Invited by
Pierre Mabille, nine artists, from both sides of the Atlantic, look at the work of Josef Albers.
Josef Albers is one of the 20th century's most influential abstract painters and teachers. After teaching for a time at the Bauhaus in his native Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1933. There he taught at Black Mountain College before heading to the design department at Yale University. In this volume, Pierre Mabille invites nine artists from both sides of the Atlantic to share their impressions of this major artistic figure, at once teacher, designer, photographer, writer, painter, and color theorist.
Pierre Mabille (born 1958 in Amiens, France) is a painter, a poet and a teacher of color pratice. Since 1997, Mabille works with a single motif—an oblong shape—with infinite polysemy. He methodically summons it up to build a body of work rooted in abstraction, where the alchemy between color and space is the essential driving force. In 2016, he was in residence at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, USA. He then participated in the first French edition of the book
Josef Albers, Poems and Drawings, Éditions Unes, 2021. In parallel with the exhibition
Anni et Josef Albers, l'Art et la Vie, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, he organized a workshop, an exhibition and a seminar on these two figures with Aurélie Mathigot at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 2021. In his poetry collections published by Éditions Le Bleu du Ciel and Éditions Unes, the registers of language, practice and view of contemporary art, interact.
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was a German artist, a member of the
Bauhaus who then emigrated to the United States, with his wife
Anni Albers, with the onset of Nazism. Best known as an abstract painter, he was in actual fact an eclectic artist, skilled in the handling of glass and metal, as well as in designing furniture and dealing with print processes. A major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1971) paid homage to a great “total” artist—he also wrote books, articles and poems—who was also the teacher of Robert Motherwell,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Sheila Hicks and the British graphic artist Alan Fletcher, among others.
See also
You can go anywhere – The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation at 50.
