Artist. He gained renown as an abstract artist, color-theorist, teacher and author. Beginning his career in Weimar, Germany, he taught at the famous Bauhaus school of fine arts. He fled from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1933, and taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After teaching at Yale University, he became a United States citizen in 1939. Starting in 1949, he painted colored squares within squares, using unmixed color directly from the tube. He named this well-known series of hard-edge color interactions, “Homage to the Square”, and continued painting these geometric variations for 25 years. As a pioneer of modernism he had an important influence on many of his students, including Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil. He was the first living artist with a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York. He and textile artist Anni Fleischman Albers were married for 51 years. (bio by: Jan Franco)