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Home , Josef Albers

the exchange , 1942, TRUE Clockwise from left: C reative brief Anni and

TENAYUCA I TENAYUCA at in 1938; Anni’s first wall hanging, BRIGHT FUTURES from 1924, at the Josef and Foundation in Bethany, How modernist pioneers Anni and Josef Albers Connecticut; Josef’s furniture in the foun- became art stars for the 21st century. dation’s Trunk gallery; one of Anni’s looms. Opposite: A 1964 BY CAROL KINO study for Josef’s Hom- PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANILO SCARPATI age to the Square series (left) and his newly rediscovered 1942 work Tenayuca I.

OW DO YOU MAKE an artist into a key fig- Albers shows in Europe and New York, including Anni ranging from $300,000 to over $2 million. (Zwirner is opens next June in Düsseldorf and travels to London suddenly contacted the gallery about the work. “I got prints, as well as her jewelry, inspired by pre-Colum- ure of art history? Take the case of Josef Albers: Touching Vision, opening October 6 at the doing its part too, with a show opening September 20 that October. “Altogether they seem to know every- one look at it and said, ‘We will buy it,’ ” Fox Weber bian adornments but made with dime-store finds like and Anni Albers, today considered lead- Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—the artist’s first ret- called Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray, pairing the thing about these artists. And Nick Weber, he tells says. “It’s an extraordinary painting, in mint condi- washers, safety pins and ribbon. ing lights of 20th-century . The rospective since 1999—and Josef Albers in Mexico, Alberses with and , two of his wonderful stories from dusk to dawn.” Indeed, tion. And it’s beautiful.” The Bilbao exhibition presents Anni as a thinker Hcouple emerged from Germany’s innovative opening November 3 at New York’s Guggenheim. their students at Black Mountain.) Fox Weber is a raconteur full of colorful anecdotes: For Lauren Hinkson, the Guggenheim curator and educator, too, using previously unseen material school, where he was a teacher and she a student. Josef’s Homage to the Square works, paintings and Established by Josef five years before his 1976 the time he first met the Alberses at their house and organizing the New York show, the painting was “a from the foundation’s archives, including the original After the Nazis forced the school’s closure in 1933, prints of nested squares that served as visualiza- death, the foundation has been helmed since 1979 Anni served him extra-crispy KFC on Rosenthal china revelation,” she says. “I’ve seen all the Tenayucas, and notes from her 1965 book, On Weaving, which is being the Alberses fled to the United States and joined the tions of his theories, are no longer seen as dry by the art historian Nicholas Fox Weber, who met because, she said, it was a ringer for classic Viennese when I saw it hanging at the foundation, I almost got reissued in an expanded edition this fall. Also on view founding faculty of Black Mountain College, in North academic studies but coveted as glorious pieces in and became close to the Alberses in the early ’70s as fried chicken, or when Jacqueline Onassis told Anni down on my knees to pray.” will be one of her notebooks, filled with drawings of Carolina. Josef oversaw the art department, and Anni themselves. And as museums intensify their focus a graduate student at Yale. From a modest complex that looking at Josef’s work was like being in Matisse’s Hinkson hit upon the show’s concept after dis- knots, curving lines and intricate patterns built with taught weaving. Both left their mark on a student on underrecognized women artists, as well as on of buildings in a woodsy grove, a team of curators, Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France. More than one covering Josef’s Mexican photographs in the triangles. Discovered in the archives after Anni’s body that included future masters such as Robert neglected media like textiles and prints, Anni’s boldly researchers, visiting artists, archivists and restor- curator mentions the importance of his deep personal Guggenheim’s collection nine years ago. They struck death, the full journal will be published by Zwirner , 1964, © THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK; JOSEF ALBERS, Rauschenberg and . unconventional weavings, which incorporated mate- ers works to maintain the couple’s legacy. (There is connection to the couple. her as an anticipation of the 1960s photographs of Books in October. By midcentury, when modernist abstraction still rial like cellophane even in the 1920s, have made her also an informal furniture gallery, called Trunk, open The fruits of the foundation’s labors can be seen land artists like Robert Smithson and - A video accompanying the show will feature a textile ruled, both artists were in their heyday: In 1949, Anni, the darling of curators, theorists and artists alike. to scholars and students by appointment.) The chief clearly in the two Guggenheim shows. Albers in ists like . The foundation staff helped her artist from the foundation’s artist residency program having already influenced a generation of designers, Perhaps it’s just the zeitgeist, but many in the art curator, Brenda Danilowitz, began working there Mexico radically repositions Josef with many works expand on that idea, linking Josef’s abstraction to the weaving on the loom Anni brought to the U.S. from the became the first textile artist to have a solo show at world also credit this resurgence to the diligent work before Anni’s death in 1994 and, like Fox Weber, knew predating his Homage series, some of which will also couple’s fascination with Latin American archaeol- Bauhaus. Although she sold it in the early ’60s, the foun- New York’s Museum of ; a year later, Josef of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, her personally. Among other projects, the founda- appear. The exhibition includes his photographs and ogy. “When you think of Albers, you think of those dation kept tabs on it, reacquired it as a gift in 2015 and became the first director of ’s graduate Connecticut, about 20 minutes away from the cem- tion staff track down the Alberses’ work, aggressively photo collages of Zapotec, Aztec and Mixtec pyra- squares,” Hinkson says. “But the foundation helped reassembled it with the help of three weavers, includ- design department, where he shaped the thinking of etery where the couple are buried under matching weeding out fakes and buying back select pieces when mids and ruins; selections from his so-called Variant/ me uncover a story that hasn’t been told in this level ing the foundation’s associate curator, Karis Medina.

