The Louisiana Museum Exhibition Shows a New Side of Josef Albers

Written by Garrett Johansson Monday, 15 August 2011 22:16

HUMBLEBAEK, DENMARK - The Louisiana Museum – on paper is a series of small exhibitions at Louisiana, scheduled to be shown in the course of 2011. The exhibitions are curated by director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Poul Erik Tøjner, and focus on graphic works and drawings. The first artist in the series was American Al Taylor (1948-1999), now followed by German Josef Albers (1888-1976). Both artists are represented in Louisiana’s collection.

As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus with artists including Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Klee was the so-called form master who taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.

The exhibition is the first to show such a concentration of paintings on paper by Josef Albers, some of which will be completely unknown to the general public. Works in oil on paper, painted by the artist since the 1940s in preparation for the »Adobe« and »Variant« series in particular, will be presented together with a large group related to his principal work »Homage to the Square« from the artist’s late period, that he focused on from 1950 until his death in 1976.


Josef Albers was only able to fully develop into an important artist and influential teacher after emigrating to the USA. From around 1940 onwards, Albers was inspired by Mexico’s pre-Columbian architecture, sculpture and textile art that boosted his sense for the aesthetic and led to idiosyncratic, radiant colour compositions, the likes of which had never been seen at that time in European modern art. Around 1950, Albers discovered what was for him the ideal formal shape of colour – the square.

The presentation of Josef Albers is something of a sensation, since it is showing a large number of works that have never been shown before. This exhibition is – also for Louisiana’s visitors – a chance to experience a new side of an old acquaintance. Albers was a designer in the Bauhaus context and is known for his abstract paintings – his ‘squares’. But what he himself called his “obsession with colour” led him from 1940 on to a number of experiments with color on paper, where he investigated color and abstract form in both sketches and more finished works in the smaller format.

The exhibition, which is showing 80 works, has been created in collaboration with Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Louisiana is one of the venues in a major tour that includes the Gulbenkian Museum in Portugal and the Morgan Library in New York.

Visit The Louisiana Museum at : http://www.louisiana.dk/dk

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