JOSEF ALBERS AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
AN EXHIBITION OF HIS PAINTINGS AND PRINTS.
Henry Geldzahler [introduction], [Norman Ives [Designer]
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971. First edition. Quarto. Printed perfect bound and stitched wrappers. 76 pp. 44 color plates supervised by Sewell Sillman. Remnants of price sticker to rear panel, otherwise a nearly fine, lightly handled copy.
10 x 10-inch softcover catalogue with 78 pages and 44 color plates supervised by Sewell Sillman. “Josef Albers has said that his great negative ambition has always been to do work that didn't look like anyone else's, work that was not reminiscent. In this, of course, he has succeeded. And, curiously enough, the place he has carved for himself, the position he has claimed through the insistence of his work, has been resistant to direct imitation. Albers' uniqueness resides in the ways his painting has gone along the parallel roads marked Science and Poetry. In the late fifties and early sixties there was much panic-stricken thought abroad that these roads, the routes of the two cultures, were mutually exclusive and even antagonistic. But there has always been art that made nonsense of this false duality, and Albers' art is a recent and contemporary refutation of it.
“The scientific aspect of his researches is in his color concepts that deal with both light and paint, but primarily with what the eye is capable of distinguishing. To hear Albers on the subject of what is possible in translating the subtlety of painted color into silk-screen printing and color photography is to engage in a postgraduate discussion in discrimination. Yellow, he affirms, cannot be photographed successfully in all its gradations; reds are available in printers' inks that elude the manufacturer of paint. As a consequence of his training and teaching at the Bauhaus, Albers is totally committed to all such details of his craft; it is his natural inclination as well. [...] His has truly been a remarkable career of devotion to the craft and art of painting. The Metropolitan Museum is proud to be the vehicle for exhibiting the works, both painting and graphic, that demonstrate his achievement.” — The Metropilitan Museum of Art
Contents:
- Introduction
- The Exhibition
- Paintings
- Prints
- Biography
- Principal One-man Exhibitions
- Exhibition Catalogues
- Graphic Portfolios
- Writings by the Artist
- Writings about the Artist
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.