Introitus
1942
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
lithograph in black on Serir wove paper
Dimensions
sheet: 60.96 × 48.26 cm (24 × 19 in.)
Classification
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Josef Albers
Accession Number
1975.20.3
Art Historical Context
**Introitus** by Josef Albers, created in 1942, invites visitors into the precise world of one of the 20th century's most influential artists. A German-born painter, designer, and educator who fled Nazi persecution in 1933, Albers had by then embraced America as his new home, teaching at Black Mountain College. This wartime print captures his Bauhaus roots—emphasizing abstraction, geometry, and perception—during a period of global upheaval, when Albers was pioneering ideas that would define modernist art. Rendered as a lithograph in black ink on smooth Serir wove paper (sheet: 24 × 19 in.), *...
About the Artist
Josef Albers
Josef Albers, born on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Westphalia, into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen, received early practical training from his father, Lorenzo Albers, a housepainter and carpenter, mastering skills in engraving glass, plumbing, wiring, and printmaking. After working as a schoolteacher in Bottrop from 1908 to 1913, he trained as an art teacher at the Königliche Kunstschule in B...