Nicholas Fox Weber's Blog, page 28

Albers_Mephisto_Self-Portrait

 

Albers was born on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, a small industrial

mining city in the Ruhr region of Westphalia, its air so clogged with

coal smoke that he used to say, “Even my spit was black.” His family

was working class; no one had advanced education…

Albers claimed his humble origins as the key to his talents. He considered

the menial skills he had been taught growing up vital to what he

subsequently became, and he wore his heritage as a badge of pride.

–The Bauhaus Group Six Masters of Modernism

 

Detail of Fish Magic

 

Klee told his students, “One can, once in awhile, take a picture as a dream.”

Like all rich dreams, this one begs to be read. In what initially seems to be a

vision in an aquarium or through a diver’s mask, this underwater scene has,

at its center, a stretched vertical canvas that fades into the horizontal canvas

on which Fish Magic is actually painted. This device of a painting within a

painting becomes a commentary on the illusion of art…

Detail of Fish Magic (Large Fish Picture), 1925. Paul Klee

 

Fish Magic

 

Paul Klee, Fish Magic (Large Fish Picture), 1925.

With an aquarium full of tropical fish at home,

Klee was riveted to the underwater universe.

 –The Bauhaus Group Six Masters of Modernism

 

125th Anniversary of Josef Alber’s birth

 

Piero della Francesca

On the 125th anniver­sary of his birth,

two exhi­bi­tions in Peru­gia and Città di Castello

cel­e­brate the genius of Josef Albers

The choice of the Umbria region delib­er­ately hon­ors Albers’s life­long pas­sion

for 14th and 15th cen­tury Ital­ian paint­ing, espe­cially that of Giotto, Duc­cio,

and Piero della Francesca. Nicholas Fox Weber, who was a friend of Josef

Albers’s and is exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Josef and Anni Albers Foun­da­tion

in the United States, con­sid­ers it a birth­day present to put his work under

the same roof as Piero, Duc­cio, Fra Angelico, Perug­ino, and Donatello at

the Gal­le­ria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Peru­gia and the Pina­coteca

Comu­nale in Città di Castello.

Piero della Francesca, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Angels,

c. 1460 –70.

Kandinsky

 

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, on December 4,1866–in the

same decade that Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s

Crime and Punishment were published and Mussorgsky’s Boris

Gudunov was first performed. His earliest memories consisted of

shapes and colors of the sort that would eventually become the

substance of his art.

 

Rosa Mystica

 

Josef Albers: Spirituality and Rigor

Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria

March — 20 June 2013

The work in Perugia includes stained glass assemblages, including a reproduction especially

made for this show of Rosa Mystica, a window Albers created for the Catholic Church in his

hometown in Germany and which was destroyed during World War II. There are also rare early

drawings, sandblasted glass constructions, architectural drawings, and a range of pure abstract

paintings.

 

GABRIELE MÜNTER

[image error]

GABRIELE MÜNTER, Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the table in Murnau, 1912.

In Münter’s country house in a Bavarian mountain village, Kandinsky pushed

his art into unprecedented realms of abstraction.

Source: Uploaded by user via Nicholas on Pinterest

Press Release

Press Release
Josef Albers: Spirituality and Rigor

Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria

20 March — 20 June 2013

 

Josef Albers: Art as Experience

Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Comunale

20 March — 20 June 2013

Press view:

Further information and pictures: www.studioesseci.net

On the 125th anniversary of his birth,

two exhibitions in Perugia and Città di Castello

celebrate the genius of Josef Albers

To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of the artist who forever changed the way that people see color and line,

the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation brings two exhibitions to the Umbrian cities Perugia and Città di Castello.

The Perugia exhibition explores the religious element in Albers’s art. Raised as a Catholic, and maintaining his religious

practice lifelong, Albers incorporated traditional imagery in a lot of his work, and, even when he did not, regarded

transformation of color and line as spiritual, even mystical, events. The Città di Castello show focuses on his teaching

methods and their influence on generations of artists worldwide.

The choice of the Umbria region deliberately honors Albers’s lifelong passion for 14th and 15th century Italian painting,

especially that of Giotto, Duccio, and Piero della Francesca. Nicholas Fox Weber, who was a friend of Josef Albers’s and

is executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the United States, considers it a birthday present to put

his work under the same roof as Piero, Duccio, Fra Angelico, Perugino, and Donatello at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria

in Perugia and the Pinacoteca Comunale in Città di Castello.

