One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers

Description

Josef Albers is widely recognized as a crucial figure in 20th-century art, both as an independent practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University. Albers made paintings, drawings and prints and designed furniture and typography, all of which have been extensively collected, exhibited, and studied at The Museum of Modern Art. Arguably the least familiar aspect of his extraordinary career was his inventive engagement with photography, only widely known after his death, including his production of approximately seventy photo-collages that feature photographs he made at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932. These works anticipate concerns that he would pursue throughout his career - the effects of adjacency, the exploration of colour through white, black and grey, and the delicate balance between handcraft and industrial and mechanical form. Albers' photographs were first shown at MoMA in a modest exhibition in 1988, when the Museum acquired two photo-collages. In 2015, the Museum acquired ten additional photo-collages, making its collection of this key aspect of Albers's practice the most substantial anywhere outside the Albers Foundation. This publication reproduces each of the photo-collages Albers made at the Bauhaus, presenting the scope of this achievement for the first time and providing an unparalleled opportunity to explore the nuanced relationship between form and image. An introductory essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister situates them within the contexts of modernist photography and of Albers's practice.

Sarah Meister is a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Elizabeth Otto is an art historian whose work focuses on experimental media and art cultures of early 20th-century Europe. Lee Ann Daffner is Conservator of Photography at MoMA.

...focuses on [Albers's] early experiments with the ways in which photography did and did not render reality, the interplay between its flat shapes and its instantaneous representation of the three-dimensional world before the lens.--Randy Kennedy "The New York Times" Albers developed a hands-on, eyes-on art practice that opened the world up, a world he approached with a craftsman's care and experienced with the scintillated focus of a mescaline high...we can see his expansive version of single-mindedness unfold.--Holland Cotter "The New York Times" Albers's photocollages stand as a remarkable contribution to the medium in their own right.--Sarah Hermanson Meister "The Brooklyn Rail" This small, vital display of medleys of photographs...reveals the man, and the joy, behind the pedagogy...these works are infectiously buoyant-- "The New Yorker" One and One Is Four reveals an Albers at once familiar and unexpected--playful yet disciplined, personal yet enigmatic--through a body of work whose genius becomes fully apparent when considered as a whole.-- "Fine Books and Collections"