Josef Albers Evaluates Student Work (c. 1928)

Artist, teacher, and theorist Josef Albers (1888-1976) enrolled in Johannes Itten’s preliminary course [Vorkurs] at the Bauhaus in 1920. Three years later, after Itten left the school, Albers began teaching the preliminary course along with Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. In 1925, Albers became one of the first former Bauhaus students to be appointed a master. Albers’ interest in abstract form and color made him well suited to teach the preliminary course. In the photograph below, he evaluates the work of students in the course. After the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Josef Albers and his wife Anni (an artist and former Bauhaus student whom he had met in 1922 and married in 1925) immigrated to the United States, where they accepted positions in the art department at Black Mountain College, a newly founded, experimental school in North Carolina. Josef Albers remained there until 1949. In 1950, he was appointed chair of the design department at Yale University.

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Photographer: Otto Umbehr
© Albers Foundation/Art Resource, NY