Josef Albers in America: Paintings on Paper 8 February

JOSEF ALBERS IN AMERICA: PAINTINGS ON PAPER 8 FEBRUARY – 30 APRIL 2012

‘Juxtaposing two colours puts me in a from monochrome to colour state of intense excitement,’ said gradations, on small pieces of paper. Josef Albers (1888-1976). Each of his Others are large compositions, highly works attests to this immediately accomplished and close to the palpable stimulation, but also reveals finished work. Some of them are a conceptually demanding creative marked with inscriptions that shed method. This exhibition is devoted to light on the experimental nature of Josef Albers’s studies painted in oil on Albers’s work. He was one of the great paper, and explores part of the artist’s masters of the second half of the intense relationship with colour. twentieth century, and was These sketches preceded the particularly influential on a generation paintings on masonite made by the of American artists. In 1991, the artist during his American years minimalist sculptor Donald Judd (1933-1976), including the famous wrote of him: ‘There is a very simple series Homage to the Square, begun totality in Albers’ paintings […]. We are in 1950. stunned by the way brilliance is born Organised initially by the Josef Albers so discreetly.’ Museum Quadrat, in Bottrop, and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, in Munich, the exhibition ‘Josef Albers in America’ presents, for the first time in Europe, nearly 80 works on paper. Some are essentially colour tests,

1 TEACHING a genuine model of artistic training, based on individual experimentation IN THE UNITED STATES and creative freedom. In this experimental school, Albers would In 1920, Albers registered for contribute to the education of some of Johannes Itten’s ‘preliminary course’ the most eminent American creative at the Weimar Bauhaus. This course artists of the second half of the was based on the general teaching of twentieth century, among them Robert the fundamentals of creative Rauschenberg. expression: ideas about colour and In 1949, he was appointed head of the space, graphic and pictorial logic, design department at Yale, in experiments with materials. In 1923, Connecticut: his students here the school’s founder, Walter Gropius, included Eva Hesse. His book put Albers in charge of the glass Interaction of Color , published in 1963, workshop. Two years later, when the is considered an important work in the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, he became field of chromatic studies, and is still director of the ‘preliminary course’. used by most fine arts schools today. From this point, the idea – advocated by Gropius – of a ‘new unity between art and technique, between individual DRAWINGS, PAINTINGS creativity and the power of collective AND STUDIES ON PAPER production’ was at the centre of the Bauhaus’s programme. Albers taught his students to explore the From his earliest works, around the potentials of different materials, time of the First World War, Josef particularly paper and cardboard; Albers showed a preference for series using sheets of paper, they studied and variations over the idea of the folds, curves and constructions, and single, exemplary work. Among the discovered the specific limits and hundreds of works he executed on possibilities of this support. After the paper – drawings, gouaches, oil advent of the National Socialist paintings, linocuts, etchings, government in 1933, the Bauhaus, lithographies – most of them belong considered a ‘hotbed of subversion’, to groups of works. The artist never was pressured into closing. Albers, stopped exploring formal structures, with his wife Anni, who was also a through line, colour, surface and teacher, accepted an invitation from space. His prolific and varied the architect Philip Johnson to teach production is represented here with at the Black Mountain College in studies for the series Kinetics and North Carolina. Albers found the vital Adobes from the 1930s and 1940s. spirit of the Bauhaus’s early years There is also an important group of reborn in this place, and he preparatory works for the series of reintroduced the idea of the paintings Homage to the Square, ‘preliminary course’, which became which began in 1950. 2 It is, paradoxically, in his works on HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE paper that we can best appreciate the scope of Albers’ output, even more so After the Variants series, Albers than in his panel paintings. It is true liberated himself from the support in that, in his works on paper, there are order to concentrate solely on colour. fewer examples of his signature style The preparatory papers for the series as a painter: the use of a knife to Homage to the Square, of a size spread colour; nevertheless, the commensurate with the eye and the paper surfaces show an almost bodily hand, served as a framework for expressiveness in their contours. This experimentation. Albers chose as his contributes to the vividness of these arena the ‘zero point’ of the square: works and strengthens the colour’s to his eyes, the most basic vehicle for materiality, which asserts and colour. This static form gives a reveals itself in this way. The thick paradoxical dynamism and intensity blotting paper aborbs oil and gives the to the visual impact of the coloured colours a silky, luminous quality. areas. Through the ‘interaction’ – or even the interpenetration – of colours, VARIANTS / ADOBES through the superimposition and disappearance of one colour under The formal elegance and chromatic another, the painter achieves a sort shimmer of the works in the series of dematerialisation of the borders Variants / Adobes obscure the between colours and tones. mathematical precision of their Some of the later sketches have an geometry. The infinitely varied unfinished feel, appropriate for the organisation (no two works are exactly genre of drawing. Notes written by the the same) of the positioning and artist in the margins of the papers or proportions of the coloured fields on even in the colour itself allow us to sheets of different sizes; the materials grasp even more fully the and textures that are sometimes fluid, experimental nature of the Homages, sometimes thick; the variations on the which explore colour in all its theme of rectangles set within variations and in its most subtle rectangles… all of this leads us to shadings. consider the Variants as the culmination of Albers’ experiments with colour. But, despite their radical abstraction, the Variants do betray a certain attachment to the figurative: the two vertical rectangles, linked by this flattened U, reveal the influence of the architectonic structures of preColumbian villages, which had impressed the artist on his first trip to Mexico in 1935. 3 EXHIBITION INFORMATIONS 01 44 78 12 33 CURATOR www.centrepompidou.fr Jonas Storsve EXHIBITION OPEN TO THE PUBLIC PRODUCTION From February 8 through Claire Blanchon May 7, 2012 Galerie d’art graphique, level 4 Daily, except Tuesday, CATALOGUE from 11 am until 9 pm Ticket office closes at 8 pm

Paintings on Paper Josef Albers in America ADMISSION Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Access with the “Museum & 2010 / ed. Centre Pompidou, Exhibitions” ticket 2012 Valid the same day for the Texts by Nicholas Fox Weber, Museum and the Panorama Isabelle Dervaux, Heinz area for one entry each to the Liesbrock, Michael Semff. Museum and to all exhibitions Translated in French by Jean €13; concessions €10 Torrent and JeanFrançois Free to under18s and to Cornu. holders of the annual pass 192 p. + 24 p. €39,80€ BUY TICKETS ON LINE AND PRINT AT HOME (Plein tarif uniquement) www.centrepompidou.fr/ billetterie

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