The Fleming Museum Exhibits Josef Albers’ Iconic Screen-Print Experiments

The University of Vermont Fleming Museum of Art‘s primary exhibition right now is a collection of modestly sized, stringently abstract screen prints, titled “Formulation: Articulation.” Upon first glance, viewers might be forgiven for missing the wow factor in these iterative prints of nested squares, rectilinear line compositions and other hard-edged forms in a variety of colors and shades of black and gray.

Yet these meticulous formal experiments in color and perception are the work of an artist who has had a profound impact on art making: German-born, Bauhaus-trained Josef Albers (1888-1976), who, through a lifetime of teaching, influenced artists from Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland to Chuck Close and Eva Hesse.

The show, courtesy of Landau Traveling Exhibitions, is a selection of 66 screen prints from Albers’ 1972 publication Formulation: Articulation, a limited-edition set of two folios containing 127 prints. Albers arranged them singly, in pairs or in groups of four and appended brief, declarative commentaries. Booklets available at the Fleming reproduce the comments he wrote for the selected prints, as well as excerpts from his lectures and other sources.

It’s best to think of the exhibition as instructions in how to see. Often Albers groups two or four prints in order to show how colors look different depending on which colors surround them. He pursued this idea most obsessively in his “Homage to the Square” series — nested squares of three or four different colors, with mathematically precise placement of the squares.

Some examples demonstrate that the squares’ behavior varies: They appear to pop or recede, or even lose their edges. Folio II, No. 14 pairs two “Homage to the Squares”: a black central square surrounded by two greens and a blue on the left, and a nested array of yellows that Albers calls “extra citric and ripe” on the right.

In the latter, the central square’s shade of yellow is not that far off from its adjacent shade, so the square appears to have softly blurred edges. The black square, however, is different enough from its green neighbor that it has a hard-edged appearance — even though both central squares actually have the same precise edge.

In other groupings, it’s hard to believe one is looking at the same color. The four vertically oriented rectangular prints of I:6 repeat a pattern of overlapping horizontal gray lines on backgrounds of yellow, green and two different blues. The green background surprisingly turns the gray lines faintly pink, far from the solid dark gray they appear against yellow.

What Albers was getting at was that “color is relational, experiential. You never see a color in isolation; everything is relative to everything else,” as Burlington artist Steve Budington put in it a recent visit to the exhibition with Seven Days. “It’s radical,” he added. “His works are about relationships and contexts.”

Budington, a UVM associate professor of painting, earned his master of fine arts at Yale University, where Albers taught for the last eight years of his career. Budington took Albers’ color class from one of the master’s own students, Richard Lytle, who “taught it as Albers did.”

The class wasn’t required, but it was too famous to miss, Budington said: “I was like, I’m not going to Yale without taking Albers’ color class.”

Budington also worked as a teacher’s assistant to the late Robert Reed, another of Albers’ students who became the Yale School of Art’s first tenured Black professor. Reed’s first job in the department, as a student there in 1960, was to mix colors for the screen prints in Albers’ first publication, Interaction of Color — a limited-edition folio set published in 1963 that remains a teaching tool in art schools around the world. Reed had to match Albers’ original examples. It was an essential task for an exacting boss.

Albers grew up learning carpentry, painting and stained glass work from his craftsman father before studying for three years at the Bauhaus, a German experimental school that was founded in Weimar in 1919. He taught there another 10 years, until the Nazis shut it down in 1933. Faced with persecution, he and his wife, Anni Albers — another Bauhaus artist who became famous for her weavings — immediately fled to the U.S. He was 44 and knew no English.

Albers taught at the newly formed art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1933 to 1949, then at Yale from 1950 until his retirement in 1958.

The year Albers started at Yale was also the year he made his first “Homage to the Square” — the series for which he is best known. He continued to explore iterations of “Homage” until he died in 1976, producing more than 1,000 of them.

For Albers, exploring the relativity of color was simultaneously an exploration of humanity. In an interview recorded by Katharine Kuh in the early 1960s, he said, “Color, in my opinion, behaves in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realizations of relationships with others … [like a person] must combine both being an individual and being a member of society. I’ve handled color as man should behave … And from all this, you may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.”

Albers’ work has a political context, Budington pointed out. The refugee from the Nazi system “saw modern life as brutal and hierarchical. Art was a freedom from that, a protest,” Budington opined. The artist produced work that was democratic, accessible: He used ready-made aluminum frames (similar to the ones in the Fleming show) and painted on cheap Masonite with a humble palette knife.

Albers’ scrupulous minimalism — his use of form solely to study color — has prompted other artists to explore his ideas in less rarified contexts, including in relation to social concepts. The Fleming show includes a number of prints, selected by curator Kristan Hanson from the permanent collection, that push Albers’ ideas beyond his self-imposed limits.

One is a print of Black American artist Glenn Ligon’s 1990 work “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background).” Ligon stenciled the title’s quote, from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in repetition, creating a page-long paragraph. The black letters begin as crisp against the white background but become increasingly smudged as the sentence is repeated, suggesting that racial identities both make and influence each other through their interaction.

While this newspaper tries its best to reproduce art accurately, Albers would no doubt have been appalled at the inaccuracies of his art in newsprint. It’s best to see “Formulation: Articulation” in person, testing out Albers’ ideas on one’s own eyes through these iconic prints.

This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2023.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!