CHAPTER 4: Josef Albers' Use of 20th Century Pigments: A Non-invasive Analytical Approach

A survey about Josef Albers' painting materials is presented through non-invasive spectroscopic analyses. Josef Albers (1888–1976), a German-born, Bauhaus-educated designer, moved in 1934 to the United States, where he became a globally influential artist and teacher. His life-long interests in visual perception and interaction of color culminated in the series of paintings, Homage to the Square, for which he is best known. The extraordinarily detailed corpus of data about the materials he employed, which he used to carefully write on the verso of his artworks, could make any attempt to study them unnecessary. Nevertheless, a deeper knowledge about Albers' technique is useful to assess some conservation issues, to characterize materials where no records appear, to study support preparation and understand which pigment constitutes the single color named on the tubes and recorded by the painter on the verso. From the perspective of Conservation Science, this latter point is a particularly important contribution, considering the high numbers of colors and producers he used during his career. His artworks are therefore a real training ground for understanding the painting Zeitgeist of an epoch in which many newborn dyes and pigments were developed and launched on the market by the chemical industries. By means of diverse spectroscopic non-invasive analyses, a material overview of a highly representative group of both his earlier and later works is presented, discussing different techniques employed as well as conservation issues.