Exceptional Works: Josef Albers

On the Other Side (1952) is instantly recognizable as part of Josef Albers’s iconic Variant/Adobe series begun in 1947. Employing a geometric structure rendered in various color schemes, these breakthrough works anticipate the chromatic investigations Albers would devote himself to in his later Homage to the Square series. On the Other Side is featured on the occasion of the gallery’s participation in Art Basel 2024.

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century. His career, which bridged European and American modernism, consisted mainly of a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of color and spatial relationships. Working with simple geometric forms, Albers sought to produce the effects of chromatic interaction, in which the visual perception of a color is affected by those adjacent to it.

The Variant/Adobe series—Albers alternately used both terms to describe this body of work—features an abstract architectonic form built around two rectangles. The architectural reference is emphasized in the term “Adobe,” which may refer to the “clay house” in La Luz, New Mexico, in which the artist initiated these works. The influence of Latin American art and culture on the artist’s work is reflected in the geometric forms Albers employed in this series, which resemble a schematic rendering of a vernacular southern Mexican dwelling.

Josef and his wife Anni Albers spent significant time in Latin and South America between 1934 and 1967, returning most often to Mexico. These trips had a profound impact on the work of both artists. As Roberta Smith observes, “The values apparent in Mesoamerican objects and structures dovetailed with the Alberses’ most cherished Bauhaus principles, especially economy of means, truth to materials and the pursuit of variation within specific boundaries.” On the Other Side has featured in important shows including the early solo exhibition Acting Color: Albers at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1955, and most recently Josef Albers in Mexico at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2017.

“The Variants, also known as Adobes, overtly recall built forms,” research curator and Josef Albers Catalogue raisonné director, Jeannette Redensek, observes. “Albers himself labeled elements of the paintings as ‘windows’ and ‘walls,’ and titled many works in the series quite literally wall and façade. Marcel Breuer had described Albers as a ‘frustrated architect,’ and whether thwarted or not in that ambition, Albers certainly had an architect’s imagination. He valued precision and attention to materials, and had a feeling for spatial thinking and the gravitational forces against which structures must defend themselves or surrender.... [The Variant/Adobe works] render illusions of translucent overlay, with thin films of color appearing to shift over and under one another. The ­effect is scenographic, as if the paintings were theatrical stage scrims floating in space.”