Josef Albers valuation
Bauhaus master turned American teacher, and the painter who spent twenty-five years on one square inside another.
Josef Albers trained and then taught at the Bauhaus, and left Germany in 1933 when the school was closed, taking a post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina before moving to Yale in 1950.
What a work by Josef Albers is worth
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Bio
Josef Albers trained and then taught at the Bauhaus, and left Germany in 1933 when the school was closed, taking a post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina before moving to Yale in 1950. He began Homage to the Square in that same year and continued it until his death in 1976 — hundreds of panels, always the same nested arrangement, the paint applied with a palette knife straight from the tube onto a Masonite board primed white. The point was never the shape. It was that a colour changes according to what sits beside it, the argument set out in Interaction of Color in 1963, and the square was simply the plainest frame in which to prove it.
Two very different things carry his name to market. The paintings are unique, on board rather than canvas, and Albers recorded the exact pigments and manufacturers on the reverse of each — an inscription that is central to authentication and should never be covered by a backing board. The prints are numerous: screenprints, lithographs and portfolios such as Formulation: Articulation. Sheets pulled out of a bound portfolio are valued differently from a complete one, so establishing which you have comes first, along with the pencil signature and the condition of the paper.
At a glance
- Born
- 19 March 1888, Bottrop
- Died
- 25 March 1976, New Haven
- Movements
- Op art, Abstract art
More on Wikipedia.
Interaction of Color, and Formulation: Articulation
Interaction of Color was first published by Yale University Press in 1963 as two large unbound volumes with 150 colour plates, many of them screenprinted, in an edition of 2,000, of which fifty were signed and numbered. Plates from it are often framed and sold singly; they are pages from the book, and later editions of the book reproduce a selection of them.
Formulation: Articulation, published by Harry N. Abrams in 1972 and printed by Albers's Yale colleagues Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman, is two portfolios of 127 screenprints in an edition of 1,000, each sheet with a central fold as issued. The fold is not damage, and the sheets are unsigned, so a signed, separately editioned Albers screenprint is a different object.
Bottrop glass, Dessau and the murals
Albers came from a family of craftsmen in Bottrop, Westphalia. His father worked as a housepainter and carpenter, and as a boy Josef learned to engrave glass, plumb and wire. He taught school from 1908 to 1913, trained as an art teacher in Berlin, and from 1916 learned stained glass in Essen with the Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker; his first public commission, in 1918, was a window for a church in Bottrop. He entered Johannes Itten's preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920, joined the staff as a glass maker in 1922, and in 1925, when the school moved to Dessau, became a professor and married Anni Fleischmann, a student there.
Philip Johnson, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, arranged the post at Black Mountain, where his students included Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, who later named him as his most important teacher. At Yale he hired Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter and Alvin Lustig to build up graphic design, and taught Eva Hesse and Richard Anuszkiewicz before he retired from teaching in 1958. Between 1959 and 1961 he designed seven album sleeves for Enoch Light's Command Records. His murals include Two Portals, of 1961, in the lobby of the Time & Life Building, and Manhattan, made for the Pan Am Building and taken down around 2000.
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