born March 19, 1888, Bottrop, Ger.
died March 25, 1976, New Haven, Conn., U.S.
German-U.S. painter, poet, teacher, and theoretician.
He studied and taught at the Bauhaus and in 1933 became one of the first Bauhaus teachers to immigrate to the U.S., where he taught at Black Mountain College and later at Yale. He developed a painting style characterized by abstract rectilinear patterns and primary colours as well as black and white. His best-known series of paintings, Homage to the Square (begun in 1950 and continued until his death), restricts its repertory of forms to coloured squares superimposed onto each other. The arrangement of these squares is carefully calculated so that the colour of each square optically alters the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the others. His research into colour theory was published in the influential Interaction of Color (1963).
Josef Albers, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1948.
s Arnold Newman