Josef Albers

Josef Albers (1888 to 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator considered one of the most influential twentieth-century art teachers in the United States. He joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and became a faculty member in 1922, teaching handicraft principles and later designing furniture and working in glass; after the Bauhaus closed under Nazi orders in 1933 he emigrated to the United States and taught at Black Mountain College until 1949, where his students included Ruth Asawa, before heading the design department at Yale University from 1950. An active abstract painter and color theorist himself, his 1963 book Interaction of Color is considered a seminal work on color theory and his teaching had a profound impact on postwar Western visual art.