Albers was a prolific 20th century artist known primarily for his ''Homages to Squares''. Josef Albers was also a highly innovative teacher associated with the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany and later with Black Mountain College in North Carolina. 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. His working philosophy was to build carefully and meticulously with sturdy materials from a base of simple, fundamental forms to increasingly complex shapes. In 1933, Albers and his associates dissolved the Bauhaus because of Nazi pressure against their creativity. He and his wife moved to America, where he spent the next sixteen years in North Carolina teaching at Black Mountain College, an experimental school operating with the principle that fine art integrated all learning.