Midnight and Noon VIII

Josef Albers

1964

Color lithograph

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Josef Albers studied and taught at the Bauhaus, a renowned modernist German art and design school, where he developed theories on the relativity of color perception. After immigrating to America in the 1930s, he joined the faculty of the experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which served as an important training ground for the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 50s. There Albers urged his students, including future powerhouses Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg, to... Do less in order to do more. In 1949, Albers began what would become his best known and most influential project: an extended ser