The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - "The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers" Exhibition

The Sum of the Parts

The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Until 29 August 2025

Josef Albers 

Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962 

The complete portfolio of 10 screenprints 

Paper and Image each: 43 x 43 cm (each) 

Edition of 250 

Photo courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the first exhibition dedicated to all of the print portfolios made by Josef Albers.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers, features eighteen portfolios using lithography, silkscreen, inkless intaglio and embossing. The portfolios made over a period of 14 years which are increasingly rare to see in their complete form, is each a powerful demonstration of how markedly original Albers was in his understanding of colour and line.

Josef Albers (1888 - 1976), was one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century, creating seminal works in painting, stained glass, and furniture.  He was also a dedicated printmaker who produced work in a variety of print techniques right up until his death in 1976. His complete graphic oeuvre comprises some 350 editions. In printmaking, Josef Albers found the perfect vehicle with which to realize the full array of his imagery and to develop his theoretical approach to colour.

Josef Albers made his first suite in 1962, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers. It was the first time he explored his Homage to the Square painted imagery in a series of prints. Using an array of solid, unmodulated colours, the viewer is invited to perceive shifting depth and change of tone in multiple works at once.

Josef Albers went on to produce more sets, which each take a particular compositional theme, which is then explored through variations of tone, colour and line. Midnight and Noon, 1964, brings together two opposing colour sets, printed in different densities, in a single portfolio. In Soft Edge-Hard Edge, 1965, edges define forms but then begin to disappear before your eyes, creating a conflict between what is precise and what is an illusion. White Line Squares, 1966, features colours registered side by side, delineated by a single white line. The addition of this precise line creates the appearance of four colours, although only three inks are used. 

In the early 1970s Josef Albers spent almost two years making Formulation: Articulation, 1972, a set of two boxed portfolios each containing 66 sheets of paper screenprinted with imagery from every decade of his career, from the Bauhaus period to early woodcuts, pre-Columbian influences and his Homage to the Square explorations. 

A realisation of the essential ideas in Albers’ works, Formulation: Articulation demonstrates the visual and material connections that drove the artist’s practice over the preceding forty years.

Arguably two of Josef Albers most important works in any medium, are the portfolios Gray Instrumentation I and II, made in 1974-75. Together they are the ultimate expression of Albers theoretical approach to colour. The basis for each work is the interactions between different shades of grey. This exploration by Josef Albers was prompted by seeing black and white photos of his Homage to the Square paintings.

In previous portfolios colours were typically printed on top of one another. However, the inks used in Gray Instrumentation I and II, were applied adjacently without overlapping, a level of precision that had not been seen in screenprinting before and a process more closely aligned with Josef Albers painting. Nick Fox Weber, Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, states “As a totality, the twenty-four prints that comprise these two portfolios are in many ways Albers’s ultimate masterpiece.”

Still driven by his need and desire to discover colour relationships beyond anything in his previous work, Josef Albers made Never Before in 1976, which developed upon ideas he had started exploring over twenty-five years earlier in painting. The portfolio was completed, but Josef Albers was too unwell to complete signing each work. As a result a number of prints remain unsigned.

David Cleaton-Roberts, Gallery Director explains, “At the time of his death, he had just completed the series aptly titled Never Before. While artists creating works in series is not unique to printmaking, the ability to formulate, develop, and present an idea through multiple images, tied together by an underlying ethos and/or medium was perfectly realised by Albers using techniques that simultaneously allowed for multiplicity, repetition, and variation.”

The individual plates that make up each portfolio in this exhibition challenge or echo one another, support or oppose one another, but when viewed together, the visual perception and interpretation achieved demonstrates that the whole is always much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers is accompanied by a 144-page fully illustrated hard-back publication. Featuring texts by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and David Cleaton-Roberts, a senior director of Cristea Roberts Gallery.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 12 June - 29 August 2025

The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Discovery and Invention - Exhibition + Catalogue

Discovery and Invention

The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

10 December, 2021 - 22 January 2022

(closed 20 December - 3 January)

The first major survey of early graphic works by JOSEF ALBERS (1888 - 1976), tracing the artist’s early printmaking career, beginning with his first explorations of the medium in 1916, whilst teaching in an elementary school, and ending in his final year at Black Mountain College, USA, in 1950.

