According to former students of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, a short-lived experimental school that became a crucible for American modernism from the 1930s to the 1950s, for one assignment the German master asked his students to transform a single piece of paper in a way that would best show off its properties. One student gave the sheet a single fold and then stood it upright, and this was the solution Albers praised the most.
Albers was one of a group of mid-20th century artists — including architect Mies van der Rohe, musician John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham — who stripped their respective art forms down to their most basic units, and then sought to build new art forms and styles from the fundamental principles. Albers’ most famous works dealt with colors — for example, how a single shade of brown could look dark next to a bright yellow, but almost tan if next to a medium blue. His most famous paintings were a series entitled Homage to a Square begun in 1949, each showing three or four concentric squares of different colors and, more importantly, different color relationships. Such works inspired the minimalism and op art that came in Albers’ wake, and his methods and ideas about color and form are some of the most influential in art education in the last half-century.
Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect is a wonderfully realized exhibition now on display at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. It is the largest retrospective on Albers in more than two decades anywhere in the world, and the first ever mounted in Asia. It also offers a marvelous counterpoint to another exhibition just upstairs, a retrospective of Taiwanese minimalist Richard Lin (林壽宇), who worked with similarly minimal ideas. [See article on Page 14.]
This Albers exhibition not only presents a terrifically complete oeuvre, it also keeps it alive within the context of history while also managing to peer into the artists’ own mind.
Albers, born in 1888, became an early student at the Bauhaus in 1920 and went on to become a professor there in 1925, teaching furniture design and glass craft. A room Albers designed at the Bauhaus — Walter Gropius’ waiting room — is recreated in full in Kaohsiung’s galleries, as are several marvelously minimal chair designs and furniture sets.
After the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers moved to the US and taught at Black Mountain with a few other refugees (including Willem de Kooning), before going on in 1950s to chair the design department at Yale University and helping to define what we now call the “graphic arts.”
His color studies and paintings of squares may be his most famous works, but in this show we also see a complete catalog — geometric studies on glass, a typeface Albers designed, patterns of brickwork and (indeed!) constructions from single pieces of paper. These are paired against photos Albers took both of his well-known contemporaries and the forms, from waves to Mexican pyramids, that inspired him.
The most surprising fact of this show, however, may be that in spite of the ostensible purity of the geometry and color in Albers’ art, his works maintain an indelible humanity. Even in the seemingly perfected Homage to the Square paintings, the hand of the artist is never disguised, and the scale is always intimate. Albers may be ready for elevation into the pantheon of high modernism, but his modern visions were never cold, detached or dehumanizing. In the end, that may be his greatest legacy, and it certainly offers one of many reasons for going to see this fine exhibition.
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