ART CITIES:N.York-Josef Albers
An artist, poet, theoretician, and professor of arts and design at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University, Josef Albers worked across the mediums of painting, printmaking, murals, and architecture. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, he traveled to Mexico and other Latin American countries more than a dozen times from 1935 to 1967 to visit monuments of ancient Mesoamerica, which archaeologists were then excavating amid a resurgence of interest in pre-Columbian art and culture.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Guggenheim Museum Archive
The exhibition “Josef Albers in Mexico” illuminates the relationship between the forms and design of pre-Columbian monuments and the art of Josef Albers. The presentation features a selection of rarely shown early paintings, iconic canvases from Albers’s “Homage to the Square” and “Variant/Adobe” series, and works on paper. The exhibition also includes a rich selection of photographs and photocollages, many of which have never before been on view and were created by Albers in response to frequent visits to Mexican archaeological sites beginning in the 1930s. Also the exhibition Includes: letters, studies, and unseen personal photographs drawn from the Collections of Guggenheim Museum and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. On each visit in the archeological sites, Albers took hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the pyramids, shrines, and sanctuaries at these sites, often grouping multiple images printed at various sizes onto paperboard sheets. The resulting photographs and photocollages reveal Albers’s innovative, if understudied, approach to photography and also underscore the importance of seriality and temporality within his overall body of work. Albers’s collaged images also suggest a nuanced relationship between the geometry and design elements of pre-Columbian monuments and the artist’s iconic abstract canvases and works on paper. Several of the latter are titled after key sites in Mexico, and formal resonances between the two bodies of work become apparent, especially when viewed together as in the Guggenheim presentation. Albers’s embrace of pre-Columbian imagery may be considered within the complex and often-fraught history of modernist artists looking toward non-Western cultures for source material. His work contrasts with that of the revolutionary Mexican artists with whom he met on his trips, including Diego Rivera. At the same time, Albers’s long-term commitment to studying Mexican art and architecture also positions him as a prescient figure in the history of post–World War II American art, when artists such as Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Smithson looked toward ancient traditions with a new sensitivity and self-awareness
Info: Curator: Lauren Hinkson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, Duration: 3/11/17-18/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri & Sun 10:00-17:45, Fri 10:00-19:45, www.guggenheim.org
