POEMS AND DRAWINGS
Josef Albers
Josef Albers: POEMS AND DRAWINGS. New Haven: The Readymade Press, 1958. First edition [limited to 500 copies]. Text in English & German. Oblong quarto. Thick printed wrappers. Printed textured vellum sleeve. [68] pp. 17 poems and 22 plates. Book designed and sequenced by Norman Ives. Sleeve darkened at spine with a closed tear at spine crown and a couple of tiny nicks to edges. One page lightly creased due to a binding error. A very good or better copy of this elegant production.
This 9.5 x 8.25 book is the artist’s first authorized poetry collection (most of which unpublished), accompanied by drawings he personally selected, in their first group reproduction; limited to 500 copies design and sequenced by Norman Ives.
From the front sleeve: “Even those who are familiar with the work of Josef Albers may be surprised to find in his verse the same economy of means, direct statement, and penetrating expression which they admire in his paintings... In lines and words Albers creates parallel and complementary forms which at first glance are deceptively clear, until they begin to disclose their multiple meanings.”
In Poems and Drawings Josef Albers attempted to penetrate the meaning of art and life by the simplest, most disciplined means. This project was extremely important to Albers, who used its format to create complementary forms in both word and line that appear deceptively simple until they begin to disclose the author’s insights into nature, art, and life. Conceived as a kind of artist’s book, the publication features 22 of Albers’s refined line drawings alongside the same number of his original poems — each appearing in both English and German.
To distribute material possessions
is to divide them,
to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them. — Josef Albers
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.