The first full-scale biography of one of the 20th century’s great makers, theorists and painters has been published to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus. While Josef Albers’ Bauhaus colleagues Klee, Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer are familiar 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 dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933. Born in Germany and later married to the textile artist Anni Albers, his extensive archive includes letters from fellow artists John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Eva Hesse; colleagues such as Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson; and fans and
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