Josef Albers's Formulation: Articulation was released in 1972, just four years before the artist's death. The landmark portfolio comprises 127 screen prints across sixty-six sheets, reflecting more than four decades of sustained investigation into the relationship between color and optical perception. Text by Albers accompanies each sheet and situates each composition within his oeuvre while articulating how color, structure and perception—while distinct—are interdependent. Working closely with Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman on production, Albers applied a level of rigor to the portfolio comparable to that found in his paintings. This meticulous attention during production was essential to articulating how distinct color relationships operate in practice across the two-volume portfolio printed by Sirocco Printers and co-published as a limited edition by Harry N. Abrams, New York, and Ives-Sillman, New Haven.
JOSEF ALBERS | Formulation: Articulation | Folio 2 / Folder 2, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
Sewell Sillman, who was Albers's student at Black Mountain College before following him to Yale University in the early 1950s, played a central role in the realization of Formulation: Articulation. The portfolio was originally envisioned as part of a series of art books to be released by Harry N. Abrams and made available for the price of $35, but Sillman and Albers realized that after nearly five years of production, the project would not be accomplished at the intended price point. Instead, the portfolio was released in two volumes—a decision that allowed the weighty portfolio to be handled by an average person.
JOSEF ALBERS | Formulation: Articulation | Folio 2 / Folder 13, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
While many of the images featured in Formulation: Articulation are derived from earlier examples of Albers's work across a range of media, each folder in the portfolio is considered a unique work. Reflecting on his career, Albers reimagined compositions from earlier periods, employing color relationships made possible by pigments that were unavailable to him at the time of their original conception.
The portfolio contains a wide variety of color studies, with a total of seventeen double-sheets consisting of works from Albers's Homage to the Square series. These squares of solid color are essentially studies into the ways that colors interact with one another. Albers notes in the description accompanying Folio 1: Folder 15:
This interaction of colors exists in all color combinations to a larger or smaller degree, but is in most cases unrecognized even to the trained eye. Interaction permits the knowing colorist to make opaque colors look transparent, heavy ones turn light, colorless neutrals become colorful, warm ones seem cool, and vice versa. It becomes possible to make equal colors look different and different ones look alike, and even defined shapes as well as color areas vanish from our sight.
Upon viewing these works, one realizes that "though the works may look simple they are in fact enormously complicated to make, and even to look at… he uses the term meditation pictures with good reason." Albers himself said of the series that artists will look at the center square first because they are used to starting paintings in the middle so they won't smear the paint as they work toward the edge, while other people will look at the outer square first.
Created after decades of sustained inquiry and realized through an unusually rigorous production process, Formulation: Articulation occupies an important position within Albers's oeuvre. By translating principles first developed in painting into silkscreen, Albers demonstrated that printmaking could function not merely as a secondary or reproductive format, but as a site of independent investigation-whether the prints are individually considered or collectively viewed. The portfolio's scale, material precision, and conceptual ambition underscore its significance as one of the most fully realized expressions of Albers's thinking on color at the end of his life.
JOSEF ALBERS | Formulation: Articulation | Folio 1 / Folder 31, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
Works from Formulation: Articulation are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. For more information about the sixty-six folders that comprise Formulation: Articulation, please email info@zanebennettgallery.com, or browse all works by Josef Albers available at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art.
JOSEF ALBERS |Formulation: Articulation | Folio 1 / Folder 25, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | Formulation: Articulation | Folio 1 / Folder 13, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | Formulation: Articulation | Folio 1 / Folder 26, 1972. Color screen print, paper: 15 x 40 in (38.1 x 101.6 cm)
Photos by Marylene Mey, courtesy of Zane Bennett Contemporary Art (© Josef & Anni Albers Foundation)
