Josef Albers

📖 The Scoop

Josef Albers was a world-renowned Modernist painter, designer, teacher, and theoretician. Born in 1888 in Germany, Albers enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in 1920 and went on to teach metal-work furniture, typography, and design courses there until the school was forced to close in 1933. He then came to the United States to teach at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at Yale University.

This volume focuses on one aspect of Josef Albers's career: his work in black, white, and gray. By concentrating on this select group of drawings, prints, photographs, engraved vinylites, and paintings, one can survey his work from the early drawings (1910s) to the late prints (1970s). What becomes clear is that, with the key exception of his conversion to abstraction at the Bauhaus in the very early 1920s, Albers remained largely immune to changing currents in the art world. Throughout his life, he allowed only one of the pervasive social forces defining the 20th century to have a direct impact on his art -- a very modern embrace of industrialization.

Genre: Art / General (fancy, right?)