Josef Albers: Life and Work

While Josef Albers’ Bauhaus colleagues Klee and Kandinsky are household names, Albers himself has remained inscrutable. He is best known as the painter of the Homages to the Square, a series of over 2,000 seemingly tightly controlled experiments in the interaction of colour. Yet he did not begin these pictures until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, maker and theorist, much of it pursued in the United States following the Nazi dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933.

Drawing on extensive unpublished writings, documents and illustrations, Darwent offers a broad view of not only the artistic and political currents, but also the friendships and rivalries that formed the backdrop to Albers’ creative output.