Art: Think!

• Share

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.