The whole surface is animated and articulated by lambent incandescence.

On the contrary, Albers’ light emanates from within, it emerges from the surface like a gas and hovers over the colored field.

There are no whitened areas such as one finds in certain paintings by Vasarely to give an illusion of light activity, an illusion which is in fact painted in. We are as in the presence of real light, not the kind of illusionism through which light is artificially projected from an outside source onto the support of the canvas. Albers has brought this investigation to a kind of culmination: in his painting, the effect of light is so direct as to appear to be coming through the canvas. In my opinion, Albers’ importance is due to his belonging to a broader, less categorically determined direction of 20th-century art: that or the investigation of the perceptual phenomena of color and light such as it has evolved in Western painting since Cézanne. It appears, therefore, unjustly restrictive to relate Albers exclusively to Constructivist art. And it is through the form and sensibility of this mature expression that he has had an incalculable influence on recent generations of American painters. It is the American years which are the important years. Although Albers was born in Germany, and participated in the initial phase of European geometric abstraction, the major development of his art to what it is today occurred in the United States in the 1940s. Nonetheless, although his presence has been less explicitly felt than that of a focal figure such as Hans Hofmann, there is perhaps not a painter living today in America who has not been acutely aware at some time during his career of Albers’ accomplishment in the area of perceptual experiments.Ĭonstructivism, in its present-day usage in America, has connotations which set it at the opposite pole to the mainstream of postwar American painting. If one accepts this classification, it is difficult to understand what influence-if any-he could have had on present-day American art. IN AMERICA, IT HAS been the fate of Josef Albers to be identified as a “Constructivist” artist.

Josef albers colour theory