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.