Almost 50 works on paper will be on show, all of which come directly from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and they feature scenes of domestic animals, local industry, rare self-portraits as well as portraits of his friends. The exhibition will culminate in the first appearance of geometric forms inspired by pre-Columbian architecture. This comprehensive review explores the complex themes and subject matter that shaped the evolution of Albers’s work in the first half of the twentieth century, prior to his experimentation with his renowned homages to the square.

Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Josef Albers was a naturally gifted printmaker, who possessed an innate ability to push techniques and materials to new limits. The progression from his first print to his final portfolios was the culmination of a lifetime of complex artistic investigation, an evolution most clearly revealed through the historical arc of his printmaking practice.”

Josef Albers first seriously took up printmaking in 1916, at the age of 28. After attending the Royal Art School, Berlin, from 1913 – 1915, he returned home to Bottrop to take up a teaching position. Simultaneously he resumed his studies at the School of Applied Arts in nearby Essen, where he began printmaking via bookplates and greetings cards. He focused on everyday subject matter to produce accomplished linocuts and lithographs depicting local landmarks, such as sand and coal-mines and animals. Using what was available to him during wartime, these graphic works were printed on a variety of papers and on sheets of different sizes. Albers first lithographs were based on dancers he had observed in a ballet entitled The Green Flute in 1916. His portraits from this period include studies of his own striking profile and those of his friends. The soft floating figures from The Green Flute series and his portraits reveal the playful and informal side of Albers’ character, as well as his developing fascination with the interplay of two and three-dimensional space.

Josef Albers second period of focused printmaking begins after the Bauhaus closed in 1933, when he arrived at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina, USA. Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation discusses his prints from this era; “They mark a point of transition from the hard-edged forms and linear geometries associated with his major Bauhaus works in sandblasted glass, which investigated the interplay and exchangeability of figure and ground, to an engagement with evocative line and organic patterns.” Now also working in woodcut, Josef Albers delighted in the irregularities of wood grain and cork and the possibilities they lent to printmaking.

Prints made whilst teaching at Black Mountain Collage were also inspired by Albers frequent visits to Mexico which began in 1935/36. He travelled to archaeological sites throughout the country studying the constructions, the influence of which emerges in his work during the preceding years. As Albers style and themes developed, his prints made in the mid to late 1940s demonstrate his pursuit of linear geometry in a more refined format than ever before. He began using a limited amount of simple ruled lines to create forms that appear to rotate and shift. These later prints share fundamental traits with, and pave the wave for, his Homage to the Square works, which Albers explored in the final decades of his life.

Josef Albers

Discovery and Invention

The Early Graphic Works 

© 2021 Cristea Roberts Gallery - ART/BOOKS

On the jacket: Josef Albers, Self-portrait, 1916, 

Linoleum cut, paper 46 × 29.5 cm, image 21.6 × 16.5 cm (detail). 

Copyright © 2021 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Discovery and Invention: The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardback catalogue (160 pages with 158 illustrations) with an introduction by David Cleaton-Roberts and essays by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, and Jeannette Redensek, Research Curator and Josef Albers Catalogue Raisonné Director, both of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. If you are interested, please visit Criste Roberts Gallery's website.

A major exhibition featuring over 350 objects, entitled Anni et Josef Albers - L'art et la vie (Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life), is currently on show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris until 9 January 2022.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

Anni et Josef Albers @ Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris - L'art et la vie

Anni et Josef Albers

L'art et la vie

MAM - Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

Jusqu'au 9 janvier 2022

Josef et Anni Albers 

dans le jardin de la maison des maîtres 

au Bauhaus, Dessau, vers 1925 

Photographe anonyme 

© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation 

Le Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris présente une exposition inédite consacrée à Anni et Josef Albers, rassemblant plus de trois cent cinquante oeuvres (peintures, photographies, meubles, oeuvres graphiques et textiles) significatives du développement artistique des deux artistes.

