Think!

I believe that thinking is necessary in art as everywhere else and that a clear head is never in the way of genuine feelings.

One of the nation's most influential art teachers likes to fling these fighting words into the teeth of the abstract-expressionist storm. Josef Albers, chairman of the design department at Yale, clearly deplores self-expression of the big, drippy, half-conscious sort made chic by Jackson Pollock & Co. "What we need is less expression and more visualization," he says. "I try to teach my students to visualize."

What Albers sets himself to visualizing for the purpose of making pictures was made plain last week in a retrospective show of his art at the Yale University Art Gallery. There were squares within squares done in colors straight from the tube, and more complicated geometrical arrangements done in black, grey and white. At first view the show was simply forbidding; in time it became a puzzle, and finally a demonstration.

Albers' squares within squares assumed an unsettling life of their own; the colors seemed to merge and separate again, the squares to grow larger or smaller. Like the optical illusions in a child's puzzle book, the geometrical figures began to dance oddly--shifting their places and changing shape right under the viewer's nose--demonstrating the power of life and movement in the most elementary forms and colors. "The concern of the artist," Albers maintains, "is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect." If that is not the only concern of most artists, it certainly is in Albers' case; he has devoted his life to widening the discrepancy.

Put It in Writing. "I like to push a red," Albers explains, "so it will change its identity, becoming green or some other color." The reason he can do so is that the eye never sees colors quite as they are but always modified by surrounding colors. In Albers' strictly controlled pictures, the modification becomes an almost magical transformation. He himself cannot tell which tubes his painted colors came from without looking at the written records on the backs of his pictures. Using those records, another man could copy the pictures precisely--which Albers finds a flattering and not at all disturbing thought.

Albers chose squares within squares as the composition for his color experiments because the square is "human," i.e., an intellectual construction which almost never occurs in nature. His monochromatic experiments in form require more complex shapes, but these, too, he keeps geometrical and tightly organized. "The measure of art," Albers believes, "is the ratio of effort to effect." By this yardstick, his Biconjugate (see cut) rates high, for it draws the greatest possible variety from the least possible shapes and shades. Looking at the top of the picture, the two figures seem identical but reversed; moving to the bottom, they become exactly alike. The four main shapes look transparent; yet the eye cannot quite decide which shines through which.

Faith & Works. Born 68 years ago in the Ruhr Valley, Albers prepared slowly and thoroughly for his distinguished career. After studying and teaching in Berlin, Essen and Munich, he went back to art school at 32 in the Bauhaus, founded by Functional Architect Walter Gropius. At 35 he became a teacher at the Bauhaus, working alongside Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In the craftsmanlike tradition of the school, he designed the first modern bent laminated-wood chair, made stained glass windows out of broken bottles. When Hitler closed the Bauhaus,

Germany lost Albers to America. At North Carolina's little (25 students) Black Mountain College, and later at Yale, he opened hundreds of students' eyes to art's basic elements.

Is Albers' approach perhaps too basic? By favoring intellect over emotion, does he bring art too close to science? Yale's answer is no: Since the purpose of art teaching is chiefly to impart knowledge and skills, it should be as scientific in spirit as Albers makes his courses. But in terms of his own art the answer is harder. If the paint-slinging frenzies of the abstract expressionists strike most people as being plain convulsive, Albers' pristine experiments give rise to the opposite complaint: that they are too tricky and cold.

Yet the tricks are not there to fool people but to be discovered. And under the apparent coolness of Albers' art lies a warm philosophy. His pictures play with two sets of supposed irreconcilables: order v. freedom and identity v. change. They demonstrate his abiding faith that these things are not irreconcilable at all.

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