
Joseph Albers
San Francisco Museum of Art
Early in his career as an artist, Joseph Albers worked with glass and plastics in line with the Bauhaus enthusiasm for new materials and methods. With the advent of Naziism in his native Germany, he moved to the United States, teaching his first classes in America with the aid of a translator. During his first decade in America he took to oil painting, but used a palette knife, primarily, and painted a rigorously architectural delineation of space, with persistent examination of the possibilities within the limitations of black, white and grey.
This is an ironic beginning for an artist whose reputation today is as one of our leading color theorists. This summer’s exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, “Interaction of Color: A presentation of paintings and the color theory of Joseph Albers,” announces the publication by Princeton University of his new book by the same name. This exhibition demonstrates the use of violently vibrating colors to perform much the same pictorial gymnastics as the black and white paintings of the thirties: A succession of right angles leads the eye back into an illusion of space, only to have the eye suddenly reverse the illusion and find the right angles pyramiding outward. The right angle grid has been simplified into mere squares within squares in these recent color etudes. (With a more complicated architecture, and these same colors, the results might have been too riotous.)
When Albers finally concerned himself with colors, it was with much the same Gestalt emphasis on total relationships that Paul Klee had concerned himself with in the “Pedagogical Sketchbooks,” (though Klee used these ideas, his paintings were never simply “demonstrations” of the theories).
In the mid forties, Albers worked and studied in Mexico where a Pre-Columbian influence in color is still in evidence, particularly in the crafts. It is surely no accident that these recent vibrating squares exhibit a close resemblance to the “Ojos de Dios” (eye of God) configurations of the Huicholes of Nayarit.
This vibrant relationship between colors is achieved by using the complementary color mixed with an element of the color complemented. The neutral transparency between the two hues acts as a sounding board for the after images that the eyes of the viewer see jumping across the painting.
The mystical implications which reviewers of more nearly expressionist inclinations find in these paintings, probably refer to the hypnotic suggestion of such symmetrical and singular imagery, but certainly they do not inspire a meditative frame of mind such as the equally symmetrical painting of, say, Ad Reinhardt or Mark Rothko.
