E
xecuted at the pinnacle of Josef Albers’ artistic output, Orange Façade is a glowing example of the artist’s notable Adobe or Variant series. Albers was deeply inspired by the Pre-Columbian architecture he encountered on his many trips to Mexico from 1935 through the 1960s with his wife Anni. The abstracted geometric forms so prolific throughout the country and culture’s art, architecture and natural landscape resonated with Albers’s immersion at the Bauhaus, as well as his color theory teachings at Black Mountain College. The consequential unification of form and color within the artist’s formulaic boundaries reflected the world of inspiration that surrounded Josef and Anni Albers in Mexico.
Orange Façade captures the shifting shadows cast by the Mexican sun over the façades of the country’s adobe dwellings, just as the many Variant or Adobe paintings by the artist suggest. Albers’s juxtapositions of color replaced the necessity for varied hues to suggest light and shadow—the abstraction of light through color was directly descended from the artist’s influential Bauhaus teachings. Albers found freedom in repetition, particularly in the endless opportunities available through varied combinations of color through his most idiosyncratic series. As demonstrated by the methodical recipe of paints inscribed on the reverse of Orange Façade, the process of painting and the way Albers applied the medium—each color applied in one primary coat with a palette knife directly from the tube—was a ritualistic art in and of itself. The Cadmium, Mars and Ochre Yellows of Orange Façade hum vibrantly in concert like the burnt sun against the earth, each color painted in an even, balanced veil. Albers’ attention to the materiality of the medium, as well as the colors he selected for Orange Façade was parallel to his adulation of the Mexican culture’s reverence of and reliance upon natural materials.
Following the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 at the onset of World War II, Josef and Anni Albers emigrated to the United States and found themselves at Black Mountain College, where Josef Albers became the head of the art department and an inspiration amongst emerging artists and students at the institution. Albers’ teachings at Black Mountain College, heavily steeped in the theories of the Bauhaus, were centered around color and form and he argue: “to produce form with psychic effect, that is form with emotional content, makes an artist” (Josef Albers cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Josef Albers: A Retrospective, 1988, p. 52). Albers’ attention to light was also descended from his earlier work with glass as a medium—the limitations of the material’s opacity and potential coloration, as well as the necessity for the artist’s precision is evident in perceptual and varied portrayal of light in his paintings. The luminosity of Orange Façade is a testimony to his emphasis on the perception and phenomenon of light through color, particularly beginning with the works inspired by his experiences in Mexico. Just as the Mayans oriented their most sacred structures according to the sun, Albers’ paintings radiate with his abstracted intervention of light through color and form.
