Kinetic (I)
1945 (Date manufactured/created)
Oil
masonite, communication object: art
two signatures and date markers, one right aove the other sigguesting alterations made by the artist. Josef Albers is considered the father of 'Op Art'. During his lifetime he became famous for making over a thousand "Homages to the Square" (begun in 1950); "vehicles for the presentation of different color climates and various color effects, above all for the demonstration of the way that solid colors change according to their positions and surroundings." (Nicholas Fox Weber, "The Artist As Alchemist" in retrospective, ph. 14). Albers, born in Germany in 1888, studied at the Bauhaus School, where he experimented with mew materials, focusing on design and structural possibilities. He eventually left Germany because of the Nazis; he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1933 t o1949, and has a lecture series at Harvard's Graduate School of Design from 1936 to1940. He became a U.S. Citizen in 1939. From 1950 to 1960 he was the chairman of the Dept of Design at Yale. Albers' book "Interaction of Color", is a standard text of introductory studio art classes.
Special Purchase Fund, 1968
68.12