Au-delà de la présentation très complète de leurs créations respectives, il s'agit de la première exposition en France dédiée au couple formé par les deux artistes. C'est en effet ce lien intime et très complice qui leur a permis, tout au long de leur vie, de se soutenir, de se renforcer mutuellement, dans un dialogue permanent et respectueux. Ils ont non seulement produit une œuvre considérée aujourd'hui comme la base du modernisme, mais ont aussi imprégné toute une nouvelle génération d'artistes de leurs valeurs éducatives.

Anni Albers (née Annelise Fleischmann, 1899-1994) et Josef Albers (1888-1976) se rencontrent en 1922 au Bauhaus et se marient trois ans plus tard. Ils partagent d’emblée la conviction que l’art peut profondément transformer notre monde et doit être au cœur de l’existence humaine : 

« Les oeuvres d’art nous apprennent ce qu’est le courage. Nous devons aller là où personne ne s’est aventuré avant nous. » - Anni Albers

Dès le début de leur travail, les deux artistes placent ainsi la fonction de l’art au coeur de leur réflexion. Ils adhèrent non seulement à la revalorisation de l’artisanat et aux atouts de la production industrielle (Bauhaus) pour rendre possible la démocratisation de l’art, mais ils estiment aussi que la création joue un rôle essentiel dans l’éducation de chaque individu. Ils ne cessent de démontrer, en tant qu’artistes mais aussi enseignants, l’impact incommensurable de l’activité artistique sur la réalisation de soi et, plus largement, sur la relation avec les autres. Forts de ces valeurs, ils cherchent à amener leurs élèves vers une plus grande autonomie de réflexion et à une prise de conscience de la subjectivité de la perception. Selon eux, l’enseignement ne se réduit pas à transmettre un savoir théorique déjà écrit mais consiste au contraire à susciter constamment des interrogations nouvelles : d’abord par l’observation sensible du monde – visuel et tactile – qui nous entoure ; puis par la découverte empirique que comporte l’expérimentation créatrice avec les matériaux à portée de main, sans préjuger de leurs valeurs esthétiques. 

« Apprenez à voir et à ressentir la vie, cultivez votre imagination, parce qu’il y a encore des merveilles dans le monde, parce que la vie est un mystère et qu’elle le restera. Mais soyons-en conscients. » - Josef Albers

L’exposition s’ouvre sur deux œuvres emblématiques de chaque artiste, illustrant d’emblée, tel un prologue, les valeurs formelles et spirituelles qui relient le couple. Puis elle suit, de manière chronologique, les différentes étapes de leur vie. Une première section rassemble leurs productions, riches et variées, issues du Bauhaus, de 1920 à 1933. Le départ du couple pour les États Unis en 1933 marque le début de la deuxième section, dédiée aux oeuvres réalisées au Black Mountain College. Puis deux autres temps forts de la visite s’attachent à présenter une sélection pointue de Pictorial Weavings de Anni Albers et de Homages to the Square de Josef Albers. Enfin, la dernière partie de l’exposition est consacrée au travail graphique d'Anni Albers, initié avec Josef Albers dans les années soixante et qu’elle va poursuivre jusqu’à la fin de sa vie.

Une salle, spécifiquement dédiée à leurs rôles respectifs en tant que professeurs, permet aux visiteurs, grâce à d’exceptionnels films d’archives, de se glisser dans la peau des étudiants et de suivre un cours « en direct ». Un grand nombre de documents (photographies, lettres, carnets de notes, cartes postales, etc.), réunis avec l’aide de la Fondation Josef et Anni Albers, permet également de contextualiser le travail des deux artistes.

L'exposition est organisée en étroite collaboration avec The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation à Bethany, Connecticut.

Elle sera également présentée à l'IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) à Valencia, Espagne, du 17 février au 20 juin 2022.

Un catalogue est publié aux éditions Paris Musées (272 pages, 45 €).

Commissaire

Julia Garimorth, assistée de Sylvie Moreau-Soteras

Comité scientifique

Nicholas Fox Weber, directeur de la Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut

Heinz Liesbrock, directeur du Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, Allemagne

A voir également au MAM l'exposition Les Flammes. L'Âge de la céramique 

MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE PARIS

11 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris

www.mam.paris.fr

Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi @ David Zwirner, New York - Never Finished

Albers and Morandi: Never Finished

David Zwirner, New York

Through April 3, 2021

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. —Italo Calvino

David Zwirner is pleased to present Albers and Morandi: Never Finished, curated by gallery Partner David Leiber. The exhibition explores the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between two of the twentieth century’s greatest painters: JOSEF ALBERS (1888–1976) and GIORGIO MORANDI (1890–1964).

