THE PRINTS OF JOSEF ALBERS
A CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ 1915 – 1976
Brenda Danilowitz
New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2001. Quarto. Black cloth titled in red. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Red endpapers. Frontis portrait. 215 pp. 311 color plates and 201 black and white reproductions. Upper corners lightly pushed, otherwise a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
9.5 x 12.25-inch hardcover book with 215 pages and 311 color plates and 201 black and white reproductions. Introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber. The Prints of Josef Albers: A Catalogue Raisonné 1915-1976 collects the graphic works of the legendary abstract artist and Bauhaus design teacher. Early woodcut self-portraits, increasingly abstract lithographs, the famous Homage to the Square, and 10 prints that are the beginning of Albers's experiment in color are all featured here, as are the posters, album covers and greeting cards that Albers created toward the end of his career. The pieces were culled by Brenda Danilowitz, chief curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, who's written a lucid introductory essay on the evolution of Albers's oeuvre.
Josef Albers was an “addictive maker of prints.” He relished the implicit detachment of printmaking: the way that the medium removed his hand at least one step from the end result. Over the course of his life, Josef Albers created more than 240 individual prints and multi-print portfolios. The catalogue raisonné of Albers's prints documents the artist’s lifelong dedication to the art form, from the early linoleum cuts and lithographs of industrial landscapes, architectural studies, and portraits made in his native Rhineland, to the zinc plate lithographs, screenprints, and inkless embossed abstractions of his later career.
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century.
Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts.
In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.
With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing.
The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans.
Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design.