Josef Albers: Process and Printmaking (1916-1976)

Todos nuestros catálogos de arte All our art catalogues desde/since 1973 JOSEF ALBERS PROCESS AND PRINT MAKING 2014 El uso de esta base de datos de catálogos de exposiciones de la Fundación Juan March comporta la aceptación de los derechos de los autores de los textos y de los titulares de copyrights. Los usuarios pueden descargar e imprimir gra- tuitamente los textos de los catálogos incluidos en esta base de datos exclusi- vamente para su uso en la investigación académica y la enseñanza y citando su procedencia y a sus autores. Use of the Fundación Juan March database of digitized exhibition catalogues signifies the user’s recognition of the rights of individual authors and/or other copyright holders. Users may download and/or print a free copy of any essay solely for academic research and teaching purposes, accompanied by the proper citation of sources and authors. www.march.es FUNDACIÓN JUAN MARCH www.march.es 9 11117884111111 70111 11117562071111111111 111 Josef Albers Process and Printmaking (1916 1976) Fundación Juan March Fundación Juan March 6 Fundación Juan March 6 Fundación Juan March 6 Fundación Juan March Josef Albers Process and Printmaking (1916–1976) Fundación Juan March Fundación Juan March This catalogue and its Spanish edition have been published on the occasion of the exhibition Josef Albers Process and Printmaking (1916–1976) Museu Fundación Juan March, Palma April 2–June 28, 2014 Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca July 8–October 5, 2014 And it is a companion publication to the exhibition catalogue Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect Fundación Juan March, Madrid, March 28–July 6, 2014 Fundación Juan March Contents 4 Fundación Juan March 8 Josef Albers: Process and Printmaking Fundación Juan March 10 When I First Met Josef Albers… Nicholas Fox Weber 12 The HOW of Art Brenda Danilowitz 20 Works on display 96 Josef Albers (1888—1976) 102 Catalogue of works on display 5 Fundación Juan March “ Everything has form and every form has meaning.” Josef Albers, Art as Experience, 1935 6 Fundación Juan March 7 Fundación Juan March Josef Albers Process and Printmaking 8 Fundación Juan March osef Albers (1888–1976) is certainly more question. To arrive at the work of art, one must concoct one’s famous today for his links to the Bauhaus, own approach in the very process. where he studied and later taught from Rather than simply multiple reproductions of a single 1920 to 1933, and for his oil paintings in image, then, Josef Albers’ prints are the fi nal, unique result the series Homage to the Square (1950–76) of the intimate relationship the artist established with than for his graphic work. Yet he also cre- a wide range of materials, processes, and technologies— ated prints and drawings throughout his some conventional, others less so. The 103 works in this career. His graphic work ranges from the exhibition reveal that intimate link. They have been selected Jaustere blacks and whites of his fi rst woodblock prints—with from among the nearly 300 prints that the artist created and subjects inspired in the landscape of the coal mines in his the thousands of studies and drawings by means of which he native town, Bottrop, in the former province of Westphalia developed his fi nal works; nearly all of these studies remain (now in North Rhine-Westphalia)—to the vivid colors and unpublished and have never before been exhibited. abstract geometry of his screenprints from the 1960s and Albers experimented with various print mediums, 70s. Albers, like so many other artists, found printmaking to including relief prints in wood and linoleum, black-and- be particularly congenial because of the economical produc- white and color lithographs using zinc plates and stone, tion involved, the creative liberty of the medium, and the intaglio prints, and screenprints. With the works chosen opportunity that it offers for trial and error, experimenta- for the exhibition, Josef Albers: Process and Printmaking tion and innovation. (1916—1976) offers an unusual perspective on the workings This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Josef Albers: of the artist’s imagination, presenting his individual Process and Printmaking (1916–1976) presented by the studies and the series in which the process and progress Fundación Juan March at the Museu Fundación Juan of Albers’s creation of images unfold. The transformation March in Palma de Mallorca, from April 2 to June 28, 2014, of an initial idea and its resolution into a fi nal form is and at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, from revealed throughout the exhibition space to the visitors July 8 to October 5, 2014. The show is devoted to Albers’ and throughout the pages of this book to its readers. Seen working methods in the fi eld of printmaking and allows alongside the