Joseph Albers was born to a family of artisans in Bottrop Germany and inherited a family tradition of careful, exact workmanship. As a young man, the works of Cezanne, Matisse, and Cubism inspired him. After attending the Kцnigliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. In 1915, he married Anni Fleischmann, who became a noted weaver and his wife of fifty-one years. From 1913 to 1920, he studied art in Berlin and in Munich, but his most significant education took place in Weimar, Germany at the Bauhaus, an association of artists, craftsmen, and architects committed to a creed of merging craft techniques with creative aspects of fine art. As a student, he became renowned for stained glass designs that he created from broken bottles and fragments he found at the city dump. These 'found object' designs show his early predilection for optics.

Beginning in 1923, he became a Bauhaus teacher and taught furniture design, drawing, and calligraphy. He helped guide the Bauhaus away from expressionism and towards a constructivist art in the service of architecture. This was achieved through an extreme reduction in form to a lapidary, geometric idiom. During this time, Albers contributed significantly to the development of industrial design. His working philosophy was to build carefully and meticulously with sturdy materials from a base of simple, fundamental forms too increasingly complex shapes. In 1933, Albers and his associates dissolved the Bauhaus because of Nazi pressure. He and his wife moved to America, where he spent the next sixteen years as head of the art department at the newly established, Black Mountain College, New Carolina, an experimental school operating with the principle that fine art integrated all learning.

Albers became a prolific artist, known primarily for his 'Homage's to Squares'. Although he disavowed style category labels, he is credited with influencing the movements of Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism. He was also one of the first modern artists to investigate the psychological effects of color and space and to question the nature of perception. Indicative of the impact of his work is the fact that he was the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.