Josef Albers
Subtitle: life and work
By: Charles Darwent
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9780500519103
Subjects: Designers; Biography; Artists
Description: While Josef Albers' Bauhaus colleagues Klee and Kandinsky are household names, Albers himself has remained inscrutable. He is best known as the painter of the 'Homages to the Square', a series of over 2,000 seemingly tightly controlled experiments in the interaction of colour. Yet he did not begin these pictures until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, maker and theorist, much of it pursued in the United States following the Nazi dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933. Drawing on extensive unpublished archival writings, documents, and illustrations, this is the first full-scale biography of one of the 20th-century's great artists. Among Albers's unpublished papers are letters from friends John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, as well as fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so too, were his interests.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-326) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Homages to the square; title: Am Anfang; title: The world outside: Berlin and Munich; title: - A man of glass: Weimar; title: Student to Meister: Dessau and Berlin; title: Amerika: Black Mountain College; title: Ends and beginnings: Yale; title: That which should accompany old age.