THE DRAWINGS OF JOSEF ALBERS
Nicholas Fox Weber
Nicholas Fox Weber: THE DRAWINGS OF JOSEF ALBERS. New Haven and London: The Yale University Press, 1984. First edition. Square quarto. Oatmeal boards decorated in gilt and black. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 76 pp. followed by 107 pages with 183 color and halftone reproductions. Dust jacket with trivial wear, so a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
10.5 x10.75-inch book with 183 pages and 183 color and black and white reproductions. "Shortly after Josef Albers's death in 1976, a scarcely known and surprising segment of his work was discovered: the representational drawings he made before going to the Bauhaus in 1920. These early works-- self-portraits, portraits of friends and relatives, views of houses and public buildings in his native Westphalia, sketches of animals, travel scenes, nudes, caricatures of his students-- reveal a playful and informal side of Albers's character, as well as the root of his fascination with the interplay of two- and three-dimensional space. Presented in conjunction with some of his later abstract drawings, which are characterized by the familiar geometry of his work from the Bauhaus on, they round out our sense of the complex but consistent themes that shaped his evolution as a pioneer painter, teacher, and color theorist.”
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.