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. In two medium-scale studies from c. 1970–1973, both executed on blotting paper—Albers’s preferred support for such works due to how quickly it absorbed oil paint—hues of vermillion, red, and fiery orange become especially vibrant when viewed side by side.

In the main gallery, the color yellow and its various permutations appear throughout works from the Homage to the Square series, including in two seemingly identical paintings from 1962, both titled Study for Homage to the Square: Rare Echo and dominated by shades of golden ochre.

Also exhibited are two studies for the poster Albers designed for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, one of twenty-eight posters by various artists published for the occasion. With a central field of blue framed by two concentric rectangular forms, the works resemble elongated versions of Albers’s Homage to the Square compositions. The alternating tones of the exterior forms further recall the artist’s mitered square compositions, a variation on his signature nested squares that adds an even greater illusion of depth through its optical play of light and dark.

The exhibition additionally highlights Albers’s work in black, white, and gray, including a complete portfolio of Gray Instrumentation I (1974), comprising a suite of Homage to the Square screenprints published by Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village, New York. The portfolio explores what Albers called the “uncountable” shades of gray.

The exhibition includes 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.

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.

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.

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.”