Both Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: from 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces. Albers and Morandi: Never Finished puts each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal Homage to the Square series, the exhibition elucidates how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs. This shared aesthetic intensity links both artists and underscores their deep commitment to their forms. As Morandi once said, “One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.”1

Though both Albers and Morandi created formally unique approaches to painting, their individual explorations of color reveal visual connections that resound throughout the exhibition. Both artists had a  novel understanding of how the quantity and interaction of color within a structured serial format could result in distinctive, visually vibrant compositions. As Heinz Liesbrock, director of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, notes, “Anyone who makes contact with Morandi’s and Albers’s pictures quickly discovers the central importance of color in the constitution of their pictorial cosmos. For Morandi, color defines forms and space—that is, it differentiates both planes and at the same time brings them closer together.… Albers’s color fields, on the other hand, although they are linearly defined and thus seem clearly separated from each other in the individual picture, merge into each other in the process of seeing, forming new connections and thereby blurring the levels of surface and space.”2

Here, color comes to be a shared, transcendent language through which the artworks communicate with each other. A small midnight-blue vessel isolated against an offwhite grayish ground in Morandi’s Natura morta (Still Life) (1959) seems to reiterate the status of the outermost square of cerulean blue in an Albers Homage from 1961. A rich vermillion, enclosed within a square of Naples yellow, in a 1954 , echoes the sienna red of a vessel in a rare, early Fiori (Flowers) (1915) by Morandi. The status of form, how Albers’s squares can project and recede based on their relation to one another, recalls how the experience of Morandi’s vases and pitchers are contingent upon the color, shape, and size of all the other items depicted in the composition. The pairings in the show bring out surprising and unexpected qualities in each artist’s work. Through their dialogue with Morandi’s still lifes, Albers’s linear, structured compositions reveal a painterly sensuousness and tactility that was always latent within them. The underlying conviction and determinacy of Morandi’s painterly act is never more evident than when his flowers and vessels rest adjacent to an Homage. The refinement of Morandi’s practice is further explored in the exhibition through the inclusion of a selection of the artist’s prints.

Building on the connections established between the two artists in dual shows in 2005, Josef Albers, the first major exhibition of Albers’s work in Italy at the Museo Morandi, Bologna, and Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft (Giorgio Morandi: Landscape) at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany, Albers and Morandi: Never Finished offers the rare opportunity to make such individualized connections between these two artists, reaffirming the importance of each to the history of modern art, and underscoring their continued relevance to artists today. A catalogue of the exhibition was published by David Zwirner Books.

JOSEF ALBERS was born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888 and studied briefly at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, in 1919 before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. In 1922, Albers joined the school’s faculty, first working in stained glass and, starting in 1923, teaching design. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. The Alberses remained at Black Mountain until 1949 and in 1950 moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct a newly formed department of design at Yale University School of Art. In 1950, too, he developed what would become his seminal series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976. Recent exhibitions of his work include at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, in 2014 (traveled to Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway). In 2017, Josef Albers in Mexico was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2018. Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life will be on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2021. The Josef Albers Museum opened in 1983 in Bottrop, Germany.

Since May 2016, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has been exclusively represented by David Zwirner. The artist’s work has been the subject of three previous solo exhibitions at the gallery: Sonic Albers, which was on view in New York in 2019; Sunny Side Up, shown in London in 2017; and Grey Steps, Grey Scales, Grey Ladders, presented in New York in 2016.

GIORGIO MORANDI was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, where he lived until his death in 1964. From 1907 to 1913, he was enrolled at the Bologna Accademia di Belle Arti, where he later served as the professor of engraving and etching from 1930 until 1956. By 1920, Morandi established the small-scale depictions of still lifes and landscapes that he would pursue throughout his oeuvre, and that were associated with no other school or style but his own. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives and traveling solo exhibitions at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (1981–1982); Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, which traveled to IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia (1999); Tate Modern, London, which traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2001–2002); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which traveled to the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2008–2009); Museo d’Arte della Città di Lugano, Switzerland (2012); and the BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2013).

