[1][2] Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood.

With the Bauhaus's move to Dessau in 1925, he was promoted to professor and married Anni Albers, a student at the institution and a textile artist.

He was appointed as the head of the painting program at the experimental liberal arts institution Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a position he held until 1949.

His childhood included practical training in engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring, giving Josef versatility and lifelong confidence in the handling and manipulation of diverse materials.

From 1916 to 1919 he began his work as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbschule in Essen, where he learnt stained-glass making with Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker.

[6] In 1919 he moved to Munich, Germany, to study at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, where he was a pupil of Max Doerner and Franz Stuck.

Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form.

[10] The director and founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course 'Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts, because Albers came from that background and had appropriate practice and knowledge.

As a younger instructor, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among established artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.

At Black Mountain, his students included Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Susan Weil.

In 1962, as a fellow at Yale, he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies of Fine Arts for an exhibit and lecture on his work.

Among these were distinctive geometric fireplaces for the Rouse (1954) and DuPont (1959) houses, the façade of Manuscript Society, one of Yale's secret senior groups (1962), and a design for the Mt.

Both men — one an influential teacher and artist, the other a stereo-recording pioneer — driven by strong convictions and passion for their respective crafts.

"[citation needed] Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist.

[22] In the 1960s, Walter Gropius, who was designing the Pan Am Building with Emery Roth & Sons and Pietro Belluschi, commissioned Albers to make a mural.

Other architectural works include Gemini[25] (1972), a stainless steel relief for the Grand Avenue National Bank lobby in Kansas City, Missouri, and Reclining Figure (1972), a mosaic mural for the Celanese Building in Manhattan destroyed in 1980.

At the invitation of a former student, the Australian architect Harry Seidler, Albers designed the mural Wrestling (1976) for the Mutual Life Centre in Sydney.

[52] In 2019, his "colossal" mural, Manhattan, was reinstalled at the Walter Gropius-designed 200 Park Avenue (Metlife) Building, New York, following an almost two decade absence.

"While we appreciate its importance in the art community, it just doesn't work for us anymore," a Metlife representative is quoted as saying, at the time of its removal (2000).

In each case Lee suggested that Albers made fundamental errors with serious consequences for his claims about colour and his pedagogical method.

Lee suggested that Albers' belief in the importance of colour deception was related to a misconception about aesthetic appreciation (that it depends upon some kind of confusion about visual perception).

Lee suggested that the scientific colour hypothesis of Edwin H. Land should be considered in lieu of the concepts put forward by Albers.

Finally, Lee called for a reassessment of Albers' art as necessary, following successful challenge to the foundational colour concepts that were the basis of his corpus.