“[Joseph] Albers was animated by a powerful absorption in visual phenomena. At Black Mountain, he recalled that as a child he’d accompanied his mother to a bank where the floor was tiled in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The young Albers feared that if he walked across the floor he might sink into the black squares and need to climb out onto the whites—an ordeal he mimed for his students’ amusement by hobbling around on the floor. His classes were peppered with his analyses of such commonplace phenomena as New York City streetlights, monuments in the park, and insect anatomy. He’d point out what others had perhaps glanced at but not contemplated: the shape of the Yale football stadium, the spot of light that remained for a moment when a TV set was switched off, the way a red roof could merge with a blue sky, how the color of tea deepened in a glass.”

—Frederick A. Horowitz, from Josef Albers: To Open Eyes, by Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, 2006.