Josef Albers’s 'Formulation: Articulation', issued as a limited edition set of prints in 1972 and published here in book form for the first time, is a unique opportunity to understand the ideas and methods of one of the most influential artists and theorists of the twentieth century.
Albers drew on over forty years’ work in a variety of media – woodcuts, sandblasted glass pictures and oil paintings – for these rigorous yet lyrical explorations of colour and form, and they can be seen as the summation of his creative life.
Albers’s preoccupation with abstraction, colour and perception began when he was a student and teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany and continued after he fled to America in 1933. Through his art, and his teaching at Black Mountain College and at Yale University, he influenced generations of artists, including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg and the exponents of Op art, and his seminal text, Interaction of Color (1963), affected art teaching all over the world.
In his various series paintings, particularly Homage to the Square, he draws the viewer into a dynamic relationship with his work, showing how colour and line can be manipulated to have deceptive and unexpected effects. What colour is was of less concern to Albers than what it does. ‘In science’, Albers wrote, ‘one plus one is always two, in art it can also be three, or more.’
All the elements of Albers’s thinking and experience on colour and geometrical relationships are embodied in Formulation: Articulation. The series of prints were carefully sequenced by the artist so that they can be examined and appreciated for their visual interaction or as striking works of art in their own right. Statements by Albers about the images are provided on two fold-out sections and the text by the art critic T. G. Rosenthal sets the volume within the context of Albers’s life and work.
T. G. Rosenthal has a PhD in art history from Cambridge University. He is the author of books on Jack B. Yeats, Sidney Nolan and Paula Rego, is a former art critic of the Listener and the New Statesman, and has contributed many articles on art to such newspapers and magazines as the Independent on Sunday, the Spectator and Modern Painters.