Light and Shade Sculpture Garden
Module 2

When he founded the Bauhaus in 1919, the architect Walter Gropius was seeking to bring together the arts and crafts. The goal was to train a new type of artist in the field of design and architecture to create products suitable for industrial mass production. The school set out to shape society as a whole by influencing the way people lived. Creating collective “total artworks” (Gesamtkunstwerke) was one important aspect. Interdisciplinarity and experimentation were also central to the educational concept.

Training at the Bauhaus began with a single-semester preliminary course, using new and experimental educational methods to impart knowledge of materials and basic design principles. The students developed spatial structures, concentrating on materials, construction, function and production. The aim was to optimise production and minimise use of materials, energy and time.

The Swiss painter and art teacher Johannes Itten designed the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Itten saw individual sensibility, subjective recognition and objective comprehension as the basis of creative design. His teaching as head of the preliminary course (1919–23) concentrated on studies of nature and materials, along with colour and form theory; analyses of the Old Masters and life drawing were also included. When Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy took over the preliminary course, which he ran jointly with Josef Albers. Moholy-Nagy shifted the focus from artistic to technical questions, but retained Itten’s teaching methods, encouraging students to conduct their own material studies. Rather than promoting pure individuality, he sought to systematically introduce his students – in a synthesis of the senses – to basic technical principles such as statics, dynamics and equilibrium. In 1928 Josef Albers became official head of the preliminary course. He encouraged students to investigate the properties of materials like metal, wood and paper using simple tools, and also placed special weight on the effect and representation of light, shade and perspective.

Josef Albers came to the Bauhaus in Weimar as a student in 1920, from the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He took the preliminary course under Johannes Itten and attended the glass painting workshop. In 1923 he was appointed to the staff by Walter Gropius, with a teaching role in the preliminary course and also (although still a journeyman) master of works in the glass painting workshop. In 1925 he was made a junior master, from 1925 to 1927–28 he headed the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Dessau jointly with László Moholy-Nagy. After Moholy-Nagy departed in 1928, Albers became the sole head of the preliminary course and until 1929 also head of the joinery workshop. From 1932 Albers headed the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Berlin and taught drawing and lettering. After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Josef and Anni Albers emigrated to the United States where they were employed by the Black Mountain College in Ashville, North Carolina, at the recommendation of the Museum of Modern Art. Albers taught art there until 1949. His teaching attracted young artists to Ashville, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg.

Links to works by Josef Albers on the website of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation:
https://albersfoundation.org/art/josef-albers/glass/index/
https://albersfoundation.org/art/josef-albers/paintings/homages-to-the-square/index/