Albers arrived at Black Mountain College in November 1933, unable to speak English. His wife Anni spoke on his behalf; she was fluent. They had fled Germany weeks earlier. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Anni, who was Jewish, was at risk. The Bauhaus had been forced to close. Philip Johnson, then a curator at MoMA, had arranged the position.

He was born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, into a Roman Catholic craftsman's family. He worked as a schoolteacher for five years before deciding to study art, joining the Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and becoming a faculty member by 1922. He married Anni Fleischmann, a Bauhaus textile student, in 1925.

At Black Mountain, his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, and Ray Johnson. He left in 1950 to head the Department of Design at Yale, where he taught until retirement in 1958. The teaching produced Interaction of Color (1963), a text arguing that colour can only be understood in context, never in isolation. It remains a standard reference.

The Homage to the Square series occupied the rest of his life: nested squares of colour, painted obsessively, with every pigment and proportion meticulously recorded. The paintings look simple. The colour relationships within them are not. He died in 1976.