Josef Albers: Sonic Albers

In 1933, Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, emigrated to the United States to take up teaching positions at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school near Asheville, North Carolina. The unique, avant-garde program Josef designed integrated different art forms, an approach propelled by his fervent belief in the relationships between elements as the starting point for cultivating vision. Among those Albers invited to teach at Black Mountain were the composer John Cage and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who together staged a production of Erik Satie’s The Ruse of Medusa (1913) at the school’s 1948 summer session.

In a lecture delivered in Asheville in 1935, Albers drew on analogies with music in discussing abstract art: "Why should we painters not have the same right to combine, like the musician, our medium—form, colors, proportions and so on. You allow the architect to use forms without any representation. You allow the dancer to combine his movements to a composition without any sense of a thing or a situation, or to work only in a musical way. Everybody who likes Fred Astaire is an admirer of abstract art, and he who wants to dance like him, wants to be an abstract artist."