Josef Albers : process and printmaking (1916-1976) [cat. expo., Fundación Juan March, Madrid]. Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2014 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Preface. Josef Albers. An Anthology 1924-1978 (Fundación Juan March, 2014)
Josef Albers wrote extensively throughout his career, in addition to his celebrated Interaction of Color, a key work translated into twelve languages and re-edited and reprinted on a continuous basis (from the fi rst edition published by Yale University Press in 1963 to the recent app produced by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Yale University Press: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/interaction-colorby-josef/). Nonetheless, many of his numerous and varied textsranging from public lectures and contributions to conferences, talks, replies to questionnaires, aphorisms, anecdotes, short stories and poetic prose to the content of lengthy courses and essays on art and education -continue to be largely unknown to specialists, researchers and the general public.
Josef Albers. An Anthology 1924-1978 (Fundación Juan March, 2014)
Josef Albers wrote extensively throughout his career, in addition to his celebrated Interaction of Color, a key work translated into twelve languages and re-edited and reprinted on a continuous basis (from the fi rst edition published by Yale University Press in 1963 to the recent app produced by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Yale University Press: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/interaction-colorby- josef/). Nonetheless, many of his numerous and varied texts – ranging from public lectures and contributions to conferences, talks, replies to questionnaires, aphorisms, anecdotes, short stories and poetic prose to the content of lengthy courses and essays on art and education – continue to be largely unknown to specialists, researchers and the general public. [...]
Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life, Julia Garimorth (dir.),Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 216-221, 2023
Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan
Journal of the Bauhuas Imaginista , 2019
In his inaugural manifesto for the Staatlichen Bauhauses, Walter Gropius proposed a new artistic agenda and pedagogical practice based on crafted building and artisanal principles. “Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts!” was his motto in 1919. This article analyses how prominent Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers, dialogued with a very specific kind of artisanal aesthetics: the pre-Columbian crafts he encountered in Mexico. Revisiting a lecture (Truthfulness in Art) delivered in 1937 after his third trip to the country, the article studies the way in which Albers learned from the millenary abstract tradition of the pre-Columbian artisan, incorporating that knowledge into his own art and educational practice.
While Josef Albers is a well-recognised figure in twentieth century art, his photographic work remains an understudied aspect of his achievements. This dissertation focuses on seventy photocollages that Albers produced at the Bauhaus in the early 1930s. It offers a new understanding of these works by arguing that Albers’s artistic and life philosophies — most often exposed in his teaching and talks — provide a meaningful lens through which to view them. This dissertation posits that an understanding of the artist’s beliefs, along with a close look at the context in which he produced this body of work, not only sheds light on the photocollages’ thematic material, but also serves to illuminate the artist’s relation to photography. The first chapter demonstrates that an analysis of the underlying principles of Albers’s pedagogical exercises and his commitment to the founding ideal of the Bauhaus can illuminate how the photocollages manifest and substantiate these convictions. The second chapter offers an examination of Albers’s perceptive and cognitive theories and argues that, placed within the context of photographic “objectivity” in Weimar Germany, they provide a revealing frame of reference to understand Albers’s ambivalent relation to the photographic medium. Consequently, this chapter exposes the ways in which the works express photographic doubt, and through a close analysis of their seriality and incompleteness, demonstrates how they provide an alternative to common habits of photographic seeing and knowing.
“To Let Threads Be Articulate Again”: Reading Anni Albers’s Calligraphic Weavings
Though the weaver, printmaker, and writer Anni Albers (1899-1994) left behind a body of incredibly thought-provoking work, the current scholarship is filled with gaps and unanswered questions. For example, no in-depth investigation of her so-called pictorial weavings has been carried out. Created from the late 1940s until the end of the 1960s, Albers intended these works to be viewed as art, worthy of contemplation. However, besides stating that her pictorial weavings were meant to be viewed as art, Albers left behind little specific information about them; for example, there are no extant draft notations for these works, and as a result, little is known about their structures. This paucity of information is likely responsible, in part, for the vagueness with which commentators have described them. Indeed, a frequent tendency in analyses of the pictorial weavings has been for the authors to remark on their ‘mysterious’ or ‘enigmatic’ nature, and then move on without further elaboration. Using the so-called ‘calligraphic weavings’, a subset of the pictorial weavings which have the appearance of writing on them, as a case study for examining the challenges of interpreting Anni Albers’s pictorial weavings, this dissertation will seek to put forward a preliminary framework for understanding them. For when the absence of information Albers left behind about her pictorial weavings is viewed together with the beliefs expressed in her writings about how works of art are best understood, interpretation shifts to the process of viewing rather than the attempt to discern an easily decipherable meaning.
Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an artist, teacher, and seminal thinker on the perception of color. A member of the Bauhaus who fled to the U.S. in 1933, his ideas about how the mind understands color influenced generations of students, inspired countless artists, and anticipated the findings of neuroscience in the latter half of the twentieth century. With contributions from the disciplines of art history, the intellectual and cultural significance of Gestalt psychology, and neuroscience, this peer-reviewed publication offers a timely reappraisal of the immense impact of Albers’s thinking, writing, teaching, and art on generations of students. It shows the formative influence on his work of non-scientific approaches to color (notably the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and the emergence of Gestalt psychology in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work also shows how much of Albers’s approach to color—dismissed in its day by a scientific approach to the study and taxonomy of color driven chiefly by industrial and commercial interests—ultimately anticipated what neuroscience now reveals about how we perceive this most fundamental element of our visual experience. Edited by Vanja Malloy, with contributions from Brenda Danilowitz, Sarah Lowengard, Karen Koehler, Jeffrey Saletnik, and Susan R. Barry.
The Magic and Logic of Color: How Josef Albers Revolutionized Visual Culture and the Art of Seeing
A thing is never seen as it really is." "Hundreds of people can talk, for one who can think," John Ruskin wrote, "but thousands of people can think, for one who can see." "We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object,"Alexandra Horowitz lamented in her sublime meditation on looking. Hardly anyone has accomplished more in revolutionizing the art of seeing than German-born American artist, poet, printmaker, and educator Josef Albers, as celebrated for his iconic abstract paintings as he was for his vibrant wit and spellbinding presence as a classroom performer. In 1963, he launched into the world what would become the most influential exploration of the art, science, psychology, practical application, and magic of color -an experiment, radical and brave at the time, seeking to cultivate a new way of studying and understanding color through experience and trial-and-error rather than through didactic, theoretical dogma. Half a century later, Interaction of Color (public library), with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing.
Josef Albers: art, education and democracy
Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 2022
Throughout his career as an art teacher, Josef Albers made clear his vision of a methodology of education that put the arts at its core, with the aim of teaching people to see and to understand the world through its visual and material aspects. He believed that experimentation and direct experience with reality would ultimately generate real knowledge and that it was only in this way that a conscious understanding of the world was possible: a requirement for the development of free and democratic people. This paper will analyse how Albers intertwined the ideas of art, education and democracy, and the how he understood these relations within his contemporary world.