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' 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' notes and journals, and dozens of essays and scholarly discourses on art, pedagogy and philosophy. This carefully designed volume illuminates Albers' artistry and teachings and allows the reader to appreciate the incredible technical skill and the clarity of vision behind his apparently simple works.
“Before one lays eyes on a genuine Homage to the Square painting by Josef Albers,” Jeanette Redensek writes in Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect, one of our most substantial and beautiful books this season, “it is quite possible that one has already come across his signature composition in a hundred iterations: as illustrations, prints, postcards, posters, postage stamps, note cards, refrigerator magnets, mouse pads, sofa pillows, area rugs and tote bags. It is a revelation, then, to see one of Albers’ Homage to the Square paintings in person for the first time. The surfaces of Albers’ works are velvety and animated. The visible, even strokes of the palette knife, and the variations in the densities of the pigments from the color to color, from the square to square, combine to create a shimmering transparency of color. What might have appeared as a coolly intellectual, geometrical proposition in reproduction is revealed as a luminous, painterly incandescence in real life.” Study for Homage to the Square, Now (1962) is reproduced from Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect.
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“Through works of art we are permanently reminded to be balanced, within ourselves and with others; to have respect for proportion, that is, to keep relationship. It teaches us to be disciplined, and selective between quantity and quality. Art teaches the educational world that it is to be too poor to collect only knowledge; furthermore, that economy is not a matter of statistics, but of sufficient proportion between effort and effect.” This excerpt from Josef Albers’ 1940 lecture, “The Meaning of Art,” at Black Mountain College, and “Homage to the Square, Guarded” (1952) are reproduced from Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect, the superb new release from La Fábrica/Fundación Juan March. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 10.25 in. / 384 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 GBP £56.00 ISBN: 9788415691747 PUBLISHER: La Fábrica/Fundación Juan March AVAILABLE: 10/31/2014 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD Excl LA Spain
Published by La Fábrica/Fundación Juan March. Text by Nicholas Fox Weber, 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' 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' notes and journals, and dozens of essays and scholarly discourses on art, pedagogy and philosophy. This carefully designed volume illuminates Albers' artistry and teachings and allows the reader to appreciate the incredible technical skill and the clarity of vision behind his apparently simple works.
