Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect
?Texts by Nicholas Fox Weber and Jeannette Redensek
Surveying works in all media, Josef Albers: Minimum Media, Maximum Effect offers a new comprehensive monograph of Josef Albers (1888-1976) focusing on the artist\s abiding concern for clarity and simplicity. As the title suggests, Albers strove to attain the maximum effect with minimal media. This selection of works demonstrates the continuity of Albers\s austere and luminous vision, as it permeated his teaching, furniture and design objects, photography, typographical design, and his writings, from his early years as a schoolteacher in Germany and the Bauhaus years to the end of his artistic and teaching career at Yale. His prolific artistic output ranged from furniture design and figurative line drawing to engraving and painting, including his renowned Homage to the Square. This substantial, 362-page survey is exhilarating in its scope, encompassing some 170 works, archival documents such as Albers\s notes and journals, and dozens of essays and scholarly discourses on art, pedagogy, and philosophy. This carefully designed volume illuminates Albers\s artistry and teachings and allows the reader to appreciate the incredible technical skill and the clarity of vision behind his apparently simple works.
Publisher: La Fábrica/Fundación Juan March
Artists: Josef Albers
Contributors: , Jeannette Redensek
Publication Date: 2014
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 1/2 x 10 1/4 in (24.1 x 26 cm)
Pages: 384
Reproductions: illustrated throughout
ISBN: 9788415691747
Retail: $65
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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