"A New Unity!" The Art and Pedagogy of Josef Albers

Abstract

Josef Albers had an extensive and prolific career, both as an artist and a teacher. He was a crucial member of the faculties of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Yale University, producing a varied and ground-breaking body of his own work simultaneously. Albers's pedagogical philosophies were remarkably consistent throughout his teaching career, and all of his artwork reflects these philosophies to some degree. However, the artist's early engraved glass works, created while at the Bauhaus, and his later, architecturally-based sculptures were by far the most successful in communicating his message of the orderly, reasoned world he hoped transform through his art. Josef Albers was intent on challenging his viewer's "way of seeing," and he was able to accomplish this through his works with underlying architectural connections. These works allowed him to control the way they were perceived, and, by extension, the world seen figuratively through them.