A Backward Glance: Giorgio Morandi and the Old Masters, a major exhibition examining the formation of Morandi’s practice, was presented in 2019 at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. In 2020, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, Giorgio Morandi: Major Works from the Cerruti Collection, was featured at the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. The Museo Morandi was established in 1993 in Bologna, Italy, and is currently located in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. In 2015, David Zwirner presented Giorgio Morandi, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the artist’s work.

1. Morandi quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Looking Long and Hard at Morandi,” The New York Times (October 14, 2004) [accessed online].

2. Heinz Liesbrock, Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft. Exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2005), p. 14.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

____________________

Josef Albers @ David Zwirner, NYC

Josef Albers
Grey Steps, Grey Scales, Grey Ladders
David Zwirner, New York
November 3 - December 17, 2016

David Zwirner announces the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of JOSEF ALBERS since having announced its representation of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibition will take place at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location and will present a selection of works that explore Albers’s use of black, white, and grey across the full breadth of his career.

Josef Albers is considered one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century, as well as an important designer and educator noted for his rigorously experimental approach to spatial relationships and color theory. The exhibition’s title is taken from a passage in Interaction of Color (1963), Josef Albers’s significant treatise on color studies and an essential handbook for artists and teachers. Particularly concerned with the study of chromatic interaction, in which visual perception of a color is affected by those adjacent to it, Albers writes, “To this end, we study gradation by producing so-called grey steps, grey scales, grey ladders. These demonstrate a gradual stepping up or down between white and black, between lighter and darker.” (Josef Albers, Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2009), p. 16.)

The centrality of these gradations between black, white, and grey to Josf Albers’s overall theory of color is demonstrated by the inclusion of his first Homage to the Square painting, Homage to the Square (A) (1950), which inaugurated the series that would occupy him until his death in 1976. Establishing the configuration of nested squares for which the series is known, the work moves progressively from deep black at its center to pale grey at its edge. In addition to this key painting and its related studies, the exhibition will also present a range of works in a variety of media that attest to Josef Albers’s lifelong investigation into black, white, and grey, from ink and watercolor works on paper that pre-date his time at the Bauhaus, to gouaches executed during his tenure at Black Mountain College, to color studies that shed light on his working process. Known primarily for his intensive exploration of color, Josef Albers often utilized tones of black, white, and grey while working out new ideas and new techniques, crafting finely tuned studies of light and perception while emphasizing the graphic and rhythmic qualities of his compositions. Examples of this tendency include not only the first Homage to the Square, mentioned above, but also earlier works, among them his series of Treble Clefs (1932-35)—important gouaches that bridge the period from his departure from the Bauhaus to his arrival in America—and selections from his Kinetics series of the early 1940s.

The gallery is also preparing a major exhibition of the work of Josef Albers that will open in January 2017 at David Zwirner’s London location.

JOSEF ALBERS (1988-1976) was born in Bottrop, Germany, and studied briefly at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich in 1919 before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. In 1922, Albers joined the school’s faculty, first teaching stained glass and eventually teaching design as well. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they both began to teach at Black Mountain College. During their time at Black Mountain, Albers began to show his work extensively within the United States, including solo exhibitions at Addison Museum of American Art, Andover (1935); J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle, New York (1936, 1938); The Germanic Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge (1936); the Katharine Kuh Gallery, Chicago (1937); the San Francisco Museum of Art (1940); and the Nierendorf Gallery, New York (1941). The Alberses remained at Black Mountain until 1950, when they moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct the department of design at Yale University School of Art. In 1949, he developed what would become his seminal Homage to the Square series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976. This body of work was featured in a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1963 that traveled to 11 venues in the United States and 11 venues in Latin America. Albers retired from teaching in 1958, just prior to the publication of his important Interaction of Color (1963), which was reissued in an expanded format in 2013. Following numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, as well as his participation in documenta 1 (1955) and documenta 4 (1968), Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his career-spanning retrospective there in 1971.