still more American artists, including rectangular headstones. “The foundation is a think possible, and pursue their own scholarship, opening FORSTUDY HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE Adobe paintings—hotly colored squares nested inside of depth.” Fox Weber feels certain that with increased recogni- and . But from the 1970s on, as conceptual- tank not only for the Alberses’ work but also for mod- up new avenues of exploration. horizontal rectangles—and his Tenayuca series, Meanwhile, in Touching Vision, curator Manuel tion, more Albers discoveries may emerge. “I know that ism, expressionist painting and other postmodernist ernism, both European and American,” says David “I have never had a partner in any project as help- which are geometric compositions that seem to bal- Cirauqui intends to position Anni more broadly, as there is a tapestry by Anni that disappeared in Japan in movements came to the fore, the Alberses’ brand of Leiber, a partner at New York’s David Zwirner gal- ful as the foundation,” says Maria Müller-Schareck, ance flatness with three-dimensional space. “an important artist,” one whose work addresses, the late 1920s. The assumption is that it was destroyed, and formal experimentation lery, which began representing the foundation last chief curator of modern and contemporary art at Among them is Tenayuca I, lost since it was he says, “key issues for modernist painting from the but I don’t know for sure.” He’s on the hunt for Easter fell out of fashion. year. According to Leiber, prices for certain Homage Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen purchased in 1947 and known only from a small black- perspective and materiality of so-called minor art eggs, and not just metaphorical ones. “Anni told me Yet these days the couple suddenly seems to be paintings have doubled in the past five years and tri- museum, which together with London’s Tate Modern and-white photograph. When the foundation began forms.” The show comprises wall hangings, pictorial that she and Josef painted them every year. What FROM LEFT: JOSEF ALBERS, everywhere: The coming year brings a crop of major pled in the past 10; the gallery has sold them at prices is presenting Anni Albers, a major retrospective that © THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY TOP LEFT: ANNI ALBERS, WALLHANGING, 1924, THE © 2017 JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK. MIDDLE:MODEL LEFT TI244 TO RIGHT, TOP ARMCHAIR, TO BOTTOM: JOSEF ALBERS, CIRCA 1929; DOUBLE ARMOIRE, NIGHT TABLE, AND BOOKSHELF, ALL CIRCA THE © 2017 1927, JOSEFJOSEF AND ALBERS, ANNI REPRODUCTION ALBERS OF A 1922 STAINED-GLASS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW WINDOW, YORK; THE © 2017 JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK, BEDROOM STOOLS,MEXICAN CIRCA CHAIRS 1927; A AND STUDIES FOR MEXICAN CHAIRS, ALL CIRCA 1940; FILE CABINET, OFFICE THE © 2017 1927; DESK, JOSEF WRITING AND ANNI DESK, ALL BED, ALBERS CIRCA FOUNDATION/ARTISTS TEA RIGHTS 1927; TABLES, SOCIETY, CIRCA NEW YORK. 1928; STACKING BOTTOM TABLES, LEFT: CIRCA COURTESY OF THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION (ARCHIVAL) working with Zwirner, a relative of the original owner weavings (as she began calling them in the U.S.) and wouldn’t I do to find Anni and Josef’s Easter eggs?” •

88 wsj. magazine