The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers (1888-1976)

The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist


Curated by Nicholas Fox Weber until 8 July 2012 at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork


Visit exhibition site The Sacred Modernist


Josef Albers, one of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Albers was the first living artist ever to be given a solo retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Josef Albers's Interaction of Colour is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers's unique ideas of colour experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, the publication first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative colour studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.

Albers's work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporated European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European. But his influence fell heavily on American artists of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, while Op 
artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception.

Sean Scully, like Albers, sees his art as imbued with an elemental spirituality.