Wed Mar 19, 2008 — by Aaron Rosenberg

On This Day: Josef Albers

A powerful figure in art history is born...

Born on March 19, 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, Josef Albers was a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, but he is best remembered as an abstract painter and theorist.

A professor at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus for many years (from 1922 to 1933), Albers moved to the U.S. and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus down. He took a job teaching design at Yale in 1950, and taught there until his retirement in 1958.

Albers continued to paint and write in New Haven until his death in 1976. His work is often considered a bridge between traditional European and new American art, and he heavily influenced the Op artists, among others.

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