It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

He studied art in Berlin Essen and Munich before enrolling as a student in the basic course of Johannes Itten at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Albers worked at Yale until he retired from teaching in 1958. In the 1960s Walter Gropius who was designing the Pan Am Building with Emery Roth & Sons and Pietro Belluschi commissioned Albers to make a mural.