Albers And Morandi Never Finished

An unprecedented catalogue exploring the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi—two of modern art’s greatest painters. Rarely seen together, the artworks of Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) share many similarities. Although they never met, both artists worked in series as they explored difference and potential through their distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, and morphology. They were also both influenced by Cezanne. As master illusionists and experts in proportion, they tackled similar conceits from different perspectives. Albers focused on the effects of subtle or bold changes and interactions in color, while Morandi made still lifes that treat simple objects as a cast of characters on a stage, exploring their relationship in space. Published on the occasion of the critically acclaimed exhibition Albers and Morandi: Never Finished at David Zwirner New York in 2021, the book illuminates the visual conversation between these two artists. With the exhibition hailed by The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl as “one of the best … I’ve ever seen,” this publication brings this unusual, thought-provoking pairing to your home. Gorgeous reproductions are accompanied by a roundtable about form and color between the exhibition’s curator, David Leiber; Heinz Liesbrock, the director of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop; and Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, as well as an essay by Laura Mattioli, the Morandi expert and founder of the Center for Italian Modern Art.

One of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi created works that continue to exert their mysterious power on viewers worldwide. This publication focuses on the period from 1948 to 1964, during which Morandi developed and refined his investigations of serial, reductive, and permutational forms and compositions, a body of work that has had a profound influence on twentieth-century art and painting. Included here are five of the ten iconic “yellow cloth” paintings from 1952, a series featured prominently in the historic 1998 exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and numerous late paintings by the Italian master. Lavishly reproduced, these immersive plates draw attention to the idiosyncratic perspectival and color-driven decisions that give the work its abstract power. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition of Morandi’s paintings from this period at David Zwirner, New York—which, according to The New York Times, represent “lucid perfection, at once cerebral and impassioned.” It marked the first major presentation of the artist’s late work in America since the acclaimed 2008 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In addition to an essay by Laura Mattioli and a foreword by David Leiber, who organized the exhibition, this catalogue includes a fantastic array of contributions by contemporary artists: John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. They offer their personal responses to Morandi’s work and to the Zwirner exhibition in particular. Working in different media across many disciplines, this diverse list of contributors is a testament to the reach of Morandi’s paintings and their influence on contemporary art.

"Features all aspects of the artist's long career: paintings, prints, furniture, household objects, works in glass, photographs, and pre-Columbian sculptures"--

Previously unseen early works and other unpublished material from the pioneering Bauhaus polymath This publication considers Josef Albers' early development as an artist, beginning with the pre-Bauhaus years when he worked as an elementary school teacher in his native Bottrop in Western Germany, while sketching the landscape and architecture of his home town and studying courses in art by night. With a particular focus on works on paper, the book reveals not only the unappreciated naturalistic origins of his art, but also his ongoing interest in producing organic, surrealistic forms alongside the geometric abstraction for which he is best known. It presents dozens of prints, paintings and drawings from the first half of his career, as well as previously unseen photographs of the artist at work and on research trips to the ancient sites of Mexico where he found important sources of inspiration for his art and theories. With texts by two recognized Albers scholars, this volume offers a fresh and surprising view of a celebrated pioneer of modernism. German-born artist Josef Albers (1888-1976) laid the foundations for some of the most important art education programs of the 20th century. In 1936, during his time working at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he had his first solo exhibition in New York at J.B. Neumann's New Art Circle. In 1949, Albers left the college and began his famous Homage to the Square series. He taught at various institutions throughout America, including Yale University, New Haven. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Albers' traveling exhibition in 1965 and a retrospective of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971. He died in 1976.

Using minimal means—paint straight from the tube, applied meticulously with a palette knife—and a focused selection of colors, Josef Albers’s sustained, serial investigation into rhythm, mood, and spatial movement is explored in this lavishly produced catalogue that looks solely at his respective grey and yellow paintings, exploring two distinct color palettes pervasive to his oeuvre. Highlighting the rich diversity of effects Albers drew from a narrow range of colors, this publication centers around the groundbreaking Homage to the Square (A) (1950), the inaugural painting in the series that would occupy the artist until his death in 1976. The pairing of two palettes—black, white, and grey and an array of yellows—stems in part from Albers’s 1964 series of lithographs, Midnight and Noon, which brought together these two opposing color sets in a single portfolio. Together they address the limitless possibilities the artist found in color and form in relation to light. The impossible simultaneity of “midnight” and “noon” moreover speaks to Albers’s transcending of what he called “factual facts” in favor of the play of perception and illusion possible in art. Opening with an introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, that contextualizes these works and their color palettes, this volume also includes Albers’s own writing on Homage to the Square. Additionally, Elaine de Kooning’s historic text and Colm Tóibín’s recent writing explore this body of work from different perspectives and time periods. Published on the occasion of exhibitions at David Zwirner’s New York and London galleries in 2016 and 2017, this beautifully illustrated publication looks at one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) built his visual lexicon from the most minimal of props--dust-covered bottles, bowls, vases, pitchers, tins and boxes. From it, he composed delicious permutations of quiet still lifes, in the most muted yet luminous of palettes, transforming the genre of still life into a cosmos. The composer Morton Feldman once wrote that in his own work he was "interested in getting to Time in its unstructured existence... How Time exists before we put our paws on it," and in this sense Morandi may be his counterpart in paint: his painted objects seem to possess a subtle self-sufficiency and interiority. Accompanying a recent exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., this beautifully designed catalogue contains a selection of reproductions buttressed with two essays by Morandi experts: Flavio Fergonzi appraises the myths that have attached to Morandi, the history of his critical reception and the cities with which the artist was particularly associated; Elisabetta Barisoni discusses Morandi's reception in America.