PRESENTATION: Josef Albers-Paintings Titled Variants

Josef Albers, initially a teacher of elementary school, was one of the foremost art teachers of the 20th century. His approach to color and drawing now informs art education universally. He made groundbreaking art and designs in glass, woodworking, painting, and printmaking. The Homage to the Square paintings and prints that he began in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976 are among the masterworks of modern art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Archive

The exhibition “Paintings Titled Variants” focuses on Josef Albers’s breakthrough “Variant/Adobe” series, a body of work that was inspired, in part, by the art, architecture, and landscapes that Albers observed during his numerous visits to Mexico and the American Southwest. Like his “Homage to the Square”, the “Variant/Adobe” works follow a serialised format within which Albers experimented with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects. Begun in 1947, while Albers was still a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the “Variant/Adobe” series initiated a new phase in his work. Titled after the first exhibition of the “Variant/Adobe” paintings at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1949, The exhibition features a range of works from this series, including compositions on Masonite as well as on blotting paper. With their vivid colour palettes, the paintings reflect Albers’s keen and studied sensitivity to and interest in opticality, as well as the way in which the relationship between different colors dramatically impacts the appearance and experience of the work. Elaborating on these visual qualities. One of Albers’s names for these works, “Adobe”, reinforces their architectural quality and may refer to the ”clay house” in La Luz, New Mexico, in which he began making these works. The name also reflects the influence of pre-Columbian art and architecture on the series, which resembles a schematic rendering of a vernacular southern Mexican adobe dwelling. Several of Albers’s photocollages from his trips to Mexico are also on view and further attest to this connection. An important, yet largely unrecognised facet of his work, the photocollages, which often present typologies of architectural forms or decorative patterns, visualise Albers’s thinking and illuminate how his travels and study influenced his painterly practise. Highlighting the significance of these works, curator Lauren Hinkson writes, “Albers’s photography offers a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting how his overall body of work bridges the temporal divide between ancient forms and modernist abstraction. The chain of formal correspondence linking the photographs of pre-Columbian ruins to Albers’s paintings and prints looks self-evident, almost obvious.”3 Albers’s connection to Mexico and Mesoamerican art and architecture was the subject of Josef Albers in Mexico, a major 2017–2018 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that subsequently travelled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Josef Albers was born 19/3/1888, in Bottrop, Germany. From 1905 to 1908, he studied to become a teacher in Büren and then taught in Westphalian primary schools from 1908 to 1913. After attending the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. Albers studied art in Essen and Munich before entering the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. There, he initially concentrated on glass painting, and in 1929, as a journeyman, he reorganized the glass workshop. In 1923, he began to teach the Vorkurs, a basic design course. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he became a professor. In addition to working in glass and metal, he designed furniture and typography. After the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States. That same year, he became head of the art department at the newly established, experimental Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Albers continued to teach at Black Mountain until 1949. In 1935, he took the first of many trips to Mexico, where he encountered the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. He and his wife, the artist Anni Albers (1899–1994), would go on to visit Mexico and other Latin American countries more than a dozen times between 1935 and the late 1960s. On each visit, Albers took hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the numerous archeological sites and monuments they saw. He often created photocollages with these images, such as “Monte Albán” (ca. 1956), grouping multiple prints and sometimes postcards of various sizes in grid-like compositions on sheets of paperboard. In 1936, he was given his first solo show in New York at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle. Albers became a United States citizen in 1939. In 1949, he began his iconic “Homage to the Square” series. Albers lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States and from 1950 to 1958 served as head of the design department at Yale University, New Haven. In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art. As a theoretician and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists. Albers lived and worked in New Haven until his death there on 25/3/1976.

Photo: Josef Albers, Variant/Adobe, 1947, Oil on blotting paper, 19 1/2 x 24 1/4 inches (49.5 x 61.6 cm), Framed: 24 5/8 x 30 1/4 inches (62.5 x 76.8 cm), Initialed, dated, and inscribed recto, ©The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 28/2-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/