Josef Albers: roaring diagonals and paradisiacal squares

Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his long engagement with the square, which he painted in exquisite variation more than a thousand times. A German–American painter, he trained in Berlin and Munich before enrolling at the Bauhaus (the leading modernist art and design school) in 1920. He was a student there for three years and a teacher for ten (longer than anyone else), his chosen craft was stained glass, and his teaching ranged from typography to furniture. In 1933 he moved to America and began to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Among his students was Robert Rauschenberg, who acknowledged Albers as ‘the most important teacher I’ve ever had’. Albers’s work combined Catholic mysticism with precise method, the cerebral with the sensual, in a deeply engaging way. His apparently severe geometries grow ever more human as you get to know them.

Albers was obsessed with colour, and employed in his paintings hues as bright as the tints of the autumn leaves he told his students to collect. But his singularity as a colourist was built upon the firm foundations of his understanding of black and white and the tonal distinctions that arise from their juxtaposition. This exhibition, the brainchild of Leslie Waddington, a long-time Albers admirer, examines the radical black-and-white work from the artist’s earliest extant drawing (a view from his window of a church in Stadtlohn, Germany, dated 1911) to oil paintings of the late 1960s. His art, as his teaching, was grounded in the analysis of space, form and colour as visual phenomena. If that sounds arid, his work is actually dramatic and expressive, and full of personality. He loved structure but also valued intuition, and believed that our experience of colour is qualified by context. In the end, what he wanted was for us to see more intensely.