Arts and Letters

Just before the dawn of the twentieth century, when Josef Albers was born, world-around humanity's reality was OBVIOUS—everything man could directly see, smell, touch, and hear with his own senses. Then came the discovery of radium, the electron, x-rays, cosmic rays, electromagnetics in general. Today, 99.999% of the reality of hard science and technology is sensed only indirectly by macro-micro instrumental extensions. The reality of 1977 A.D. is 99.999% NON-OBVIOUS—INVISIBLE and only contactable by mind-trained brains and the instruments they have devised.

The aesthetic of the new reality is integrity, for only through absolute integrity of coping can the frontiers be reached. Macrocosmically, we have a 12 BILLION LIGHT YEAR RADIUS, a sweep-out, and microcosmically, we have AN ATOM VIEWING PENETRATION.

To comprehend where the artist Albers fits into the swiftly evolving episodes of this scenario, MAN IN THE UNIVERSE, requires cosmic scale consideration. As we shall see, at any scale of consideration, Albers proves to be great, for his aesthetic integrity is maximally inclusive and refined.

In July, 1969, the significance of artists such as Josef Albers was momentarily overwhelmed by the moon landing news. Though the names of the astronauts doing visible reality's televised tasks had the widest and most dramatic publication in all human history, their individual names became ever more difficult to recall because our subconscious judgments know that the accomplishment was a complex cooperative task of millions of people working almost entirely within the invisible reality whose greatest heroes probably were the Houston, Texas, Mission Control Center's Corps, on the average nineteen years old, who operated the battery of omni-computerized, electro-magnetic wave-fed, space-flight's remote control consoles. As the world held its breath and the astronauts their courage, the nineteen-year-olds had the mind-brain responsibility of split-second judging whether the data was falling within anticipated limits of the flight plan and when to alert the mission controller himself regarding any and all deviations from the flight plan. Experience had shown that the conditioned reflexing of those over nineteen was too insensitive, askew and laggard to permit the faultless, coolly comprehending performance required and to do so within the exquisitely critical time limits, uniquely characterizing each function.

Each time the tidal wave of such world news subsides and is followed by moments of everyday continuity, we rediscover Albers and his pictures to be ever more enduringly satisfactory. Graduating altogether from history's precedents of Athens, Florence, Paris, etc., or from any local geographic schools and from powerful individual patronage, Earthian's arts and letters are now entering an entirely new world forum of popular, initially fickle but ultimately magnificent patronage.

International physical events first, individual physical events second, make today's great headlines. Happily amusing, moneymaking arts and letters get whole third section news accommodation, while seriously bemusing, monetarily unexploitable arts and letters get small paragraphs, or none. Television pays the world-champion pugilist and his challenger over a million dollars for the exclusive right to broadcast the only-for-minutes lasting, close-in scene of two human beings employing humanity's great cerebral faculties only for punching dummies. Nobel prize scientists make the news not because of their scientific accomplishments, but because Nobel awards had been for many pre-inflation years world history's biggest money prizes—a lifetime-supporting fortune.

At first, slowly, then ever faster, history reverses the order of prominently remembered people and events and the metaphysical gradually transcends the physical in human reconsideration and inspiration. Out goes Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for twelve successive years—Hitler—and in comes a more enduring Picasso. Emerging much more slowly, but far longer to endure come such modest scientist-artists as Albers, whose strength is his metaphysical integrity and omni-humanity concern.

Since we seek to comprehend Albers and his metaphysical mind's command of his brain-monitored articulation and since there is confusion in the arts and letters regarding the meaning of metaphysics, mind, and brain, we turn to the scientists for definitions. Physicists agree that the physical consists always and only of inter-transformable energy as radiation or matter. The physicists also agree that whatever is physical can always be made to move an instrument needle either by electromagnetics or gravity. All human experiences that cannot be made to move an instrument needle are metaphysical. Thinking and mathematical conceptualizing are metaphysical, as are all the concerns of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Nothing ever comprehended or conceived by Albers moved instrument needles.

Science's only metaphysically stateable principles, which from time to time in history are found to be governing all known physical phenomena of the Universe, qualify as generalized principles only if they are found to be without exception and as such inherently eternal.

The brains of man and other creatures always and only coordinate, store, and retrieve the successive special-case sets of physical information fed in by their physical senses. Brains deal only with the Temporal and the Terminal. Brains spontaneously ask for a physical explanation of the beginning and end of the Universe. Brains apprehend the physical, minds comprehend the metaphysical—the principles manifest in the physical patternings. Only metaphysically conceptualizing minds have the capacity to discover eternal interrelationships existing only between, and not in, any special-case part of a system.

As an example, for millions of years man was aware that from time to time, five somewhat differently colored and a little bit brighter "stars" reappeared and lingered for varying periods. In all the night sky, only these five brighter ones moved around in startling contrast to the fixity of pattern of the myriads of others. Despite some impressive identification of the rates of reappearance of these Olympian God-identified brighter ones, naught else of importance concerning them was ascertained before 1500 A.D. because man had as yet no effective calculating capabilities. Try to do multiplication or division with Roman numerals.

Calculation became popularly feasible with the publication in North Africa in 1200 A.D. of al Khuwarizmi's disclosure (made in 850 A.D.) that Arabic arithmetic, like the abacus, provides progressive sidewise positioning in successive rows of the products of each one integer's multiplication and division. In 1200 A.D., however, illiteracy was so abysmally prevalent that knowledge of this calculating capability took 300 years to reach the students of Northern Italy and Southern Germany. However, with its arrival in that region came the birth of modern science: the mathematically-navigated voyaging of Columbus and the chain of astronomical breakthroughs of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, as well as the breakthroughs of the scientist-artists: Leonardo, Michelangelo, et al.

