Exceptional Works: Josef Albers

Created by Josef Albers in 1972, the present work is a complete set of the two-volume print portfolio Formulation: Articulation, an expansive series of 127 screenprints printed on 66 sheets of folded wove paper. Albers spent roughly two years working on the prints, which are based on a range of works from throughout his life including sand-blasted glass works from his Bauhaus period, woodcuts from his time at Black Mountain College, and countless Variant/Adobe and Homage to the Square paintings, among others.

A preface to the portfolio, written by its publishers, Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman, describes the content and concept of the volumes, stressing that the portfolio is “the realization rather than the reproduction of the essential ideas in Josef Albers's works.” They further explain, “Works have been selected from forty years of Albers’s search and offer an unusual opportunity for study of this significant artist’s direct participation in an original development of his own work.”

Other complete sets of Formulation: Articulation are held in the collections of the British Museum, London; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Princeton University Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2006, Thames & Hudson printed a complete facsimile of Formulation: Articulation.