Description: JOSEF + ANNI ALBERS: DESIGNS FOR LIVING 2004 Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum First Edition 160 pages and 152 color plates and 23 text photographs and illustrations Nicholas Fox Weber [essay]: JOSEF +ANNI ALBERS: DESIGNS FOR LIVING. New York: Merrell and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2004. First edition. Quarto. Black fabricoid titled in white. Decorated endpapers. Printed dust jacket. 160 pp. 152 color plates. 23 text photographs and illustrations. Trivial wear overall, so a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. 7.75 x 10.25-inch hardcover book with 160 pages and 152 color plates and 23 text photographs and illustrations, and a foreword by Paul Warwick Thompson, the title essay by Nicholas Fox Weber, and "A Marriage of True Minds" by Martin Filler. Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, October 2004 to February 2005. Features works by Josef and Anni Albers designed for the modern domestic interior, dating from the 1920s through the 1950s. The objects in this book include Josef's glass and metal table-top objects and Anni's textiles for space dividers and rugs, as well as some never-before-seen domestic objects designed by both. As artists, designers, and teachers, this extraordinary couple shared an intense design philosophy that would ultimately have an indelible impact on future generations of designers and architects. Ladies and Gentlemen: please welcome Anni and Josef Albers, card-carrying members of the Bauhaus! When this handsome pair weren’t kissing—many archival photos show them in spontaneous embrace—he was painting or designing furniture, and she was weaving. And though the interdisciplinary couple never collaborated, curators Nicholas Fox Weber and Matilda McQuaid make the case that his objects and her fabrics share jazzy geometries that helped change the subject of design from nature to abstraction. Here we find Anni’s fabrics—woven to a shimmer with cellophane and metallic threads—and Josef’s asymmetrical furniture. Geared for factory production, the designs can be hilariously pragmatic: For one necklace, Anni attaches bobby pins to key chains, and paper clips to a perforated steel drain—drop-dead baubles for Saturday-night swings at the Bauhaus. From the Publisher: “The first comprehensive book on the furniture, textiles and the other works of two of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. Features innovative objects that the couple designed for their homes while teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany and following their move to the United States in 1933. Includes specially commissioned photographs of important but little-known works. Illuminating essays celebrate the Alberses endless creativity and set their ground-breaking work in the context of international Modernism.” Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century. Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts. In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years. With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing. The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans. Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design. Anni Albers (née Annelise Fleischmann; 1899 – 1994) was a textile artist, designer, printmaker, and educator known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs. She was born in Berlin, and studied painting under the tutelage of German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919. After attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg for two months in 1920, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922. She was assigned to the Weaving Workshop, and she came to approach the discipline with relentless experimentation, regularly incorporating nontraditional materials into her compositions. Upon completing her course of study there in 1929, Anni Albers joined the Bauhaus faculty. In 1933, Anni and her husband Josef emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. At Black Mountain College, she elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. It was during this time that she began to avidly collect Pre-Columbian art, in particular textiles. In 1949, she became the first designer to have a one-person show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition Anni Albers: Textiles subsequently traveled to 26 venues throughout the United States and Canada. Following the Alberses' move to New Haven in 1950, Anni Albers shifted her focus primarily to her workshop, spending the 1950s creating mass-reproducible fabrics (including a commission from Walter Gropius for Harvard University), writing, and developing her "pictorial weavings," culminating in the exhibition Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings at the MIT New Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959 (traveled to Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh; Baltimore Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston). Please visit my Ebay store for an excellent and ever-changing selection of rare and out-of-print design books and periodicals covering all aspects of 20th-century visual culture. I offer shipping discounts for multiple purchases. Please contact me for details. Payment due within 3 days of purchase.
Price: 75 USD
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End Time: 2024-08-14T21:00:12.000Z
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