The astro-physical chain of events altogether compounded to permit Newton's discovery of the gravitational law, which can be stated only in metaphysical terms and which showed that the intensity of the interattraction of any two celestial bodies is initially proportional to the product of their masses and varies at a rate of the second power of the arithmetical distances progressively intervening—double the distance and reduce the interattraction to one quarter of its previous intensity.

Ask Newton what gravity is and he will answer, "It is a co-varying interrelationship of two or more bodies inherently non-disclosable by any one of the bodies considered separately."

The welter of misinformation of all the yesterdays is each day displaced by a greater inventory of more reliable fundamental information regarding an ever larger and more inclusive world concept. The nineteen-year-old and younger space flight-guiding generation mentioned earlier were not born brighter or more sensitive than their elders. They were born exactly the same, but their innate brightness and sensitivity is every year less blemished and dulled by the loving, misinformed ministrations of the older ones. Experiment shows that the present generation of nineteen and younger when exposed to Albers spontaneously sense his integrity and respond comfortably to his aesthetic communication. The younger they come the better they like him.

I have reviewed all the foregoing to identify what it is that minds can do that brains cannot, for Albers always used his mind. Only minds can discover and employ the only-mathematically-expressible principles governing eternal interrelationships. Interrelationship was the essence of Albers' concern. Brains deal only with the sensational, the special-case, terminal events. Only minds can conduct science and produce art. After minds' discoveries, brains can be programmed to remember the co-varying formulae of those eternal interrelationships. All that is of enduring value in human history relates to the human employment in theory and deed of the metaphysical principles which only human minds have discovered and only human minds can employ.

Cosmic in scale, all of the foregoing is relevant to Josef Albers, for he was a scientist-artist—an original discoverer of cosmic principles who deliberately and lovingly realized them in special-case physical articulations.

Albers' articulations were many and varied, but all of them comprehended the eternal generalized principles governing physical formation and transformation which he communicated so eloquently to the artist-scientist innate in others as to inspire a whole generation of mid-twentieth century students. His inspiration of students was so great as to impart regenerative momentum to the inspiration he had engendered. This made teachers of his students, who, in turn, became teachers. Albers' perceptivity was so magnificent and his sensitivity so humanly thoughtful as to ultimately advance all of human sensitivity and comprehension, a fact which will be clearly realized only half a century hence when the augmentative waves of comprehension and articulation which he propagated have travelled embracingly around our planet.

Albers' regenerativity was first manifest as one of the small team of teachers during the prolific years 1923-1933 of the German Bauhaus.

In 1933 Albers became one of the small founding staff of teacher-trustees of Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he stayed until 1948, within which 15 years he was the benign Rector of that "dwarf star" college during its most brilliant world-around-sighted "nova" period.

In 1950 he became head of the Department of Design at Yale University where he remained until retirement in 1958.

Albers' artist-scientist teaching was always gently unassuming, exquisitely simple, yet immaculately elegant.

Albers' sensitivity gave him access to nuances of the physical Universe's most powerful secrets. It opened, for instance, a whole field of mathematically brilliant insights into the positive and negative foldability of paper or other crisp films or metal sheets with results as multi-dimensionally beautiful as they were scientifically surprising, for some of them physically anticipated complex electromagnetic waves as well as Einstein, Reiman, curved space wave propagations.

But most memorable of Albers' teachings were his lectures on the harmonic properties of color. Albers' compositions in color harmonics were as comprehensively ranging, exquisitely defined, progressively evolved, and profoundly simple as musical compositions by Bach. Scientifically informed regarding human optical mechanics, Albers employed time incremental notation considerate of inherent tuning-in lags and human perception which, like the musical composers’ formal notation, clearly defined harmonic color increments of various magnitudes of contrast, emphasis, frequency, harmonic mix, and duration-modulating.

One Sunday morning in August, 1948 when I was fortunate enough to be present, Albers, ever irrepressibly eager to have his students share his own delight in color harmonics, developed his system of simple squares within squares and of squares beside squares as explicit articulations of his color harmonics with, for instance, the powerful and subtle effects of very minutely varying widths and numbers of color bands of the concentric squares. The varying band widths were proportional to the magnitude of any one given color's juxtapositional properties, as those brought out certain scientifically predictable and intuitively sensed harmonic effects in adjacent colors. When he developed this form, he did not do so with any idea of its becoming a gallery and collectors' item. It was only Albers' love of his students and his desire to have them share the delight his spontaneous insights afforded that inadvertently introduced this new painting form, now known to museums and collectors the world around. Its birth, like the rest of Albers' work, was never conceited. He never deliberately strove to develop a collector-recognizable personal idiom. Albers had no such thoughts and did not profess to being an artist. He professed only his love of communicating to others his joy in realizing special-case expositions of the exquisite beauty of the set of generalized principles he had been so fortunate as to find. He sought also to share his joy of awareness of the vast range of special-case realizations inherent within those generalized principles.

Any one lucky enough to have known Josef Albers cannot think of him without thinking a great deal about his extraordinary wife, Anni, and of her own weaving art. Since Anni, herself, has for decades been recognized around the world as a great artist, her story has been told by others and will continue to be told by others. But the mystery that envelops all that is great and will always envelop the art of Josef Albers has woven deeply into its mystical warp and woof a half century of the gently loving ministrations of Anni who called her always-clearly-to-her "great artist" husband, Yuppi.