Perfect Plastics: Investigating Josef Albers’ Structural Constellations

Investigating the artist's material choices involved both technical analysis and archival study of 20th-century plastics patents

Digital microscopic examination of the engraved plastic surfaces in Josef Albers’ Structural Constellations series.

Post-doctoral fellows Madeline Meier and Hortense de La Codre set up Fourier transform infrared analysis (FTIR).

Meier and de La Codre set up hyperspectral imaging (HSI) at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Plastics were once part of a utopian vision of the future. In the middle of the 20th century, chemical research labs had developed new processes for refining and synthesizing industrial plastics: nylon, polystyrene, PVC. They were brand new in the grand scheme of art and industry: glossy, malleable, cheap, and mass-produced. Jukeboxes were plastic, radios were plastic, tanks and bombers and planes were plastic. For consumers and artists alike, in a world rebuilding after World War II, plastics were symbols of progress and potential for a better future. “The incredible fact about plastics is this: anything is possible in this industry that has boomed up out of the Depression, when all new enterprise was supposed to have stopped, and made itself a part of the new age of power, chemistry, and alloys,” wrote an enthusiast in Fortune magazine in 1940.

Artists had their own parts to play in this material revolution. They experimented with synthetic products that contained plastics, like acrylics. These experiments with materials were a crucial element of what is broadly called “modernism”: a kaleidoscope of artistic movements, schools, and philosophical manifestos about how to understand the modern world.

Yet for cultural heritage researchers today, plastics present a challenge. The newness of these plastic materials means that we are still learning about their properties as they age and change composition and appearance. “We don’t have a deep, deep knowledge based on experience,” says Maria Kokkori, senior scientist for the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, “because we are very close [time-wise] to the production of these materials.”

Josef Albers’ experimental vision

One of the most interesting areas for studying plastics and modernist art movements is the Bauhaus School. First in Germany and later in the United States, this loosely connected group of artists bridged the gap between industrial design and fine arts to create beautiful, functional architecture, home goods, and art objects. Bauhaus artists were committed to “honesty” in materials of all kinds — including plastics.

Bauhaus artist Josef Albers (1888–1976) was a modernist who distilled abstract ideas like spatial and color perception into elegant iterations of line and shape. As a Bauhaus master teacher and artist, Albers worked in a variety of crafts from carpentry to metalwork to graphic design, while embarking on what would become his legacy of encouraging experimentation and vision in his students. His wife Anni Albers was similarly innovative as a master of textiles and prints. They emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1933 when the Third Reich shut down the Bauhaus School, forcing many artists to leave.

In the United States, Bauhaus artists found new institutions to practice their innovative pedagogy. Both Josef and Anni Albers were influential faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where they sought to link craft and exploratory use of everyday materials. Josef Albers was the founding director of Yale University’s Department of Design (1950–58), inspiring generations of students to use art to explore the implications of modern materials and technologies. One of his best-known works is the Homage to the Square, a series of more than a thousand color studies made over 25 years (1950–1976), that shows variable perceptual interactions of colors in the simplest, yet most effective way: by imposing three different-sized squares of different colors on top of each other.

Made during the same span of time as the Square series, Albers’ Structural Constellations are no less elegant and provocative. Using parallelograms and projection lines, Albers created a series of ambiguous, yet dynamic images that look like blueprints for impossible geometries. He made the first preparatory drawings and works on paper in 1948, before moving into other substrates over the following years. Most of the Structural Constellations were made by incising the designs into the surface of black laminated plastics, their smooth planes especially conducive to Albers’ vision. They look like a brain-breaking optical illusion, or the floor map for a house you wouldn’t want to live in. They look like flawless incisions into space itself.

Albers needed a machine to achieve maximum precision. For centuries, artists and architects have used pantographs, mechanical devices for tracing artworks. Albers took this creative practice to an industrial level for his more than a hundred renditions of Structural Constellations over twenty years of iterations. Working with machine shops in New York, New Jersey, Cincinnati, and later New Haven, Albers could direct the machines to trace an image or template in one arm and replicate those patterns with another. Using a router, these pantographs would incise the top layers of the laminate to render his designs, revealing the white plastic substrate underneath the black surface.

They are minimalist in design yet endlessly invite us to explore our spatial perceptions. The Center’s senior scientist Kokkori is fascinated by the intellectual and material worlds contained in Albers’ Structural Constellations. “The fact that the artist chooses his media so carefully: he designed, he printed, he thought. He drew sketches for these works, and somebody else executed them. This high level of intellectual thinking and collaboration makes it a unique example within modernist art production.”

