For some reason, red is the most sought-after color. “The market really favors red above everything else,” says Emily Kaplan, a specialist at Sotheby’s and head of its biannual “Contemporary Curated” sale. “Even the smaller [red] homages always have the higher prices.” Next in line are the yellow paintings, followed by oranges. “Colors that are sort of sunny and happy,” she explains.

It may seem random. (Or not—lots of people like red.) But plenty of artists’ works vary in market value, based on such mundane attributes as color, size, and material.

But the glaring market inefficiency in Albers work is chronology. For most artists, whether Picasso, Monet, Pollock, the year that the work was made is crucial to its value. Not Albers. A red painting that Albers made in 1954 carries the same price as a red painting he made in 1974. “It’s definitely not our main criterion,” says Kaplan. “Whereas with other artists, it definitely is.”

Career Trajectory
The absence of chronology in Albers’ market is notable, given that his career trajectory was so remarkable.

Born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888, Albers became a teacher in 1922 at the famous Bauhaus school of design. When he emigrated to the U.S. in 1933, he obtained teaching jobs, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, and then at Yale, where he directed the university’s design department.

All the while, Albers made art. His first exhibition came as early as 1919, and his star kept rising after he moved to the U.S. In 1964, the Museum of Modern Art organized a solo exhibition of his work, which traveled to 22 exhibition spaces around the globe.

Despite his prestigious teaching jobs, famous pupils, and relatively robust primary market, Albers was never a star.

“When we started to represent him, he wasn’t such a household name,” says David Cleaton-Roberts, a director at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London, which began with Albers’ prints and multiples market 18 years ago. (David Zwirner represents Alber’s unique artworks; Alan Cristea represents the less-expensive reproductions.) “He was known among people in the art world and among collectors of hard-edged abstraction—among them, he’s kind of a legendary figure,” Cleaton-Roberts continues.

Several factors have since conspired to raise Albers’ profile. A series of critically lauded museum shows included “Josef Albers” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002 and “Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World” at the Tate Modern in 2006.

And as blue chip dealers started to look as far afield as Japan, Italy, and Cuba for mid-century modernists, Albers was hiding in plain sight back in the U.S. “Serious collectors began to look at artists like Donald Judd, Fred Sandback, and Sol Lewitt and realized that all these artists lead back to Josef Albers,” says Cleaton-Roberts.