Josef Albers, Minimal Means, Maximum Effect.
Being able to enjoy a retrospective exhibition of Josef Albers in Madrid is a privilege for all those who feel an interest in contemporary art, and its evolution. Once again, we must thank the Juan March Foundation for the possibility of getting to know first-hand this “master” of masters.
To understand Albers’s work one must know his training and, very especially, his academic career, which occupied a large part of his life. In 1921 he began to work at the Bauhaus. From this moment until its closure in 1933, Albers was a fundamental pillar for the development of the pedagogical approaches that were taught in this mythical center of learning. The Bauhaus constituted the most important and renovating contribution of the European aesthetic education of its time. The school sought the unity of the artistic and cultural spheres and a return toward the reunification of art with craft. The applied arts, classified as inferior, again take on prominence in the founding ideology of the center. The Bauhaus criticized the teaching of the traditional school and sought to teach through experience.
Between 1923 and 1928, Albers directed, together with Moholy-Nagy, the preliminary course of the Bauhaus; there the foundations were laid that would be developed in later courses. It began with the suppression of the academic concept of art. The creative force of the young had to be set in motion, and one had to confront the most elementary problems of artistic creation to give free rein to the variety of possibilities and abilities. Practically, any material was valid to become a work of art and the formal elements dissolved into an infinite variety of possibilities. Art cannot be taught, but it can be “learned”. One must seek an art that presents itself and does not represent. Forms and textures are arranged freely, to heighten the student’s perception, and stimulate creative fantasy. “Trial and error”, as a precondition to the creative process. Economy of material (optimal use of the material) and economy of labor.
The same year in which the Bauhaus of Berlin was closed, Josef Albers and his wife Anni moved to the United States, invited by the recently inaugurated Black Mountain College, a small university located in a paradisiacal place in the mountains of North Carolina, whose ideology resembled that of the Bauhaus. For some years Albers combined his work at Black Mountain with his seminars at the Harvard School of Design, and with frequent trips to Mexico that served him to approach pre-Columbian culture. In 1950 he settled definitively in Connecticut to take charge of the Design Department of Yale University, a position he held until his retirement in 1958. From this moment on his teaching activity was greatly reduced but not so his artistic work. In these years he published many of his writings and made a very important part of his pictorial work.
The visit to the exhibition must be made from the perspective of a multidisciplinary artist and with the idea that his work walks closely tied to his pedagogical work, in such a way that one and the other condition each other down to the smallest details. The pieces on display give an idea of the variety of materials with which he worked and the diversity of disciplines to which he devoted his ingenuity.
Albers, is the painter of the “squares”, the creator of the famous series “Homage to the Square” that began in the 1950s and reached into the 1970s. The exhibition offers the opportunity to see gathered several of the series he made over these two decades, where he delves into the study of harmony through the synchronization of tones, color and form. From a formal point of view these works are the mixture and superimposition of three or four squares that are not arranged in the geometric center, they tend toward the lower part of the composition, which is occupied by narrow bands, and in the upper part wide fields emerge. He likes to work in series because he considers that there is no single solution for the same aesthetic problem. He always uses geometric elements, so that he optimizes the relationship between effort and effect, a principle summed up in the maxim that gives its name to the exhibition “minimal means, maximum effect”.
His tendency toward abstraction began very early and possibly his interest in glass and his compositions with small waste pieces of this material were a further step on this path.
Other very representative pieces that can be seen in the exhibition are his designs of domestic furniture. The Ti 244 armchair stands out, for being a dismountable piece, made of curved ash wood and created for series manufacture, a new concept in this field, and within reach of a broader social group.
Corrugated cardboard, and other materials of the same kind, serve him to practice constructive thought and imagination, and not to fall into the purely formal.
The pleasure of the ephemeral of this exhibition will remain forever in our retina thanks to the magnificent catalog that has been published on this occasion and which gathers some of the texts that Josef Albers wrote.
Juan March Foundation. Madrid. 28 March / 6 July
www.march.es
