Structural Constellation: Alpha (1954) belongs to the Structural Constellation series of drawings and engravings by Josef Albers. In 1950 Albers left his position at the experimental art school Black Mountain College to head the design program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. After his appointment to Yale, Albers’s artistic practice significantly narrowed, and he focused on two key series: Homage to the Square and Structural Constellation.

Even though the two series explore different concerns, Homage to the Square investigated color while Structural Constellation explored the line, they share two major principles in Albers’s artistic practice. Firstly, Albers’s art follows the principle of “maximum effect with minimal means”, he worked under strict guidelines and particularly in late works like Structural Constellation: Alpha his approach was austere and minimalistic. The other characteristic of his art is perceptual ambiguity, which is central to the Structural Constellation series.

In the series, Albers created different compositions of rotationally straight lines, that can be described as two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional objects. These carefully planned configurations create a single image that holds two or more different visions. Structural Constellation: Alpha explores right angles and parallel lines in a way that purposefully makes it difficult for the viewer to detect the depicted geometric shape. Structural Constellation: Alpha produces visual ambiguity: it appears the floating form can be simultaneously viewed in multiple ways. The lines form rectangle shapes that intersect each other from various angles, producing a distorted sense of depth and space. For the viewer, the same shapes can appear to be moving forward and backward depending on the angle. Structural Constellation: Alpha, a simple black and white engraving enhance the impersonal and the detached qualities of the work. This was important to Albers, who believed that this detachment was necessary when depicting non-representational forms.

During his lifetime, Albers presented the series in prints, engraving, and public sculpture. However, these are outnumbered by the many preparatory drawings he created for Structural Constellations. The drawings provide additional insight into the series and the artist’s working process. Throughout the 1950s, he worked on the series in small graph paper notebooks. The notebooks show the meticulous and calculated nature of Albers’s work, as well as the highly restrictive guidelines he set when working on Structural Constellations. The artist would then transfer some of these ideas into larger drawings, before realizing the idea in a print, engraving, or sculpture.

Albers’s late works, including the Structural Constellation series, played a key role in the development of the Op Art movement, and some even refer to Albers as the “Father of Op Art”. In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held a groundbreaking “Op Art” exhibition titled “The Responsive Eye”. Albers participated in the exhibition and showcased six oil paintings. Despite this affiliation, the artist rejected the label Op Art as he felt that it implies that these artworks are merely gimmicks that deal with optical illusions. Instead, Albers preferred the term ‘perceptual art’, which he felt adequately describes the visual experience produced by his artworks.