Pillars, 1928, printed 1970

Screen print
x1972-7
Pillars

Interpretation

A highly influential teacher whose lessons focused on color compositions, Albers taught at the Bauhaus in Germany and then later at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, and at Yale. This composition derives from Albers’s 1928 glass paintings, in which the glass was sandblasted to create a uniform color field, a quality that the medium of silkscreen can replicate. Here the complex interactions of shape, pattern, and color create spatial illusion and visual rhythm in an emphatically flat image. 

Information

Title
Pillars
Object Number
x1972-7
Maker
Josef Albers
Printed by Sirocco Screenprinters
Medium
Screen print
Dates
1928, printed 1970
Dimensions
image: 29 x 26 cm. (11 7/16 x 10 1/4 in.) sheet: 49 x 44.9 cm (19 5/16 x 17 11/16 in.)
Catalog Raisonné
Danilowitz 199
Credit Line
Gift of Carl Otto von Kienbusch, Class of 1906, for the Carl Otto von Kienbusch Jr., Memorial Collection
Culture
American
Place made
North America, United States, Connecticut, New Haven
Signatures
Editioned, signed,and dated in graphite, lower right: 64//100 Albers '70
Inscriptions
Text printed in gray along bottom of sheet: The aim of life is living creatures / the aim of art is living creations J.A. / Josef Albers, Pillars, 1928 / in commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Marks/Labels/Seals
Blindstamp of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lower left

Blindstamp, lower right: [gemini?]
Type
Materials
Techniques

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