Josef Albers

German born abstract painter Josef Albers, laid the foundations for some of the most important art education programs of the 20th century. In 1936, during his time working at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he had his first solo exhibition in New York at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle. In 1949, Albers left the college and began his famous Homage to the Square series. He taught at various institutions throughout America, including Yale University, New Haven, where he lectured for eight years. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Albers' traveling exhibition in 1965 and a retrospective of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971. The artist died in 1976.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

JOSEF ALBERS
Text by Marco Pierini, Nicolas Fox Weber.
SILVANA EDITORIALE
ISBN: 9788836621415 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 3/31/2012
Active | Awaiting stock

JOSEF ALBERS: HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE
Edited by Nicholas Fox Weber, Brenda Danilowitz. Text by Edgardo Ganado Kim, Juan Palomar Verea.
RM/FUNDACIóN DE ARQUITECTURA TAPATíA LUíS BARRAGáN/THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOU
ISBN: 9788492480388 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 12/31/2009
Active | Awaiting stock

JOSEF ALBERS: INTERACTION OF COLOR
YALE
ISBN: 9780300115956 | US $16.00
Pub Date: --
Active | Limited Quantity

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

JOSEF ALBERS IN AMERICA: PAINTINGS ON PAPER
Edited by Heinz Liesbrock, Michael Semff. Text by Isabelle Dervaux, Heinz Liesbrock, Michael Semff.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775725873 | US $60.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2011
Out of Print | Not available

JOSEF ALBERS: OBSERVATION AND FORMULATION
Text by Martin Krampen.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775723527 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2009
Out of Print | Not available

Josef Albers

Josef Albers: Art as Experience

The Teaching Method of a Bauhaus Master

Edited by Nicholas Fox Weber.
Published by Silvana Editoriale

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was both a pioneer of abstract art and an enormously influential teacher and theorist of art pedagogy. In the work he made at the Bauhaus and--following his emigration from Germany to the U.S.--at Black Mountain College and Yale University, Albers strived for economy of line and clarity of articulation, and he developed his pedagogy along similarly rigorous lines. At Black Mountain College, Albers encountered the educational theories of the great American philosopher John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of context and experience in education, and whose famous statement on aesthetics, Art as Experience, was published the year after Albers arrived in the U.S. In 1963, Albers published the profoundly influential book Interaction of Color. Subsequently translated into 12 languages, it continues to be used in classrooms and studios worldwide. Josef Albers: Art as Experience looks at the relationship between Albers’ pragmatic (and Pragmatist) teaching and his art, presenting previously unseen works by Albers’ students from the Bauhaus and elsewhere, along with little-known studies and other art by Albers himself, and reveals the vibrancy and extraordinary impact of Josef Albers’ groundbreaking pedagogical methods.

Josef Albers: Spirituality and Rigor

Edited by Nicholas Fox Weber. Text by Fabio de Chirico, Fiona Kearney, Paolo Papone, Marco Pierini, Colm Tóibín, Juile Agoos.
Published by Silvana Editoriale

Josef Albers (1888–1976) believed firmly in art’s spiritual dimension. Among his several aphorisms on the topic, none reflects the humble, ascetic character of his spiritual disposition better than the following: “Easy to know that diamonds are precious. Good to know that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.” Conceived by the renowned Albers expert Nicholas Fox Weber, who directed the Albers Foundation for 20 years and knew the artist well, Spirituality and Rigor presents a selection of work by Albers that illustrates his ascetic spirituality and his deeply felt Catholicism. The book stems in part from Fox Weber’s The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist, and is augmented with additional work by Fabio De Chirico. It includes Albers’ early drawings of country churches and cathedrals; “Rosa Mystica,” his stained glass window for St Michael’s Church, and other glass works containing religious imagery; his abstractions of crosses and geometric abstractions with spiritually themed titles, from his Black Mountain years; his prints of Mexican gods; photographic interpretations of the theme of angels; and a selection from the Homage to the Square series. This important volume is the most thorough portrait yet published of Albers’ spiritual convictions.

Josef Albers

Text by Marco Pierini, Nicolas Fox Weber.
Published by Silvana Editoriale

Recent exhibitions and publications on Josef Albers (1888–1976) have established this influential artist as a true Renaissance man of modernism--a painter, furniture designer, glass artist, writer, pedagogue and even album cover designer. Published on the occasion of the first major retrospective of Josef Albers in more than 20 years, and drawing on a wealth of information from the Albers archive, this volume consolidates this broad perspective, covering the full scope of Albers’ achievement. The artist’s career on both sides of the Atlantic is documented here, from his Weimar Bauhaus beginnings to his tenure as a teacher at Black Mountain College, to his years at Yale University and his considerable influence as a painter and theorist. The catalogue reproduces nearly 200 works, including 12 works in glass produced between 1921 and 1932; nearly 30 photographs and photocollages, many of which are previously unpublished; a selection of woodcuts and gouaches, and several items of furniture; the seven record sleeves Albers designed for Command Records (with their classic gatefold sleeves, which Albers helped to conceive); the paintings for which he is so well known; and a selection of theoretical texts. Also included is a rare text by Wassily Kandinsky, previously printed in a 1934 exhibition bulletin for a show of Alber’s woodcuts at the Galleria del Milione in Milan. This volume gives the most comprehensive account of Albers’ career to date.

Josef Albers in America: Paintings on Paper

Edited by Heinz Liesbrock, Michael Semff. Text by Isabelle Dervaux, Heinz Liesbrock, Michael Semff.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Josef Albers' rigorous investigations into color have had a decisive effect on art in the twentieth century and beyond. His teaching posts at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale enabled him to bequeath his theories to several generations of artists and designers, from Max Bill and Mark Rothko to Eva Hesse and Ray Johnson. Published for an exhibition at the Morgan library, and with an abundance of previously uncollected works, this volume unveils the full bounty of Albers' works on paper: lithographs, linocuts, woodcuts, screenprints and etchings. Since the prints lack the just-visible brushwork of Albers' paintings, allowing color to emerge without surface blemish, some have argued that they constitute a more effective illustration of his color theory.

Josef Albers: Observation and Formulation

A Foundation Course

Text by Martin Krampen.
Published by Hatje Cantz

During the winter of 1953/54, former Bauhaus professor Josef Albers (1888-1976) taught a three-part introductory course on drawing, material studies and color studies at the newly founded Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm--courses which anticipated his now classic text Interaction of Color (1963). In May 1954, Albers gave one of his former students, Martin Krampen, a film script that dealt with his teachings, and under his direction, the film was shot word for word. Now, 50 years later, this presentation of Josef Albers's teachings is being made available to the general public. A fantastic pedagogic tool, this interactive DVD permits the viewer to come up with his or her own solutions to each of the tasks Albers gives his students, while other suggestions are documented through works by former students taken from the HfG archives.

Josef Albers: Homage to the Square

Edited by Nicholas Fox Weber, Brenda Danilowitz. Text by Edgardo Ganado Kim, Juan Palomar Verea.
Published by RM/Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luís Barragán/The josef and anni Albers Fou

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' 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.

Josef Albers: Interaction of Color

Published by Yale

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.

This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.