The Drawings of Josef Albers

Shortly after Josef Albers's death in 1976, a scarcely known and surprising segment of his work was discovered: the representational drawings he made before going to the Bauhaus in 1920. These early works—self-portraits, portraits of friends and relatives, views of houses and public buildings in his native Westphalia, sketches of animals, travel scenes, nudes, caricatures of his students—reveal a playful and informal side of Albers's character, as well as the root of his fascination with the interplay of two- and three-dimensional space. Presented in conjunction with some of his later abstract drawings, which are characterized by the familiar geometry of his work from the Bauhaus on, they round out our sense of the complex but consistent themes that shaped his evolution as a pioneer painter, teacher, and color theorist.