Josef Albers
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. 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.
If you own a work by Josef Albers
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.