Josef Albers and the Bauhaus: How a Lifetime of Colour Became a Rug

In 1933, the Bauhaus closed. Founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius, it had survived fourteen years, three cities, and the relentless hostility of a political culture that regarded its ideas as dangerous. It was, in many respects, correct to do so. The Bauhaus was dangerous — to complacency, to ornament for its own sake, to the comfortable assumption that beauty and function occupied separate territories.

Josef Albers had been at the Bauhaus almost from the beginning, first as a student and then as a teacher. When the school closed, he left Germany for America, where he would eventually teach at Yale for a decade and produce the body of work that secured his place in the history of modern art. His series Homage to the Square, begun in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976, consisted of hundreds of paintings — each one a set of nested squares, each one an investigation into how colour behaves in relation to other colours.

The conclusions he reached were not simple. A colour is never just itself. It is always also the colours around it — advancing or receding, warming or cooling, expanding or contracting depending entirely on its context. The same yellow placed against white and then against black becomes, perceptually, two different yellows. The same square, given different surroundings, changes size. Albers spent twenty-six years proving this, painting after painting, with a rigour that was entirely Bauhaus and an obsession that was entirely his own.

The Josef rug is made in that spirit. Rows of pale aqua squares recede into a deep indigo field. A single pale yellow rectangle floats above the composition — an open window, or a thought held just before it resolves. The bamboo silk catches light differently from every angle, giving the indigo ground a richness that shifts between blue, black and near-green across the course of a day. It is, in the most direct sense, a surface that changes as you look at it. Albers would have understood this immediately.

Hand-knotted at 100 knots per square inch by Goodweave-certified artisans in Nepal, the Josef is made from New Zealand wool and bamboo silk. Limited to an edition of 5.

View the Josef rug →