LONDON.- The first full-scale biography of one of the 20th century’s great makers, theorists and painters has been published to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus.

While Josef Albers’ Bauhaus colleagues Klee, Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer are familiar names, Albers himself has remained inscrutable. He is best known as the painter of the Homages to the Square, a series of over 2,000 seemingly tightly controlled experiments in the interaction of colour. Yet he did not begin these pictures until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, maker and theorist, much of it pursued in the United States following the dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933.

Born in Germany and later married to the textile artist Anni Albers, his extensive archive includes letters from fellow artists John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Eva Hesse; colleagues such as Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson; and fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so, too, were his interests. Albers started life at the Bauhaus as a glassmaker, ran their renowned wallpaper workshop, and designed furniture and fonts that are still in production eighty years later. He pioneered the study of colour at Black Mountain College, organized its famed ‘Summer Sessions’ with guest tutors from Willem de Kooning to Merce Cunningham, and went on to head the design department at Yale. His many, devoted students at Yale included Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Michael Craig-Martin.

Drawing on extensive unpublished writings, documents and illustrations, Darwent’s compelling narrative offers a broad view of not only the artistic and political currents, but also the friendships and rivalries that formed the backdrop to Albers’ creative output.

Charles Darwent is an art critic. He contributes regularly to the Guardian, ArtReview and the Art Newspaper and was the Independent on Sunday’s art critic from 1997 to 2013. His publications include Mondrian in London and The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing.

Advance praise for Josef Albers: Life and Work:

‘Lively, lucid, compelling and revealing, offering fascinating insights into Albers – as artist and teacher – while convincingly reframing his place at the heart of modernism on both sides of the Atlantic.’ --Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern