such as Ruth Asawa and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. The Albers’ stayed at Black Mountain until 1949, and in 1950, they relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef led the design department at the Yale University School of Art.

In 1949, he began developing what would become his seminal Homage to the Square series, a body of work he continued until his death in 1976. By this time, he had already been exploring the diverse optical and psychological effects that colours can produce based solely on their placement and proximity to other colours. However, the Homage to the Square series marked the culmination of that exploration. Each work followed the same format: three or four progressively smaller squares nested within one another, each rendered in a distinct colour. Despite the uniform structure, every work was meticulously planned and visually unique from the others. This series was not only the most critically acclaimed of his career but also one of the most pivotal and influential in the history of contemporary art. A crucial element of his Homage to the Square series is his choice to shift the centre of the composition downward. By doing this he activates the squares, deliberately guiding your vision, aiming for the colours to feel dynamic rather than static, as if they’re in motion. Albers aimed to create “colour magic,” where the interaction between colours sparks a “creative act of seeing,” transforming the work from a static object into an experience.

Albers’s technique was distinctive; he favoured a palette knife over a brush, applying pure pigment straight from the tube and only adding white occasionally to adjust the hue. Before starting on his canvas’, he meticulously explored colour combinations through extensive studies on paper. Albers meticulously documented his choices, such as colours and materials, on the backs of his canvas’, helping him track his process and the evolution of his colour experiments. As sources of information, the reverse sides of Josef Albers’ paintings are in a category of their own. His efficiency and prolific output were rooted in his design training. His technique traces back to childhood, when he painted doors for his father’s business. Josef’s father taught him to always start at the centre and work outward to the edges when painting a door, which Josef then applied to his paintings. Art historian Kelly Feeney connects this idea of the door to Albers’s works beautifully noting, “The Homages operate like doors – physically, optically, psychologically, and metaphorically. They are entrances, exits, and thresholds, beginnings and endings. Sometimes it is not clear on which side of the door we are. The door opens both out and in, onto the past, the present, and onto an endless, inescapable hall of doors…. And the possibilities are both limited and limitless, just as Albers conceived of his paintings…” (Kelly Feeney, Josef Albers: Works on Paper, Alexandria, Virginia, 1991, p. 86.)

Josef Albers’ legacy goes beyond his iconic Homage to the Square series — his impact as a teacher, theorist, and writer shaped generations of artists and the art historical cannon. He brought Bauhaus principles to America and revolutionized colour theory. He retired from teaching in 1958, yet his academic journey continued with the publication of his influential book Interaction of Colour, which would become a seminal text. Following a string of successful gallery and museum exhibitions, including a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and participation in documenta 1 (1955) and documenta 4 (1968), Albers made history in 1971 as the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a career-spanning retrospective.

After retiring from teaching Albers spent his remaining years in New Haven, where he continued to paint until his passing on March 25, 1976. His work transcended simple squares, offering profound explorations of colour and the shifting relationships within different environments. As he famously said, “When you really understand that each colour is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as about colour.”