Displaying items by tag: josef albers

Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced that Baltimore businessman, author, and collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift to the museum of 48 works on paper created by some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including 11 lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Among the other artists represented in the gift are Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully.

Salny’s gift will augment strengths of the Rose Art Museum collection, which includes paintings and other works by some of the artists included, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell, and Frankenthaler, while also extending its holdings in new directions, including the first work by Hirst to by acquired by the museum.

For a scrappy, short-lived little college founded at a Christian summer camp by an outcast professor, Black Mountain College had a mighty impact on American cultural life. Among the artists who taught and studied there: Josef and Anni Albers, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham.

“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Oct. 10.

In the annals of 20th-century American art, few legends loom quite as large as that of Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933 by the classics scholar John Andrew Rice and the engineer Theodore Dreier, it was a progressive institution based in Black Mountain, a small North Carolina town that aimed to place art making at the heart of a liberal arts education. That same year, the Nazis forced the closing of another grand experiment, Germany’s Bauhaus school, prompting many of its teachers and students to decamp for the United States. Several landed at Black Mountain, most prominently Josef Albers, who was chosen to lead the art program, and his wife, Anni, who taught textile design and weaving.

Under Albers, whose course on materials and form was one of only two requirements (the other was a class on Plato), Black Mountain soon became known as a kind of Shangri-La for avant-garde art.

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by the artists in 1971 and based in Bethany, Connecticut, aims to raise around $600,000 through sales of work by Josef Albers and other artists at Christie’s New York in May. The money will help fund a new culture center due to open in rural Senegal in March.

The new space, which is called “Thread”, will be located in Sinthian, a village in the southeastern region of Senegal, in a building designed by the Japanese architect Toshiko Mori.

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

For thirty-seven years, Josef Albers’ mural “Manhattan” graced the lobby of the MetLife (previously PanAm) Building on Park Avenue in New York City. Installed in 1963, the giant red, white, and black work was designed as an homage to New York, the city to which Albers emigrated in 1933. The mural was removed in 2000 during a lobby redesign and all but one of the panels ended up in a landfill site in Ohio after a failed attempt to remove asbestos from the backs of the tiles. Much to the delight of art lovers, “The Art Newspaper” has reported that the modernist masterpiece could make a triumphant return to New York City.

The forthcoming World Trade Center Transit Hub could be a possible home for the work, but no definitive plans have been announced. 

Christie’s has announced that they will auction 45 works from the estate of the late Austrian actor Maximilian Schell in London, Amsterdam, and Paris, "Salzburger Nachrichten" reported. The film and stage actor died on February 1 of this year at the age of 83.

The sale includes works by Josef Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Franz Kline, Jean Tinguely, and Roy Lichtenstein. Highlights include Albers’ "Study for Homage to the Square: Kind Regards" (1958) which is due to hit the auction block in Amsterdam as part of the Postwar and Contemporary evening sale, and is slated to sell for between €150,000 to €200,000 ($190,000-$250,000).

A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey charts the developments in abstract painting that took place between 1950 and 1990. The show examines how postwar artists such as Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella ushered in advancements in abstraction thanks to their individual approaches to line, color, and form.

“Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting” presents nearly thirty paintings on loan from the collection of Preston H. Haskell III, a Princeton University alumnus and a longstanding Museum benefactor. The exhibition touches on a number of monumental movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Minimalism, Op art, and Postmodernism.