145. Bauhaus Group Photo
Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Làszio Moholy-
Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel
Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta
Stolzl and Oskar Schlemmer.
The first aim of the school was to "rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself."
Josef Albers was fascinated by the ambiguities of visual and spatial perception. This preoccupation is central to his famous "Homage to the Square" series begun in the 1950s and continuing until his death. In this series, color assumes the main role of producing deceptive and unpredictable effects, causing multiple readings of the same hue depending on what colors surround it. Albers did not mix colors, putting the colors on the painting right out of the tube. He forced his viewers into a changing and dynamic relationship with his work, rather than accepting one visual truth. Albers: "Homage to the Square" "...I see color as motion…to put two color together side by side really excites me. They breathe together. It's like a pulse beat… I like to take a very weak color and make it rich and beautiful or work on its neighbors. I can kill the most brilliant red by putting it with violet. I can make the dullest gray in the world dance by setting it against black… Josef Albers, 1973
Albers teaching at the Bauhaus, Dessau, 1928 photograph Umbo
Georg Muche and members of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus, Weimar, ca. 1923. Anni Albers is at the extreme right.
Albers teaching at the Bauhaus, Dessau, 1928 photograph Umbo