More recent exhibitions include Painting On Paper: Josef Albers In America, which originated at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, in 2010 (traveled to Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat, Bottrop, Germany; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Kunstmuseum Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Moderna, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York); Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect, at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, in 2014 (traveled to Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway); and A Beautiful Confluence: Anni and Josef Albers and the Latin American World at Mudec, Museo delle Culture, Milan, in 2015-2016. The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is planning a major survey exhibition of the work of both Josef and Anni Albers for 2019.

DAVID ZWIRNER, NYC
www.davidzwirner.com

Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s @ Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, curated by Hayden Dunbar

Openness and Clarity: Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s
Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles
June 7 — August 2, 2014

Honor Fraser Gallery presents Openness and Clarity: Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s, curated by HAYDEN DUNBAR. The show includes works by Josef Albers, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.

Assembling works rarely exhibited in Los Angeles, Openness and Clarity seeks to examine the pivotal role that Color Field painters and their direct predecessors played in the evolution of abstract art, while also proving the work's persisting ability to captivate the contemporary eye. The title of the exhibition references CLEMENT GREENBERG's catalog essay for his seminal 1964 exhibition, Post Painterly Abstraction, which championed a new group of artists that rejected painterliness in favor of an "openness and clarity" in color and contour. Organized for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition introduced thirty-one artists whose restrained arrangements of saturated color in vaporous soft-edged shapes and geometrical hard-edged forms reacted to the dense, gestural brushwork and raw emotion of the Abstract Expressionists. Diminishing distinctions between object and ground, these paintings formed a cool-headed and fresh visual language that de-emphasized line to privilege the perceptual effects of color: "What sets the best Color Field paintings apart is the extraordinary economy of means with which they manage not only to engage our feelings but also to ravish the eye." (Karen Wilkin, Color As Field: American Painting, 1950 – 1975, p. 17.)

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of LACMA's historic exhibition, Openness and Clarity presents a selection of exceptional works by five artists who were integral to Clement Greenberg's thesis and were instrumental in advancing abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. Though not included in Post Painterly Abstraction, the works of JOSEF ALBERTS establish a direct link between these artists' early and ongoing emphasis on color and form. As a teacher at Black Mountain College and Yale University, his work and ideas set a foundation for younger artists to expand upon and rebel against. His inclusion in this exhibition also underscores the social framework within which all of these artists were working and which provided a sphere of mutual influence. Josef Albers's Homage to the Square: Warm-Near (1966) is an example of his commitment to pure geometry and the interaction of color.

Using an all-over staining technique to achieve lyrical, floating shapes and radiant hues, HELEN FRANKENTHALER poured and applied washes of thinned paint with rags in works like Bach's Sacred Theater (1973). After Clement Greenberg showed him Helen Frankenthaler's work, MORRIS LOUIS followed her lead and embarked on intense experimentation with materials and color that led to the various acclaimed series he completed before his untimely death at age forty-nine. Kaf (1959-1960) is from his Floral series, an excellent and rarely seen example of Morris Louis's breakthrough work. Clement Greenberg also introduced KENNETH NOLAND to Hellen Frankenthaler's innovations, and like Louis (Noland's close friend) he embraced the potential of staining unprimed canvas with thinned pigments. A student of Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland invigorated his devotion to geometry with unusually shaped and stained canvases, as can be seen in works like Bolton Landing: Singing the Blues (1962) and Warm Weekend (1967). A close friend of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, JULES OLISKI was a bold colorist whose biomorphic forms alternately floated in monochromatic fields (as in Mushroom Joy [1959]) and pushed at the edges of the canvas (as in Z [1964]).

Known as an Abstract Expressionist and part of The New York School, ROBERT MOTHERWELL took a minimal approach to the use of color in the late 1960s, creating a series of expansive, nearly monochromatic canvases. Open No. 20: In Orange with Charcoal Line (1968) demonstrates Robert Motherwell's interest in color and composition as subjects. Like Robert Motherwell and Kenneth Noland, FRANK STELLA turned to painting as the subject matter for painting, pushing beyond the conventional rectilinear limits of the canvas and challenging notions of painting and objecthood. Sunapee IV (1966) from Franck Stella's Irregular Polygon series demonstrates his ability to marry color and form. On loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ctesiphon I (1968) is part of Franck Stella's Protractor Variation series and exemplifies the rigor and energy for which he became so well known. These radical geometries are echoed in ANTHONY CARO's Dumbfound (1976). On a 1960 visit from England to the United States, Anthony Caro met Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and the sculptor David Smith, all of whom made a lasting impression on him. Returning to England, Anthony Caro developed a monochromatic collage style that favored open forms and horizontality, which can be seen in Dumbfound (1976).

