Drawing on extensive unpublished writings, documents and illustrations, Darwent’s compelling narrative offers a broad view of not only the artistic and political currents, but also the friendships and rivalries that formed the backdrop to Josef Albers’ creative output. Josef Albers: Life and Work is the first full-scale biography of Josef Albers, published by Thames and Hudson to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus.
While Josef Albers’ Bauhaus colleagues Klee, Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer are familiar names, Albers himself has remained inscrutable. He is best known as the painter of the Homages to the Square, a series of over 2,000 seemingly tightly controlled experiments in the interaction of colour. Yet he did not begin these pictures until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, maker and theorist, much of it pursued in the United States following the dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933. Born in Germany and later married to the textile artist Anni Albers, his extensive archive includes letters from fellow artists John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Eva Hesse; colleagues such as Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson; and fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. His many, devoted students at Yale included Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Michael Craig-Martin.
This event is in partnership with Thames and Hudson.
Biography
Charles Darwent
Charles Darwent is an art critic. He contributes regularly to the Guardian, ArtReview and the Art Newspaper and was the Independent on Sunday’s art critic from 1997 to 2013. His publications include Mondrian in London and The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing.