Exceptional Works: Josef Albers

Untitled, 1949

Oil on board in artist's frame Framed: 17 1/2 x 13 1/2 x 7/8 inches 44.5 x 34.3 x 2.2 cm

Josef Albers in a drawing class, c.1939-40 (detail). Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Ashville, NC.

“What he evoked through color is magical and intensely spiritual.”

—Nicholas Fox Weber, director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century. His career, which bridged European and American modernism, consisted mainly of a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of color and spatial relationships. Working with simple geometric forms, Albers sought to produce the effects of chromatic interaction, in which the visual perception of a color is affected by those adjacent to it.

Made while Albers was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, this untitled painting broadly relates to the artist's interest in color relations and geometric form—as exemplified in his Variant/Adobe and Homage to the Square series, both of which he began in the late 1940s. Here, the contrast between the various gray tones of the parallelograms and the yellow and orange planes of color creates an optical push and pull that animates the surface.

Hazel Larsen Archer, Interior of the Jalowetz Cottage; Untitled (1949) hangs above the fireplace to the left.

Johanna Jalowetz participating in the work program on the Lake Eden campus at Black Mountain College

Josef Albers’s drawing class, Black Mountain College, c.1939-40. Left to right: Lisa Jalowetz, Bela Martin, Fred Stone, Betty Brett, Albers (kneeling), Robert de Niro, Martha McMillan, Eunice Shifris. Courtesy Western Regional Archives

Trude Guermonprez, 1938. Photo by Paul Guermonprez

Albers gave this painting to Johanna Jalowetz (1885–1966), who taught bookbinding and vocal training at Black Mountain College. Johanna and her husband, Heinrich Jalowetz (1882–1946), were emigrés from the former Austria-Hungary, who, like the Alberses, fled to the United States to avoid political persecution under the Nazis. Johanna hung the work in the “Jalowetz cottage,” which was built for the couple and their family by students at the school under the guidance of architect A. Lawrence Kocher. The painting later passed to the Jalowetz’s daughter, Trude Guermonprez (born Gertrud Emilie Jalowetz), a noted textile artist, designer and educator, and has remained in the family since.

The Jalowitz family is notably connected to the arts. Heinrich Jalowetz, a conductor and part of the Second Viennese School, taught Music at Black Mountain College from 1939 to1946. He and Johanna’s daughter Lisa, seen on the left in a photograph of Josef Albers’s drawing class at Black Mountain c. 1939–40, went on to become a designer and assisted her husband, the noted scenic designer Boris Aronson, on numerous Broadway productions.

An inscription on the back of the painting reads:

To Johanna with love June 10 1949 A

Untitled is presented in an artist’s frame cut from a single sheet of wood—a relatively rare practice seen later in some of the Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe works. Here, the frame reinforces the geometry of the composition.

Josef Albers, Oblique White, Grays, Yellow, 1949. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation, Inc.

The present work shows two intersecting gray parallelograms and orange and rectangular planes of orange and yellow. Where the forms overlap, Albers modulates the color, creating a sense of layering and of the colors interacting—as though light were passing through the forms. The palette seen in Untitled (1949) continued to interest Albers throughout his career, and is seen in numerous later works.

In his notebooks, Albers described this painting as a study for Oblique White, Grays, Yellow (1949), which he later donated to the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, where it currently resides. Additional related works include Either … Or (1948; Yale University Art Gallery), and Neither … Nor (1948; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, West Germany).

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: With Rays, 1959. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Josef Albers at his studio, August 1960. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / DACS 2021.

As Jeannette Redensek, research curator at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Josef Albers Catalogue Raisonné director, has observed, in Untitled (1949) and the aforementioned works to which it relates, “the colors chosen were tessellated to create the illusion of translucent planes shifting over and around one another, while a white parallelogram—is it a mask or a void?—hovers at the center.”

Related works by Josef Albers, from left: Either. . . Or, 1948. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Neither...Nor, 1948. Josef Albers Mueum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany

Untitled (1949) is signed twice on the front, suggesting that it could be exhibited either horizontally or vertically. While this painting and Oblique White, Grays, Yellow (1949) have only been recorded in vertical orientation, Either … Or and Neither … Nor have been presented horizontally.

Josef Albers, Untitled, 1949

Josef Albers, Untitled, 1949

 

Albers’s work in this period was crucially influenced by the artist’s travels around Mexico, which he visited with his wife Anni thirteen times between 1935 and the late 1960s. For Josef, the complex geometric vocabulary of pre-Columbian art and architecture in what he called “the promised land of abstract art” informed a number of different compositional structures, including the overlapping parallelograms seen in the present painting. In combining these dynamic structures with color, Albers cultivated “the idea of multiple readings, of the simultaneous occurrence of a ‘this’ and a ‘that’ which were seemingly at odds.”

Josef Albers, Mitla, Mexico, photo negative, 1936-1937. © 2024 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/DACS, London

“Look! The color orange is at the door and says to the yellow, ‘You go first.’ But the yellow is also polite and says, ‘No, you go first.’ They are like good friends and their conversation is very charming.”

—Josef Albers

David Zwirner at Art Basel