Josef Albers

Life and work

Josef Albers was born in Bottrop in Westphalia in 1888, into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen. A childhood spent learning to engrave glass, to plumb and to wire gave him a confidence with materials that never left the work. He taught in an elementary school in his home town, trained as an art teacher in Berlin, learnt stained glass making in Essen under the Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker, then studied in Munich. He enrolled in the preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus as a student and joined its faculty as a maker of stained glass, treating that medium both as a component of architecture and as an art in its own right. He was promoted to professor the year the school moved to Dessau, the same year he married Anni Fleischmann, a student there and later a major textile artist. Paul Klee was form master to his crafts master in the glass workshops, and the two worked together for several years.

Emigration and teaching

When the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure the faculty scattered and Albers emigrated. Philip Johnson, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, arranged the offer that took him to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he ran the painting programme for sixteen years and taught Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Susan Weil. Asked on arrival what he intended to teach, he answered, in the first English sentence he managed, that he was there to open eyes, and he kept that as the motto of all his teaching. He left to head the department of design at Yale, where he built the graphic design programme and taught Richard Anuszkiewicz, Eva Hesse and Neil Welliver. His book Interaction of Color argues that colour is almost never seen as it really is and that the only way to learn it is by handling it. In 1971 he became the first living artist given a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Disciplines and how they differ

The saleroom sees three things under this name. At the top sit the Homage to the Square paintings, begun when Albers was in his sixties and continued until his death, oil applied with a palette knife straight from the tube onto primed Masonite, worked outwards from the centre with the panel flat on the table and without a ruler or masking tape. Below them sit the studies on paper for the same series, of which Tate holds several. At the base sit the print editions, screenprints and lithographs issued in numbered portfolios, among them the Edition Keller portfolios published in Germany. The LLB lot, a serigraph from the Homage to the Square material, belongs in this last register.

What a specialist examines

The support settles the register at once: Masonite or fibreboard for the paintings, paper for the studies and for the editions. On the paintings Albers recorded the manufacturer, the colour name and the varnish on the reverse in his own hand, as though listing the components of an optical experiment, so the back of a panel carries as much information as the front and has to be photographed. On the editions expect a pencil signature, a date, a portfolio inscription and a number over the edition size, and check that the sheet is a full sheet rather than a trimmed one. Colour registration matters more here than in almost any other printed work, because the subject is the exact relation between adjacent flat fields.

Market position

The two registers are not in the same market. At Bonhams in London in June 2020, Homage to the Square: Edition Keller Id, a screenprint in colours on Hahnemuhle Buttenboard wove paper, signed, dated, inscribed and numbered eighty four from an edition of one hundred and twenty five, published by Josef Keller Verlag in Starnberg, made a mid four figure sum in pounds. At the same house in October 2021, a painted Homage to the Square study in oil on Masonite, roughly forty centimetres square and coming directly from the artist's estate and his foundation, made GBP 586,750. Both figures include the buyer's premium as the house prints it. The gap is a matter of category rather than quality, which is why the support, the inscription line and the reverse have to be established before anything else. A seller should photograph all of them, record measurements in centimetres, and keep any documentation from the publisher or the representing gallery, since the output under this name is closely recorded in the published literature.