At the Bauhaus, where Albers was both student and teacher, from 1920–1933, Italy was an important source of inspiration.

Paul Klee loved to visit the country (after a holiday in Genoa, he defined Sauce Sugo as one of the great human miracles,

alongside Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony); Josef and Anni Albers chose Florence for their honeymoon in 1925. In 1934, the year

following the closing of the Bauhaus—Albers was one of the Masters who made the decision to bring the pioneering

educational institution to an end rather than collaborate with the Nazis—Wassily Kandinsky organized an exhibition of

Albers’s prints in Milan.

The exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale in Perugia, entitled Josef Albers: Spirituality and Rigor, has been organized by

Weber, in collaboration with Fabio de Chirico, Head of the Fine Arts Office and Director of the Galleria Nazionale. It

presents a wide selection of works, from Albers’s early days as an artist and schoolteacher in Westphalia to the final

years of his life. Underlying all these works is Albers’s reverence for clear and honest thinking, and his firm belief that

devotion to craftsmanship and truthfulness can transform the everyday miraculously.

The work in Perugia includes stained glass assemblages, including a reproduction especially made for this show of

Rosa Mystica, a window Albers created for the Catholic Church in his hometown in Germany and which was

destroyed during World War II. There are also rare early drawings, sandblasted glass constructions, architectural

drawings, and a range of pure abstract paintings.

In Città di Castello, the exhibition Josef Albers: Art as Experience reveals the powerful impact on his pupils of Albers’s

revolutionary teaching methods, first in Germany and then in the United States. It presents a selection of the artist’s

works alongside those of his students, and also includes photographic and film records of Albers’s lessons and workshops,

which helped to shape subsequent generations of artists.

Josef Albers was born on 19 March 1988, in Bottrop, Westphalia. After his art studies in Berlin and Munich, he enrolled in

the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus’s founder, intended the school to be a community of artists

who would work together in the spirit of the gothic era, and to create art, architecture, and design to be used by industry

on a large scale and by people worldwide at every strapping of society. In 1923, Albers was appointed instructor of the

Preliminary Course, which he continued when the school moved to Dessau in 1925. It was compulsory for all new students.

In 1925, he married Annelise Fleischmann, a textile artist; for over 50 years, until Albers’s death in 1976, they had a tremendous

connection of beliefs and a shared faith in abstract art, as well as a mutual loathing of a lot they considered ambitious and

self-serving.

In 1933, the Alberses immigrated to the United States, where Josef was invited to make an art department in Black Mountain

College, North Carolina. He and Anni remained there until 1949. Then and after, they made many visits to Central and South

America – traveling to Mexico, Guatemala, and, in 1953 to Chile and Peru, and collected pre-Columbian art. The architecture

and overall aesthetics of those lands south of the U.S. border became a passion for both artists.

In 1950, Albers started his Homage to the Square series of paintings in oil on masonite, and in the same year he accepted the

appointment as Chair of the Department of Design at Yale University. He later returned to Germany as a visiting professor in Ulm;

on weekends he visited the monasteries and cathedrals of southern Germany, photographing them and collecting postcards

which he would later compose into collages shown for the first time in this exhibition.

In 1963, Yale University Press published Albers’s Interaction of Color, demonstrating the principles of Albers’s endless exploration

of the mutability and relativity of color and based on his renowned teaching of color, widely known as “The Color Course.”

In 1971, Josef Albers was the first living artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It was one of many major shows devoted to his art.

He died on 25 March 1976, a week after his 88th birthday, in New Haven, and was buried in Orange, Connecticut.

Since his death, the Albers Foundation has continued to perpetuate his legacy in a range of ways.

Paul Klee Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition

PAUL KLEE, Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition. In this small image, Klee evoked the fantastic energy and originality of the

upcoming presentation of the Bauhaus’s achievement from its first four years.

 

Paul Klee specified the text for his tombstone: I ...

 

 

Paul Klee specified the text for his tombstone:

 

I CANNOT BE GRASPED IN THE HERE AND NOW

FOR I LIVE JUST AS WELL WITH THE DEAD

AS WITH THE UNBORN

SOMEWHAT CLOSER TO THE HEART

OF CREATION THAN USUAL

BUT FAR FROM CLOSE ENOUGH

– The Bauhaus Group Six Masters of Modernism