Openness and Clarity pays tribute to the legacy of Color Field artists who paved the way for Minimalism, Conceptual, and Pop art, creating an enduring shift in the course of art history that can still be seen today.

HONOR FRASER GALLERY
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On the Square: Art Elemental Form

 

More than half a century of artists' meditations

on art history's most elemental form.

 

Josef Albers, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Dan Flavin, Alfred Jensen,

Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin,

Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Lucas Samaras,

Joel Shapiro, James Siena, Keith Tyson, Corban Walker

 

© JAMES SIENA, Untitled (Iterative Grid), 2009
enamel on aluminum painting 29" x 22-3/4"
Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

 

© JAMES SIENA, Untitled (Iterative grid, second version), 2009
enamel on aluminum painting 19-1/4" x 15-1/8"
Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

 

PaceWildenstein presents a group exhibition that brings together works by some of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying homage to the square, an elemental form that has helped to define and shape the practice of modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition features sculptures and paintings by 16 artists, including Josef Albers, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Dan Flavin, Alfred Jensen, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Lucas Samaras, Joel Shapiro, James Siena, Keith Tyson, and Corban Walker. On the Square will be on view at 32 East 57th Street gallery from January 8 through February 13, 2010.

In the late 1960s, Sol LeWitt famously articulated the value of the square’s (or the cube’s) “uninteresting” form: “Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed. The use of a square or cube obviates the necessity of inventing other forms and reserves their use for invention.” Indeed, “the square,” perhaps the most stabile, enduring, and neutral form, a New York art critic argued in her homage to this elemental form in 1967, provides a universal standard that is as attractive in its precision and neutrality to the space age as it was to early philosophers and theologians.”

From deconstruction to reconstruction, creation and re-dissolution [1], for the artists included in this exhibition, the square and its permutations have served as a frame for formal invention. Josef Albers, Alfred Jensen, and Ad Reinhardt used the square as the basic organizing framework for their systems of color theory. Josef Albers once explained that he “prefer[red] to think of the square as a stage on which colors play as actors influencing each other—a visual excitement called interaction.” The arrangement of squares within Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square paintings and prints were “a convenient carrier” for his color “instrumentation”—a “container for and a dish to serve [his] cooking in.”

The square was an important defining unit for Minimalists and Conceptualists, who used more objective methodologies with mathematical and logic-based systems.  Artists such as Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt focusing on spatial organization through sculpture, used the box as the basic unit with which to define real space. “The problem is for any artist to find the concatenation that will grow,” Judd once explained. He emptied space of its inessentials and then re-articulated it with carefully placed objects: closed or open, stacked—vertically or horizontally, placed on the floor, hung on the wall, colored in one or multiple colors; the spacing of the units became as important as the pieces themselves.

The square remains an important element for artists working today. The square enables Joel Shapiro to move fluidly between figuration and abstraction, as he conjoins elongated boxes into evocative constructions. With a nod to minimalism, Tony Feher articulates the repetition of the form in stacked plastic beverage crates (Century Plant, 2002), revealing beauty in the simplest gesture.

The exhibition also includes works by James Siena, Tara Donovan, and Keith Tyson, who use subunits to create works resulting in multiple variations. In pieces such as Keith Tyson’s Geno Pheno Sculpture: “Automata No. 2,” the cube serves as the fundamental component for the phenotype generated by the base. The square is the foundation for James Siena’s enamel on aluminum paintings from 2009, as his visual algorithms cascade into dizzying, pulsating patterns. With the square, a jumble of straight pins finds order and clarity in Tara Donovan’s shimmering Untitled (Pins), 2004.

 

[1] Ad Reinhardt, “25 Lines of Words on Art Statement” from It Is (New York), Spring 1958.

