Above the Water

Josef Albers, artist

1888–1976

Above the Water, 1944

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: woodcut

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 335 x 253 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 13 3/16 x 9 15/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 409 x 333 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 1/8 x 13 1/8 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 25 x 20 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 1982.0111

Not on display

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Label texts

Archive Label 2003:
By 1916, Josef Albers was working as a printmaker in the art school in the Ruhr region of Germany. In 1920, he began to study design at the Bauhaus in Weimar and by 1925, he was among the first students to become teaching Masters. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi government, Albers was invited to teach in the United States at the new Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he remained until 1949, when he relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, to assume the chair of Yale University’s Department of Design.

This woodcut is one of the last in the artist’s woodblocks and linoleum cuts done between 1933, when he left Germany, and 1944, when he was settling in as an influential teacher of notable young artists at Black Mountain College. This series provides a tangible record of Albers’s distilled use of tone, shading, and color intensities in combination with geometric forms.