German painter, poet, sculptor, teacher, and theoretician. Born in Bottrop, Germany on March 19, 1888, died March 25, 1976 in New Haven, Connecticut. In Germany, Albers studied to become a primary school teacher, and eventually became an art teacher before bringing European (Bauhaus) modernism to America. In 1920, he attended Bauhaus, a school in Weimar, that was committed to exploring the relationship between the arts and technological society. He originally was a stain glass maker at Bauhaus, and taught the Vokurs, the basic design course, a year after reaching journeyman in 1922. He became Bauhausmeister (professor) alongside artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. When Nazi Germany forced Bauhaus to close down, Albers and his wife moved to America to teach at the experimental art school of Black Mountain College where he headed the painting program from 1933 to 1949. The school curriculum emphasized on experimentation and direct experience based on John Dewey’s educational philosophy and the theories and teaching methods of Bauhaus. Albers greatest contribution to art was his transformation of art education and pedagogy. This pedagogy was a non-dogmatic, un-hierarchical, “scientific” approach based on observation and experimentation. The goal was to reduce perceptions of objects to their basic characteristics (line, shape, material, color) and Albers used strategies of “defamiliarization” such drawing w/ left hand, mirror writing, exploring optical illusions, and representing “negative” spaces. His extensive theoretical work proposing that color, rather than form, makes up an image, influenced the development of modern art in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s.
