Nicholas Fox Weber and Fred Licht [text], Brenda Danilowitz [Catalogue]: JOSEF ALBERS. GLASS, COLOR AND LIGHT. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Third printing, 1995. Square quarto. Photo illustrated wrappers. 152 pp. 56 color plates and 19 black and white illustrations, essays. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers with trivial wear, so a nearly fine copy.
9.5 x 11 softcover book with 152 pages and 56 color plates and 19 black and white illustrations. Catalogue of exhibition organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Josef Albers Foundation, Orange, Connecticut. With essays by Fred Licht, Brenda Danilowitz, and Josef Albers.
The first monograph devoted to Albers' works in glass, from the first primitive glass pictures that he made with found fragments of colored glass in Germany in 1921 to work made with a sophisticated sandblasting process and architectural commissions.
Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts.
In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.
With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing.
The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans.
Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design.
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