listen to a lecture in an art history class. P: Today, I want to introduce the 20th century modern artist Joseph Albers, who left his mark both as an artist and an art educator. Albers was born in Germany in 1888 and began his career teaching art at an elementary school. That\'s not where he made his mark as an educator, though, we\'ll get to that later. In his early 30s, Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus school of design, architecture and applied arts in Germany. The Bauhaus school was special, famous for pioneering new ideas about beauty, function and design. Some of Albers’ later ideas about art and art education owed a lot to the Bauhaus philosophy, which challenged traditional hierarchies of high art and low art. For example, crafts and arts were treated as equals. Carpentry classes were just as important as sculpture classes. In fact, many Bauhaus professors and students did more than one thing, often developing a wide range of skills and talents. So it\'s not surprising that Albers started out as a glass artist, painting on glass and making stained glass windows and collage pieces, and then later became a painter, photographer, furniture designer, graphic artist, educator and color theorist. Let\'s fast forward to the 1930s.? Albers and his wife, Annie, also an artist, moved to the United States and took teaching positions at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Black Mountain College, like the Bauhaus, was special. Its faculty consisted mostly of artists, many of them famous or on their way to becoming famous. The college provided Albers with the perfect setting to put his unconventional ideas about art education into practice. Now their traditional art curriculum focuses on art history, teaching students to recognize works by famous artists and the styles and techniques that had emerged over the course of history. Albers rejected this approach. He wanted students to observe an artwork and simply experience it. Background information, like style and historical information, was beside the point. What mattered most was to truly see the work, to develop a heightened awareness of the elements that had gone into its composition, line, shape, texture, color, especially color. In 1950, Albers moved to Yale University, where he continued to explore the impact of color. He wrote a seminal book on color interactions and taught what was probably the first university level course dedicated exclusively to color. By the way, he was also the first living artist to be given a retrospective exhibit at the net, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Normally, the net does not mount exhibitions featuring examples from an artist\'s entire body of work until after the artist\'s death. But back to color, there\'s a long tradition of understanding color in scientific terms, starting with Isaac Newton, who discovered that colors are components of visible lights. In this tradition, different color effects are explained as different physical properties of lights. And when scientists began understanding exactly how human vision works, they came to realize that the eye doesn\'t perceive color directly. It perceives different wavelengths of light. So color theory, from a scientific viewpoint, is straightforward, objective, determined by physical laws. Well, Joseph Albers would have none of that. He viewed color not as a static, fixed thing determined by physics, but rather as a continually changing esthetic and artistic medium as a kind of living element, more optical illusion than physics, optical illusion the artist could experiment with. Albers argued that color is always relative. How we perceive a given color depends on its context, by the colors surrounding it. So blue next to green appears very different from blue next to purple or brown. This living, changing nature of color also acknowledges the emotional impact of color. Different color combinations trigger changes in mood, in feelings. And because there are endless ways to combine colors, the study of color is open ended, infinite. Of course, the more you work with color, the better you can predict its behavior in a given context. But for Albers, the world of color was too vast and complex to fit on any simple color chart.