Josef Albers: Duets

Organized in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, this exhibition features significant paintings and works on paper from the 1930s through the 1970s in which two related forms are played against one another.

Albers was fascinated by such dualities. He guides us to recognize first that either two disparate paintings or two disparate elements within a single painting are in many ways the same but also vary from one another because of shifts in color or their internal structures.

Paintings and works on paper from Albers’s groundbreaking series Homage to the Square (1950–1976), in which he experimented with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects set in precise formats, are featured. These include Study for Homage to the Square: Starting Anew (1964) and Study for Homage to the Square (1968), whose shared palette of greens and grays demonstrate how Albers returned to resonant colorways over the years, here in large 40-by-40-inch scale.

Nearby, Study to Homage to the Square: Budding (1958) and Study for Homage to the Square: Spring Out (1962), apply earthen greens and browns that allude to the natural world and the changing seasons.

Others, such as two grayscale oil studies for Albers’s first Homage to the Square from 1950, further highlight how compositional placement defines the ultimate perception of color.

The exhibition further highlights Albers’s work in black, white, and gray, including a significant glass work from the series Treble Clefs (1932–1935), which depicts the musical notation in grayscale tones. This important body of work, which also includes gouaches on paper that explore this motif, bridges the period from Albers’s departure from the Bauhaus to his arrival in the United States, and, as Nicholas Fox Weber writes, present “the sort of rich diversion provided by the music of J. S. Bach, whose work was one of Albers’s lifelong passions.”

Also on view are selections of Albers’s series of Variants (begun in 1947), also called Adobes because of their relationship to the architecture that riveted the artist in Mexico and the American Southwest, with one of its hallmarks being the presence of two entrances, inviting the viewer to experience the same structure following two different but related routes.

Albers was very aware that these alternate visual experiences were analogous to what happens in life itself when one considers or takes different paths, emotionally or physically, rather than adhering to the idea that there is only a single way to do something.

Variant of "Related" (1943) clearly foreshadows the development of the Variant/Adobe series, and is emblematic of the artist’s evolving approach to painting during his time at Black Mountain College. The painting relates to a handful of similar works depicting what appear to be two distinct forms composed of long overlapping planes of color. Unique to this work are the nested rectangles that lie beneath the forms at the top of the composition.

As Nicholas Fox Weber states in his introductory text for the exhibition: “Albers was, at heart, a magician. Pairing resemblant forms created a surcharge of visual activity.... He inspired people to recognize the infinite possibilities of parallel shapes. Eventually, as an octogenarian, he loved nothing more than to guide open-eyed children to see the wonderful visual events that can occur when two disparate elements are placed side by side.”