Albers’ Squares

Art x Fashion Edit #21

Josef Albers was a German-born American artist. Pushed to emigrate to the United States in 1933 due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Albers was a leader of the Bauhaus movement that found a home in Black Mountain College.

One of Albers’ most famous work is his series Homage to the Square, begun in 1949, in which Albers studied the interaction of colors with nested squares. In the piece Persistent (1954-1960) chosen here among the hundreds of paintings and prints, Albers also demonstrate his mastery of color, a research he fully fledged in his 1963 book The Interaction of color.

Albers was at the cusp of European symbolism influencing American abstraction. In between European constructivism and Bauhaus influence visible in the small scale and traditional of the knife method, Albers heavily influenced Op Art and conceptual art of which American artists of the 1950s and 1960s were the leaders.

He claimed that color “is almost never seen as it really is” and that “color deceives continually”. In short, color in the result of experience and interactions, of personal, social, and ever changing reinterpretations in different societies and contexts. Here, I composed an outfit referencing the color-block approach of the artist, with strong boxy and square shapes.