Please join us for a media preview for
Josef Albers in America:
Painting on Paper
Thursday, July 19
10:00–11:30 a.m.
Remarks by Morgan director William M. Griswold
followed by
Short curatorial presentation by Isabelle Dervaux
Tea & coffee will be served
RSVP: media@themorgan.org; (212) 590-0393
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
New York, NY 10016
Josef Albers in America:
Painting on Paper
July 20–October 14, 2012
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his series of paintings Homage to the Square, in which he repeatedly explored color relationships within a similar format of concentric squares. Much less familiar, however, are the painted studies on paper that Albers made for his paintings. Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper features approximately eighty studies spanning the four decades after the artist left Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States. Expressively experimental, the works offer a revealing look at the artist’s investigation of form and color.
The exhibition explores Albers’s studies for abstract geometric compositions from the late 1930s, the Variant / Adobe series from the 1940s, and, finally, the Homage to the Square series from 1950–1976. These vibrant sketches—never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and rarely seen after his death—provide important insights into Albers’s working method and, in contrast to the austerity and strict geometry of the finished paintings, are remarkable for their freedom and
sensuality.
Read the full press release here.
