On the Fate of Josef Albers’s Color Studies

In the course of his decades-long explorations into the interaction of color, Josef Albers famously used commercial oil paints straight from the tube and unmixed, employing paints from over 60 manufacturers. To achieve his subtle perceptual effects, he capitalized on incremental variations in pigments from different companies -- the cerulean blue from Shiva just a bit darker, the cerulean blue from Grumbacher just a bit more greenish. Among the materials remaining in Albers’s studio after his death in 1976 were over 1,000 pigment studies documenting such differences. To keep track of the variations between pigments, he applied patches of paint onto scraps of cardboard and blotting paper, and then penciled in the names of the paints and the manufacturers. These were color samples, used as studio references. The studies were set aside for future reference, or just as often discarded when a painting was finished. The pigment studies are essential research material for the Albers catalogue raisonné. They are also of value for scientific research into twentieth-century commercial pigments altogether. Although the studies were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, since the 1980s they have attracted the interest of curators and galleries interested in artists’ processes and conceptual analyses. The studies have acquired exhibition histories and, in some instances, provenance. What began as studio tools have become works of art. As a consequence, the scope of the artist’s catalogue raisonné has expanded significantly, while the continuity of the artist’s archive has potentially been disrupted.