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
- 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?]
- Materials
- Techniques
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