studies and preparatory drawings, Albers’s visitors to become familiar with an essential element in prints manifest the development of his highly subtle the work of any artist but one that is particularly central knowledge of how the elements of form—texture, line, and in Albers’s particular case: his techniques and approaches. color—can bring rich, unforeseen visual experiences to light. On the one hand, Albers deeply respected manual work This exhibition was developed in close collaboration and artistic craft and technique. He always considered with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, technique to be the foundation of a particular poiesis, or Connecticut. The Fundación Juan March wishes to express “making”— art, in short—which consists above all in its how. its gratitude in particular to Nicholas Fox Weber, Brenda On the other hand, besides his conscientious cultivation Danilowitz, Samuel McCune, and the entire team at the of technique and craft, his work reveals his talent for free foundation for their tireless labor and assistance throughout inventiveness, for a qualitative leap in creativity: He was the process of the exhibition’s organization. convinced that, in the case of art, unlike technique by itself, the result is not a question of (applying) an approach but Fundación Juan March rather emerges precisely when that approach is called into Palma de Mallorca and Cuenca, April 2014 9 Fundación Juan March When I First Met Josef Albers… 10 Fundación Juan March hen I fi rst met Josef plant, which meant that the ten thousand dollars used to Albers, in 1971, he pay for the fi re door was no longer available to pay for the let me know within David Smith. Of course I expected Anni to bemoan this with fi ve minutes that he me. Instead, she looked at me with a furrowed brow. She distrusted the prac- pointed to a two-color offset press that had recently arrived tice of art history. from Zurich, and watched the way blank paper was soaring I had just told him over and under rollers and coming out with red and blue ink that I was com- coverage, fi nally being manipulated by devices that resem- pletingW my Masters in that fi eld at Yale University, but his bled mechanical hands into neatly stacked piles at the end diatribe against the scholarly pursuits that over-emphasize of its rapid run. “You see that printing press,” Anni said, the infl uence of one painter on another and that dwell on pointing toward it. “It’s far more beautiful than anything issues that are more theoretical than visual did not bother David Smith ever touched!” me. Rather, Josef’s passionate reaction, the fury that comes Anni and Josef were of exactly the same view on this from a love of what is true and wonderful, reassured me. My subject. They were fascinated by mechanical processes, and delight became clear to him. He instantly asked what my loved well-designed machinery. They worshiped technical father did, and when I said that my father was a printer, he skill. The act of printing gave them a visceral thrill. replied, “Good, boy, then you know something about some- Brenda Danilowitz is the scholar of Josef’s prints. Having thing. You are not just an art historian.” been a brilliant member of the team at the Albers Founda- A few months later, I took Anni Albers, the brilliant tion for many years, she has studied in depth the way Josef weaver, textile designer, and printmaker to whom Josef approached the acts of etching and lithography and line-en- was married for over fi fty years, to our family’s printing graving and screen printing, his use of the surface of expanses company. It was a commercial fi rm that specialized in both of cork and wood grain, his constant collaboration with the letterpress and photo-offset. On the way in to the compa- technicians he so admired. This exhibition, which is taking ny’s handsome headquarters, completed in 1958 in what place thanks to the splendid guidance of Manuel Fontán del one might call “corporate Mies Van der Rohe style”—it was Junco, the knowing vision of Catalina Ballester, Assumpta designed by the gifted architect Philip De Corcia, father of Capellà and all of the extraordinary team at the Museu the well-known photographer Philip Lorca De Corcia, who Fundación Juan March, provides an unprecedented opportu- was a baby crawling on the fl oor when I visited his unusu- nity for the public to see not only some of Josef’s very fi nest ally streamlined home at age eight while our fathers met to graphic works, but also the processes that went into their discuss the future Fox Press—I told Anni Albers that when making. As with those remarks that Josef made to me the fi rst my father was completing the building, he was on the verge time I met him, it is about fact and poetry, mechanics and art, of buying a gigantic David Smith sculpture.

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