Josef Albers at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Exhibition of His Paintings and Prints

Josef Albers has said that his great negative ambition has always been to do work that didn't look like anyone else's, work that was not reminiscent. In this, of course, he has succeeded. And, curiously enough, the place he has carved for himself, the position he has claimed through the insistence of his work, has been resistant to direct imitation. Albers' uniqueness resides in the ways his painting has gone along the parallel roads marked Science and Poetry. In the late fifties and early sixties there was much panic-stricken thought abroad that these roads, the routes of the two cultures, were mutually exclusive and even antagonistic. But there has always been art that made nonsense of this false duality, and Albers' art is a recent and contemporary refutation of it.

The scientific aspect of his researches is in his color concepts that deal with both light and paint, but primarily with what the eye is capable of distinguishing. To hear Albers on the subject of what is possible in translating the subtlety of painted color into silk-screen printing and color photography is to engage in a postgraduate discussion in discrimination. Yellow, he affirms, cannot be photographed successfully in all its gradations; reds are available in printers' inks that elude the manufacturer of paint. As a consequence of his training and teaching at the Bauhaus, Albers is totally committed to all such details of his craft; it is his natural inclination as well. [...] His has truly been a remarkable career of devotion to the craft and art of painting. The Metropolitan Museum is proud to be the vehicle for exhibiting the works, both painting and graphic, that demonstrate his achievement.