Introitus 1942

Josef Albers made this print, Introitus, with ink on paper. The dark lines act as a kind of optical architecture, a nested set of boxes that lead your eye right into the center of the image. You can feel Albers’s background as a furniture designer in this piece, the precision and clean lines, but the way the black ink bleeds ever so slightly at the edges gives it a handmade, human touch. This piece has so much in common with the work of Sol Lewitt, yet it is more playful and less rigidly diagrammatic. The surface is matte and the ink sits on the paper like a dark stain. But it's not just the lines themselves but the negative space in between that gives the image its dynamism, that creates a push and pull, a back and forth rhythm, so that the act of looking becomes an active, almost participatory experience.