One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers
Edited with text by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Elizabeth Otto, Lee Ann Daffner.
Josef Albers is widely recognized as a crucial figure in 20th-century art, both as an independent practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University. Albers made paintings, drawings and prints and designed furniture and typography. Arguably the least familiar aspect of his extraordinary career was his inventive engagement with photography, only widely known after his death, including his production of approximately 70 photocollages that feature photographs he made at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932. These works anticipate concerns that he would pursue throughout his career--the effects of adjacency, the exploration of color through white, black and gray, and the delicate balance between handcraft and mechanical production.
Albers’ photographs were first shown at MoMA in a modest exhibition in 1988, when the Museum acquired two photocollages. In 2015 the Museum acquired ten additional photocollages, making its collection the most substantial anywhere outside the Albers Foundation. This publication reproduces each of the photocollages Albers made at the Bauhaus, presenting the scope of this achievement for the first time. An introductory essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister situates them within the contexts of modernist photography, the Bauhaus ethos and of Albers’ own practice.
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.
Sarah Meister is Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
"El Lissitzky, Dessau, June 1930" is reproduced from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Fine Books and Collections
One and One Is Four reveals an Albers at once familiar and unexpected—playful yet disciplined, personal yet enigmatic—through a body of work whose genius becomes fully apparent when considered as a whole.
The New York Times
Randy Kennedy
...focuses on [Albers’s] early experiments with the ways in which photography did and did not render reality, the interplay between its flat shapes and its instantaneous representation of the three-dimensional world before the lens.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
Albers developed a hands-on, eyes-on art practice that opened the world up, a world he approached with a craftsman’s care and experienced with the scintillated focus of a mescaline high...we can see his expansive version of single-mindedness unfold.
The New Yorker
This small, vital display of medleys of photographs...reveals the man, and the joy, behind the pedagogy...these works are infectiously buoyant
The Brooklyn Rail
Sarah Hermanson Meister
Albers’s photocollages stand as a remarkable contribution to the medium in their own right.
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"One and one is two—that's business.
One and one is four—that's art—or if you like it better—is life.
I think that makes clear: the many-fold seeing, the many-fold reading of the world makes us broader; wider; richer.
In education, a single standpoint cannot give a solid firm stand.
Thus, let us have different viewpoints, different standpoints.
Let us observe in different directions and from different angles…"
— Josef Albers, 1938
Featured image is "Marli Heimann, March [or] April 1931; all during an hour."
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“I suppose some of you have seen the advertisement of commercial photo dealers saying, ‘You push the button, and we do the rest,’” Josef Albers said during a lecture at Black Mountain College in 1943. “This promotes a taking of pictures with the least care possible. Such a way of looking at photography, I believe, is of the lowest level possible and should not be our way of approaching and understanding photography. Photography is first a handicraft. It can also be art. It can produce works of art as any handicraft does, if the product represents a significant expression of the mentality of a period or an individual.” In honor of Memorial Day beachgoers everywhere, featured image is reproduced from staff favorite, One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers. The photographs are captioned “Biarritz, August 1929” and “Ascona, August 1930.” continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 12 in. / 128 pgs / 100 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9781633450172 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 10/25/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Elizabeth Otto, Lee Ann Daffner.
Josef Albers is widely recognized as a crucial figure in 20th-century art, both as an independent practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University. Albers made paintings, drawings and prints and designed furniture and typography. Arguably the least familiar aspect of his extraordinary career was his inventive engagement with photography, only widely known after his death, including his production of approximately 70 photocollages that feature photographs he made at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932. These works anticipate concerns that he would pursue throughout his career--the effects of adjacency, the exploration of color through white, black and gray, and the delicate balance between handcraft and mechanical production.
Albers’ photographs were first shown at MoMA in a modest exhibition in 1988, when the Museum acquired two photocollages. In 2015 the Museum acquired ten additional photocollages, making its collection the most substantial anywhere outside the Albers Foundation. This publication reproduces each of the photocollages Albers made at the Bauhaus, presenting the scope of this achievement for the first time. An introductory essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister situates them within the contexts of modernist photography, the Bauhaus ethos and of Albers’ own practice.
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.
Sarah Meister is Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