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living Exhibition

Josef and Anni Albers

Designs for Living

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, NYC

October 1, 2004 - February 27, 2005 

 

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living, an exhibition chronicling the Alberses’ extraordinary designs for objects for everyday living, will be on view at Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Curated by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living explores the domestic creations of these pioneering artists from the early 1920s through the 1950s, as their designs developed from their days as students in Germany’s famed Bauhaus School to their arrival upon the American scene. The exhibition reveals the full extent of the Alberses’ mutual aesthetic commitment, perpetual creativity and contribution to modern living.

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was one of the most pioneering and respected artists of his era, excelling as a painter, printmaker, designer, writer and teacher. His wife Anni Albers (1899-1994) is considered by many to be the foremost textile artist of the 20th century.

Although the pair did not collaborate artistically, they shared a vision and developed a design philosophy that helped to transform the look of the modern domestic interior. Anni and Josef Albers embraced the fundamental idea that everyday life can be enhanced and enriched through design. Individually, their work displayed brilliance and versatility; together, their shared aesthetic formed an enduring legacy, which, until now, has scarcely been known to the public. The seminal ideas of these partners in life and design will be explored for the first time through the domestic objects featured in this exhibition.

Subscribing to the belief that art is everywhere, Josef and Anni Albers designed an array of innovative furniture, textiles and tabletop objects not only for themselves but also for use by others in their social and artistic circle, including Walter Gropius, founder of the influential Bauhaus. “Designs for Living” will include several domestic creations developed in their Dessau (Germany) Bauhaus apartment and in Berlin, many of which have never been shown publicly. 

Josef Albers has been the subject of numerous retrospectives at major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was the first living artist ever to be given a one-person show, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Josef Albers was one of the few students to be made a Junior Master at the Dessau Bauhaus and was an active instructor until 1933, when the school closed under pressure from the Nazis. Later that year, Josef and Anni Albers emigrated to Black Mountain College—a groundbreaking institution in North Carolina, known as a nurturing ground for such cultural icons as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. In 1950 they moved to Connecticut, where Josef Albers headed the Department of Design at Yale University. In the last 25 years of his life, Josef obtained an international reputation for his Homage to the Square paintings as well as for his teachings and writings on color.

Featured in “Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living” are dozens of Josef’s objects, ranging from holiday greeting cards to glass-top nesting tables, all of which are simple in form and radiant in color. Josef’s extraordinary ability to use a lean aesthetic vocabulary and minimal means to obtain complex results is demonstrated through the exhibition of items such as his fruit bowl and tea glass, glass paintings, LP album covers and fireplace designs. Also on view together, for the first time, will be furniture designed by Josef for the Moellenhoff apartment in Berlin―his first major furniture commission. 

Anni Albers has influenced generations of designers through her weavings as well as through her teaching and writing. She entered the Bauhaus in 1922 as a student and in 1930 briefly served as director of its weaving workshop. In those early years Anni Albers was already gaining recognition as a major artist and designer from contemporaries such as Sonia Delaunay. After arriving in America, she took her textile work in unprecedented directions and began to exercise great influence in the field. In 1949, Anni was commissioned by architect Philip Johnson to design curtains for the stylish guesthouse of the John D. Rockefeller III family. Later that year, she became the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been honored with several retrospectives at major institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre in Paris. Today, Anni’s textiles continue to influence, inspire and delight as new generations are introduced to her work.

On view will be many of Anni’s austere and experimental designs from her years at the Bauhaus, as well as the more playful and exuberant examples from her years in the United States. More than 50 examples of her textiles and designs, some of which have never been shown before, will be featured in the exhibition, including: the Rockefeller guesthouse draperies; wall hangings that were pioneering forays into abstract art; jewelry made from ordinary objects such as paper clips and sink strainers; and a large sampling of her upholstery and drapery materials and other fabrics for everyday living.

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living has been organized by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.  Additional support was provided by Maharam.

Curators:  Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation,  and Matilda McQuaid, in-house curator, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Exhibition Catalog:   This exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalog with original writings by Josef and Anni Albers, and essays by Nicholas Fox Weber and Martin Filler, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books and House & Garden magazine.

Exhibition Designer:  Toshiko Mori, Toshiko Mori Architect
Lighting Designer:   Anita Jorgensen, Anita Jorgensen Lighting Design

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living

October 1, 2004 - February 27, 2005

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

2 East 91st Street , New York,  NY 10128