From 1905-8 he studied to become a teacher in Büren, and went on to teach children in primary schools around Westphalia from 19. But, more directly, the voluminous forms of Variants comes out of a class exercise in Albers's drawing classes that required students to create the overlapping, intersecting and foreshortening of elliptical forms while, at the same time, challenging the viewer's perception of space Danilowitz 93. Josef Albers was born in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany in 1888. Most of these prints trace the shapes of organic and curvilinear forms, easily and freeily controlled through drypoint, not so unlike the "automatic" drawings and prints of André Masson and the Surrealists. After receiving his education at the Teachers Training School in Langenhorst and then at. Josef Albers was born in 1888 in Bottrop in the Ruhr District of West Germany. His emphasis was on color as a medium in its own right. Not unlike Atelier 17, Black Mountain College attracted many aspiring artist-students who sought to learn and hone their craft, while retaining and developing their own individual style.Īlber's first experiments with intaglio techniques, drypoints in particular, were those made in 1940 at the Art Academy in Mexico City, a place that brought great intrigue for Albers as he wrote Wassily Kandinsky years before: "Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art" (Danilowitz p.11). Josef Albers (1888-1976) was one of the leading artists and art and design teachers of the 20th century. During his tenure through 1949 he taught Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly and even attracted the likes of Willem De Kooning and Robert Motherwell. On leaving Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, Albers and his wife Anni, a superb textile desginer herself, relocated to North Carolina, where Albers was invited to join the faculty at the progressive art school Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, at the recommendation of the architect-curator Philip Johnson of the Musem of Modern Art, New York. His fellow faculty members at the Bauhaus included the imporant Modernist artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. Akin to her distinctive pictorial weavings, Albers interwove her talents. Before the dissolution of the Bauhaus by the Nazi government in 1933, Albers led the carpentry and glass painting workshops and taught the drawing and lettering classes, often moving freely between media and disciplines as he would in his own art. Photo courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. In 1920 Josef Albers (1888-1976) enrolled in the preliminary course, taught by Johannes Itten, at the Weimar Bauhaus before being asked by the founder and director Walter Gropius to stay on the following year to teach in the Department of Design. A superb, dark impression of this extremely scarce, early print. Dijon (2016) Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop (2014) Kunsthalle Zrich (2013) the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012) and Secession. Seidler then attended design courses held by Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in. Signed, titled, dated, dedicated and numbered 6/20 in pencil, lower margin. A Bio-critical Sourcebook Donald Leslie Johnson, Donald Langmead.