Josef Albers: ‘In the end, the study of colour is the study of ourselves’

In 1935, Josef Albers visited Mexico. ‘[It] is truly the promised land of abstract art,’ he wrote, ‘for here it is already a thousand years old.’

Josef and his wife, Anni, had been keen to visit Latin America ever since they’d arrived in the United States. The lean, ascetic-looking Westphalian had been working at the pioneering Bauhaus until the Nazis closed the school down in 1933. Half-starved and with few future prospects of employment in Germany, Albers accepted an invitation to teach at the newly formed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

The institution turned out to be as lawless as the surrounding Appalachian wilderness, and it suited Albers perfectly. He was an intuitive teacher with an ego-dystonic urge to push the boundaries of perception. The college gave him the freedom to experiment, and he used it to investigate colour and its mystical properties.

Students were encouraged to pay attention to the fleeting and the overlooked: the lingering white spot on a television screen after it has been switched off, or the way tea darkens over time in a glass. He left a profound impression on his pupils, including Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. ‘He taught you how to see,’ said his colleague and fellow artist Jacob Lawrence, while Rauschenberg admitted that he was still, years later, ‘learning what he taught me’.

The trip to Mexico was the first of many Albers took over the course of his life. In Oaxaca, amid the sagebrush and fiery grasses, he rediscovered the power of abstraction. It was there in the painted adobe houses and in the wide, open skies: the way the colours changed throughout the day, from sepia to rose to bone, and how, towards evening, bands of red flooded the sky, squeezing the orange sun down into a thin, shimmering strip.

Inspired by his time in Mexico, Red Front (1947-56) is one of seven paintings by Albers from Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers, a landmark collection offered in London and Paris in October 2026. Staying in one of Oaxaca’s brightly coloured houses, he began the ‘Variant’ series, a geometric cycle that continued until 1965. Red Front echoes the flat roofs of the houses there, and the checkerboard pattern of their walls and windows. Its joyous configuration and brilliant colours conjure a lyrical sense of internal dynamism suggested by the term ‘variant’.

In 1950, Albers moved to Connecticut and took up the post of head of the department of design at Yale University, where his influence was immense. He championed direct observation and chromatic perception, publishing the treatise Interaction of Colour in 1963. Today, his methods are so familiar that it is difficult to understand how innovative they once were, or how risky the proposition was for an émigré artist in the era of Cold War politics radically to alter the way we perceive art.

It was at Yale that Albers embarked on ‘Homage to the Square’, an experimental series that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Layering squares of colour — some in the same tonal range, others contrasting — he explored the relationship between light and perception.

In total, he made about 2,000 of these brilliant compositions, six of which are offered for sale. Applying paint directly from the tube with a knife, he worked and reworked it on Masonite board, endlessly exploring the ‘push and pull’ of tonal values. According to Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, he never used tape to mask the edges of his squares, but worked freehand, often leaving weeks between applications for the paint to dry fully so that he might precisely understand its tonal properties. The enigmatic titles of his works echo the strange, mystical qualities he associated with each colour: Earth Glow, Warm Silence, Not Looking.

Over the years, Albers reduced the variations of tone until they were finely calibrated shades of red or yellow. R-I d-1 (1968) and Study for Homage to the Square: Warm Silence (1971) consist of overlapping squares rendered in red or yellow that seem on the point of resolving into a three-dimensional image — but then the illusion falters and the two-dimensional flatness reasserts itself.

Many of his students considered these squares to be self-portraits, with the artist acknowledging that ‘in the end, the study of colour is the study of ourselves’. Throughout his life, Albers held to the modernist conviction that history was moving inexorably towards a brighter future. These hypnotic works embody that utopian promise.

Works by Josef Albers from Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale (14 October 2026) and the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale (15 October) at Christie’s in London, and in the 20th/21st Century: Paris Day Sale at Christie’s in Paris (23 October)