German-American painter, printmaker, and teacher — the Bauhaus figure whose fifty-year career produced both the defining modern book on color perception (Interaction of Color, 1963) and, through his teaching at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, a lineage of students that is as wide as any single 20th-century art teacher's. Albers entered the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a master in 1925, and taught the preliminary Vorkurs after Moholy-Nagy's departure. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he and his wife Anni Albers (born Annelise Fleischmann) emigrated to rural North Carolina on the invitation of the newly founded Black Mountain College.
At Black Mountain (1933–49), Albers taught the Vorkurs to the American students who would become Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland, and to a short-time summer student named Eva Hesse. He moved to Yale in 1950 as head of the Department of Design; by his retirement in 1958 he had taught, among others, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and Neil Welliver. His teaching was famously austere — students were not allowed to paint for months, were made to do exercises with leaves, paper, and swatches to discover that what one sees depends entirely on context — and became the foundation for how color was taught in American art schools for the next half-century.
Homage to the Square, the series he began in 1950 and continued for the rest of his life — more than 2,000 paintings of three or four nested squares of unmixed commercial paint, differing only in hue and saturation — is the great late body of work. Interaction of Color (originally a boxed set of silk-screened color-paper plates with a text, now also a book) remains the standard textbook on perceptual color. Anni Albers's parallel career in weaving and printmaking produced work at least as formally serious; the two ran one of the great artistic marriages of the century.