NOTRE DAME, IN.- Josef Albers was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, teacher, and theoretician of art. His work at the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College and Yale University was influential in both the Color Field and Op Art movements. Formulation : Articulation, 1972 was published by Harry N. Abrams and Ives and Sillman, four years before Albers’s death in 1976. Albers worked over a period of two years to create the one hundred and twenty-seven serigraphs or screened prints organized into two portfolios. Each portfolio contains thirty-three folders on which one, two or four serigraphs are printed.

The twenty-six works selected for this exhibition are from the two-volume print suite, Formulation : Articulation, 1972 generously given to the Snite Museum by Jane and Jim Griffin '45. The images represent a more-than-four-decades gathering of the Albers investigation into color, perception and abstraction, although the collection was not meant as a retrospective of past works. Geometric design and complex relationships of color are the subjects for exploration into the effects of perception-such as the illusion of movement and the interaction of adjacent colors.

Formulation : Articulation can be seen as a summation of the artist’s teaching strategies. Albers’s writing, work, and teaching profoundly influenced a generation of artists and visual arts instruction the world over. From his iconic Homage to the Square series, (of which three examples on masonite can be viewed in the Snite’s 20th Century Gallery) to lesser-known images, these prints display the optical possibilities of color and design.

Information included on the extended labels is quoted from notes written by Albers for each of the plates and included in the portfolio. Albers refers to these notes as “Statements of Content” in which he discusses the design and color selections, and often comments on the work, in relation to other plates in the portfolio or to the medium in which the original image was executed.