Transformation B

Josef Albers

1950 · Engraving · Drawings and Prints

Produced the year that Albers became head of the department of design at the Yale University School of Art, the series of four Transformation prints emerged from the experimentation that characterized his earlier woodblock prints at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. By shifting to the mechanical rendering of geometrical forms (through machine engraving), Albers stripped away the materiality of his earlier work, achieving an almost preternatural purity of form. Influenced by the appeal to technology of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, Albers’s print displays floating wireframe shapes against a black background in an example of geometrical abstraction devoid of scale and exterior reference.

Artist

Josef Albers

Date

1950

Medium

Engraving

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of the Josef Albers Foundation Inc., 1971