Josef Albers: Homage to the Square
?Texts by Edgardo Ganado Kim and Juan Palomar Verea
Influential teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist Josef Albers was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty. By 1933, when the Nazis forced the school to close, Albers had become one of its best-known artists and teachers. Having migrated with his wife Anni to the U.S., where he taught at Black Mountain College and at Yale, Albers began to experiment with the optical effects of simple color combinations. The experimentation blossomed into a lifelong obsession that would culminate in his best-known series of paintings, Homage to the Square, in which he painted several differently-colored squares within larger squares in order to illustrate his theory that alterations in environment, shape, and light would produce changes in color. This edition contains impeccable reproductions of Albers\s famous series, which beautifully illustrate the artist\s primary thesis, that the discrepancy between visual information received by the retina and what the mind perceives proves that this information is not intrinsic to color itself, but is dependent on its relationship with its surroundings.
Publisher: RM/Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luís Barragán/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
Artists: Josef Albers
Contributors: Edgardo Ganado Kim, Juan Palomar Verea
Publication Date: 2009
Binding: Hardcover in slipcase
Dimensions: 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in (24.1 x 24.1 cm)
Pages: 52
Reproductions: 13 color, 43 duotone
ISBN: 9788492480388
Retail: $50
Status: Out Of Print
Josef Albers
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is considered one of the foremost abstract painters, as well as an important designer and educator noted for his rigorously experimental approach to spatial relationships and color theory. Born in Bottrop, Germany, Albers studied at the Weimar Bauhaus, later joining the school’s faculty in 1922. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. During this time, Albers began to show his work extensively within the United States. In 1950, the Alberses moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef was invited to direct the newly formed Department of Design at Yale University School of Art. Albers retired from teaching in 1958, just prior to the publication of his important Interaction of Color (1963), which was reissued in two volumes in 2013. Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971.
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