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 extraordinary detailed corpus of data about the materials he employed, which he was used to carefully write on verso of his artworks, could make unnecessary any attempt to study them. 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 verso. This latter point is in particular, under the point of view of Conservation Science, a very important contribution, considering the high number of colors and of 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 came out from chemical industries to be launche don the market. By means of diverse spectroscopic non-invasive analyses, a materials overview of a considerable group of his both earlier and later works is presented, discussing different technique employed as well as conservation issues.