Given the increasingly knotty exigencies of scheduling—much less securing and financing loans—it seems all but inevitable that more and more museums will be forced to feature shows culled from the oft-unseen resources of their permanent collections. Such proverbial icebox raiding was evident at the Hirshhorn of late—and to great consequence. Curated by Valerie Fletcher to fill an eleventh-hour programming gap, Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration featured nearly seventy works produced over almost as many years (from a 1917 sketch of workers’ houses to 1973’s comparatively monumental Variants), a number of which had never been exhibited previously. Augmented by select early works sourced from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and enhanced by the inclusion of documentary photographs and teaching aids, Josef Albers made a strong case for the merits of, so to speak, playing to one’s strengths. Even the myriad iterations of Albers’s iconic format of concentric squares, Homage to the Square, looked less remedially graphic and especially lambent in the dim Hirshhorn galleries.

Despite the pleasures afforded by seeing so many of Albers’s works (and so many Squares, above all), Josef Albers was relatively uninspired in its organization: a chronological progression showed Albers’s internal development from his early years as a student and then teacher at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College to his later projects and the artists they influenced in turn (including protégés like Robert Rauschenberg and devotees such as Donald Judd, who wrote favorably about Albers in his criticism as early as 1959 and mined his model for his own sculpture in the next decade). Yet apart from the culminating works by students and peers that made a case for his legacy and its social coordinates, Josef Albers never opened up such a trajectory to broader material contextualization, leaving historical comparisons to the abovementioned photographs and accompanying wall text. No doubt the upshot of financial circumscriptions, the Albers-only primary installation still suffered from comparison to this year’s Bauhaus, 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, an equally exactingly researched and spectacularly assembled mega-show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman.

This is not to say that the Bauhaus comprises the whole of Albers’s career, but its influence upon him is nevertheless inestimable. Rudiments of his biography are thus worth sketching: Born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888, Albers studied to become a teacher. After teaching in Westphalian primary schools from 1908 to 1913, he returned to study art in Essen and Munich before arriving at the Bauhaus in 1919. He considered early mentor Johannes Itten an obstructionist in his desire to work in glass, which he subsequently did anyhow. He likewise began teaching the basic design class (Vorkurs) in 1923, and he ascended to the rank of professor in 1925 when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. Upon its Nazi-mandated closing in 1933, Albers immigrated to the United States where he introduced an adapted Bauhaus curriculum through his tenure as head of the art department at Black Mountain College, an experimental community in Asheville, North Carolina, and eventually chairman of the art department at Yale.

From the outset, Albers worked with commercially manufactured materials—glass figures prominently—and the Hirshhorn began its story there. Some of the first works one encountered in the present context were Window Picture (1921) and Grid-Mounted (1921), two small square amalgamations: of stuff (nails, mesh, imitation pearls) in the former and colors (gridded into a gaudy mosaic bound with copped wire) in the latter. These situate Albers in the world of Bauhaus utopianism, foregrounding his modernization of the medieval tradition of stained glass (using techniques of sandblasting on glass laminate, even, by a couple years hence, as in Lattice Picture (1923–1925)) as well as its suitability for mass production and distribution. Additionally they suggest his subsequent engagement with abstraction. The Black Mountain College section picked up this thread, with biomorphic trials like Proto-Form (B) (1938), a smallish oil-on-fiberboard swirl of cornflower blue and baize, alongside harder-edge geometric compositions (see, for example, the almost hieroglyphic scorings in Four Xs in Red (1938)). Collages of foliage placed on paper backgrounds injected a modicum of whimsy. Leaf Study (ca. 1940) renders fern leaves a school of fish, while Leaf Study No. 1 (ca. 1940) lines them up across a horizontal support where they become newly pictorial—as a forest—even as they remain resolutely non-objective as individual elements.

The relationship between part and whole emerges as a leitmotif—really the crux of his art and teaching alike—in the selection of Homages to the Square in the ensuing galleries. Representing nearly a third of the checklist, the breadth of Homages—and their serial procedures—was crucial to demonstrating how adept Albers was at coaxing a startlingly varied range of effects out of minimal means: A sunny intensity in Homage to the Square: Glow (1966) is answered by the chasm-like vacuity of Study for “Homage to the Square: Profundo” (1966). He employed a standardized arrangement to paradoxically highlight the differences between and among colors nestled like Russian dolls. Perceptual acuity thereby supplants a ponderous sentimentalism (Albers eschews the color-coded emotionalism Wassily Kandinsky espoused). No doubt the hard-won result of Albers’s technique of painting with a palette knife, under artificial lighting, his facture-less surfaces nowhere admit the hand that made them and instead shift our attention to how the colors look and work together—and how we learn to see them.

Albers’s pedagogical thrust was made explicit in adjacent displays that contained pages from the original, silk-screened volume of his hugely influential primer, Interaction of Color (1963). Finally this emphasis on training and the authority of his example offered an appropriate segue into the penultimate space where one encountered Anni Albers’s tapestries, Memo (1958) and Under Way (1963); Robert Rauschenberg’s cacophonous Dam (1959); Kenneth Noland’s bulls-eye, Lotus (1962); John Chamberlain’s auto lacquer encrusted Beezer (1964); Donald Judd’s cube with an iron pipe, Untitled (1963); and so on. In each instance, the case was made for a deep connection to Albers, whether through personal relationships, direct instructional contact, or something less proximate if no less meaningful. In this way Josef Albers ended on a note that both reaffirmed his relevance (coincidentally, Yale University Press recently released a complete edition of Interaction of Color, replete with exercises and movable flaps) and rendered his legacy commensurate with the societal ambition realized in his mode of relational abstraction.

In an oral history recorded for the Archives of American Art in 1968, Albers shared some thoughts on the nature of relationships:

JOSEF ALBERS: You have to know that two colors behave together as two human beings can behave together or not behave together. Is there a common action or not a common action?

SEVIM FESCI: They attract each other, they repulse each other. Is that it?

JOSEF ALBERS: That’s it.