That the spatial constructions are both extremely simple and deeply philosophical is the heart of Albers’ power as an artist and teacher. The constellations were meant to draw viewers into a reflection on the mysteries of individual perception of space. They were fixed but unfixed. They were arranged but flexible. They were contradictory and impossible.

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has the largest collection of Structural Constellations in the world. Center researchers conducted contactless analysis on the works to learn more about their composition; not only do these studies give clues about Albers’ choices of substrates and techniques over the decades of their creation, but the research is also helpful for understanding how the materials may change over time. Plastics can be dynamic and ambiguous: just like the Structural Compositions themselves.

“Most of the time, studying modernist artworks can be very tricky and very complicated,” says Kokkori. “But these works are unique examples of perfection in making, perfection in thinking, [perfection] in planning and execution. This level of perfection and the complexity of achieving perfection is reflected on the surface.”

Perceiving the Constellations in New Ways

Philosophy aside, there’s more than what meets the eye — which makes the Structural Constellations so rich for researchers to investigate. Some have been sandblasted. Others juxtapose glossy and matte sections, showing different machine-texturing treatments. Some of the laminate surfaces display fine fissures that are called “crazing.”

Looking at these finishes under a microscope reveals all the tiny bumps and ridges created by the engraving machines that brought Albers’ visions into reality. This microscopic analysis allowed researchers to identify and visualize representative geometric features and surface morphologies for each work, showing how different tool sizes might create different thicknesses of line or interact with the substrate in a distinctive way.

Researchers then investigated the material properties of these plastics using a noninvasive, spectroscopic technique called Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) in reflection mode to examine the surface of the artworks. FTIR in reflection mode works by bouncing radiation off the surface to determine the kinds of organic materials present, including any possible resins, glues, or plasticizers. The analysis yielded a large dataset that was processed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a chemometric method used to process the large volume of FTIR spectra.

This analysis allowed them to group Albers’ plastics into different categories based on their chemical compositions or the kinds of materials they originated from – ultimately opening the door to many more questions, such as why these laminates caught Albers’ eye in the first place. They conducted archival research at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in the Formica Collection and the J. Harry DuBois Collection on the History of Plastics, where they looked at patents, product descriptions, advertisements, and manufacturing information on these materials.

Albers was a famously selective artist, carefully choosing each medium he used, even sometimes inscribing notes about what he used and why on the back of his works. These plastics aren’t purely plastics, but rather thick layers of plywood or paper, pressed together then filled full of resin. The compound qualities of the materials means that analysis of the organic fingerprint of even one Structural Constellation yields an entire map of different chemicals and materials, making it difficult to identify, for example, what brand of plastic Albers used. His own annotations contain references to mid-century plastics-based materials like Formica, Vinylite, and Resopal, but not all of those brands match up with the compositions of his actual works.

For example, they identified a group of works that were a probable mixture of phenolic resin and urea-formaldehyde resin that had been developed in the 1930s to address concerns about crazing in melamine-formaldehyde resins. Albers wanted a sleek surface for the Structural Constellations, so it makes sense he would work with substrates designed to minimize these distortions. 

The future of plastics research

Indeed, plastics are part of the Bauhaus legacy of experimenting with innovative modern materials. In a prior project for the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, Kokkori and other researchers examined the plastics used by fellow Bauhaus modernist László Moholy Nagy in his own artistic explorations of dimensionality and perception.

By understanding what these plastics are made of and how they behave, researchers hope to understand how to protect and conserve this relatively new material for future generations. Will these constellations degrade and lose their sheen with time? As they change composition, will they warp, collapse, or even disintegrate? Could conservators prevent this fate by glazing the materials or storing them in special ways? Could scientists even forecast the future of these laminates, perhaps by artificially aging them in the lab to come up with means of preventative care?

These are the ever-developing questions about material change that draw scientists like Kokkori into continually investigating works of modernity. Cultural heritage materials are not only oil paints or bronze alloys. Modern materials like plastics are valuable for research because they are indicators of change.

Plastics change composition. Plastics change meaning: from mid-century awe at their durability to current fears about how they break down and infiltrate our water systems and bodies. Within a single century, after all, plastics are no longer hailed as the utopian ideals that may have channeled Albers to pick them up as a medium. Rather, they are materials we now must work around and even avoid, in order to create a healthier world.

Across his career, Josef Albers was committed to making and teaching as were provocations about how we perceive differently; decades later, they are still bringing up new questions. The future is yet to be written for Albers’ Structural Constellations.

Publication:

Kokkori, M. H. de La Codre, M.C. Meier. 2025. “Josef Albers’ Structural Constellations: Investigating Formulations of Laminated Plastics Through the Correlation of Industrial Literature with Scientific Analysis.” Polymers 17: 681.