Formulation: Articulation

Josef Albers spent his final years on the Formulation: Articulation portfolios, a two-part set of silkscreens that stands as his own summary of a lifetime spent testing what color does to the eye.

This 2006 Thames & Hudson edition, introduced by T.G. Rosenthal, reproduces all 127 screenprints across the portfolios' full sequence at 168 pages, tracking Albers as he revisits the nested squares of Homage to the Square and the linear studies that preceded it. Printed between 1972 and his death in 1976, the plates function as a retrospective in a medium Albers controlled completely, each color relationship built up in flat, unmodulated screens so that the interaction between adjacent hues, not any illusion of depth, carries the image.

Albers taught color theory at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, and the systematic thinking behind Interaction of Color, his best-known text, runs through this late portfolio as a kind of visual index to everything he had argued in the classroom.