This volume provides a fascinating study of the revolutionary painter and teacher, Josef Albers (1888-1976). Albers began his teaching career in 1923, when Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the Bauhaus in Germany, where he quickly replaced the school's standard course curriculum with his own innovative methods. After moving to the United States, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut until he retired in 1954. Overall, Albers's passionate commitment to teaching was matched only by his devotion to his own artistic development. While he is widely perceived as a strong-minded theoretician, he was, in fact, as this volume reveals, against rigid dogma and he encouraged his students to develop lively and original solutions to his many and varied design exercises. On their first day in his classroom, Albers's students were informed that his goal was to educate their eyes and that he was going to teach them how to think and to see, an agenda belied by the somewhat prosaic course names "Basic Drawing" and "Basic Design." Overall, as a thinker, writer (Albers's important volume The Interaction of Colorwas published in 1963 by Yale) and educator he has directly and indirectly influenced generations of established artists, including Robert Mangold, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd, among many others. This book provides not only a compelling study of a key figure of 20th century art, but also ponders what constitutes art and how it is made.

DVD of a documentary made in 1969 by A. Bittleman and C. Howard. The genesis of To Open Eyes: A Film on Josef Albers developed from Arnold Bittleman's appreciation for Albers while Bittleman was a student at Yale University in the 1960s. Wanting to preserve Albers's teaching method - learning by doing - Bittleman set out with filmmaker and editor Carl Howard to make a visual record of Albers teaching students how to see and use color as a visual grammar.

An experimental approach to the study and teaching of color is comprised of exercises in seeing color action and feeling color relatedness before arriving at color theory.

Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers' unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.

Summary: This publication presents a wealth of in part unknown colored works on paper by Josef Albers (1888-1976), documented for the first time. It was not until the German-born artist emigrated to the U.S. that he emerged as a prominent artist and influential teacher. Beginning in about 1940, Albers allowed himself to be inspired by Mexico's pre-Columbian architecture, sculpture and textile art, which led to a liberation of his aesthetic sensibilities and to unconventional, radiant pitches of color, the likes of which modern painting in Europe had never seen before. In ca. 1950, he discovered the square, in his eyes the ideal form for color. He was both a resolute painter as well as a color philosopher. Each of the works on paper presented here arouses a sensuous fascination for the phenomenality of color.

"In this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores influential artist and pedagogue Josef Albers's teaching practices. The pedagogy Albers developed at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale consisted in a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended modernist agendas: it involved a set of ideas and practices that cultivated a material way of thinking among his students, which included notable future artists such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. By using exercises including paper folding, cutting, and collage, Albers tried to generate a form of "productive disorientation" in his students, teaching them problem-solving strategies to explore new conceptions of composition and color. Saletnik begins by examining Albers's pedagogy in relation to modern aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought. He then examines his design, drawing, and color instruction, focusing on his relationship with Hesse and Serra, showing how their approach to material and scale were shaped by Albers's teaching. Featuring many novel images--including nineteenth-century children's teaching toys as well as rarely seen works by Albers, Serra, and Hesse--this book challenges art historians to consider how artists are introduced to problems of form and how pedagogy shapes their work"--

La exposición refleja la historia del Black Mountain College (BMC), fundado en 1933 en Carolina del Norte y concebido como universidad experimental que situaba al arte en el centro de una educación liberal que pretendía educar mejor a los ciudadanos para participar en la sociedad democrática. La educación era interdisciplinaria y concedía gran importancia al debate, la investigación y la experimentación, dedicando la misma atención a las artes visuales –pintura, escultura, dibujo- que a las llamadas artes aplicadas –tejidos, cerámica, orfebrería, así como a la arquitectura, la poesía, la música y la danza.

Catalog of an exhibtion held at the Tate Modern, London, Mar. 9-June 4, 2006, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, June 25-Oct. 1, 2006, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov. 2, 2006-Jan. 21, 2007.

"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes) An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America’s unique craft tradition. In Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories—of his mother’s upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father’s escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College—unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.