GREGOIRE
JEANMONOD
Art and its stories as an inspiration
Josef Albers
Homage to the Square: New Planting
1956
Take the time to convey
in Germany, he then developed experimental pedagogy at Black Mountain College in Carolina
from the North, before taking the direction of
Yale University Design Department
in Connecticut. From 1920 to 1958: thirty-
eight years of teaching over the years
which he trained some of the artists
the most influential of the European avant-garde
Europeans and Americans . But if the pedago-
gie was his first calling - he was
teacher at the age of 20 - he made it a component major part of his own artistic process. Because his exchanges with the students, at the antipodes of a masterly discourse of knowing to non-knowing, allowed him according to him "to learn as much from his students as his students learned from him."
The son of a house painter and theater designer, the naturalized German American Josef Albers became one of the pioneers of Op Art - or
optical art - and a recognized theorist of this
which he called "the interaction of colors".
His work as an artist, based essentially
tially on juxtapositions of forms
colored, consists of series of which the largest
famous is called "Ho mage to the Square":
more than a thousand paintings, drawings and
engravings always presenting the same mo-
tif - squares nested inside each other - with different color shades.
​
Parallel to his activity as a painter, Albers devoted his life to teaching. Professor at the Bauhaus
Josef Albers at Black Mountain College
What we can take away:
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Explain what we know to less experienced interlocutors can pass for a one-way transfer of knowledge, from which only the other, as a learner, would benefit. But more than a gift, pedagogy is a sharing. Because transmitting implies remaining attentive to the other, to their questions and their astonishments, to shed new light on what we believe we master, and to enrich our own vision.