Preface

Weber, Nicholas Fox

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Preface

Nicholas Fox Weber

The Drawings of Josef Albers

I first met Josef and Anni Albers in 1970 when I was an art history graduate student at Yale University and they were living nearby. They had remained in the New Haven area after Albers’s retirement in 1958 as chairman of the Yale School of Art. In the years following that first meeting, I grew to know both of them quite well, and by 1973 my visits to their house had become weekly...

Author

Nicholas Fox Weber

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00133.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16660

Preface

I first met Josef and Anni Albers in 1970 when I was an art history graduate student at Yale University and they were living nearby. They had remained in the New Haven area after Albers’s retirement in 1958 as chairman of the Yale School of Art. In the years following that first meeting, I grew to know both of them quite well, and by 1973 my visits to their house had become weekly events. They were living in relative isolation, eager for conversation and sometimes in need of a younger helping hand. I was working mainly on projects for Anni but also spent a lot of time with Josef. He was at first somewhat skeptical about me because, like many painters, he had an instant distrust for “art historians.” But he soon discovered that my main interests were not so much in questions of influence and iconography as in the visual impact of the artworks themselves, and this opened the way to many easy and long conversations.

At the time of Albers’s death in 1976, I went to work for the Josef Albers Foundation, of which I subsequently became executive director. Since then I have been responsible for the body of Albers’s work owned by the Foundation and Anni Albers, as well as for Albers’s archives and numerous other projects concerning his art.

The early figurative drawings that form the core of this book were among the hundred or so my wife and I discovered when we were inventorying Albers’s estate in 1976–77. Albers had kept most of them in faded cardboard folders among old papers and magazines in a basement storage room; others were in a file drawer in his studio. Their discovery was a surprise not only to us but to his wife of fifty years, who had not seen them before. Because so little was known about Albers’s figurative drawings during his lifetime, one of my main tasks—after seeing to their restoration and conservation—has been to establish a chronology for them and to uncover whatever factual information is available about these remarkable images. This has involved some of the sort of “looking backward” of which Albers disapproved. He did not see much value in recording history or in tracing outside influences on his artistic development (“I come from my father, very much, and from Adam, that’s all”). In my essay preceding the drawings, I have tried, however, to the extent I consider helpful, to put his work in a historical context that clarifies our sense of his direction. In writing about his better-known geometric art as well as about his earlier drawings, I have attempted to distinguish between Albers’s voice and my own, to present his artistic viewpoint along with the findings and observations of a frankly partial onlooker.

Like most people, I first came to know Albers’s primary artistic traits through his late and best-known work, the Homages to the Square. Since they are widely familiar, they are often my frame of reference. In the past thirty years many rather rigid assumptions have developed about the color theorist who did so many variations on a single format; my view is that a knowledge of the man himself, combined with a close and analytical look at his drawings, reveals his greater range and depth. Albers and I were friends, and one of the main purposes of this book is to portray elements of his personality that relate to the character of his art as I perceive it. If in some cases my personal responses to his drawings seem historically irrelevant, they are in keeping with the artist’s unorthodox preferences in discussions and writing about art. They are the attempt of a close observer to share some of the subjective feelings, both pleasurable and critical, that have arisen through full exposure to one man, his work, and the literature on it.

In this book, “drawings” refers to linear works on paper, mostly in a finished state, done in ink and/or pencil. Colored or monochromatic gouaches and watercolors, as well as pastels, have not been included.

N. F. W.

Bethany, Connecticut, 1983

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