Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect

Surveying works in all media, Josef Albers: Minimum Media, Maximum Effect offers a new comprehensive monograph of Josef Albers (1888-1976) focusing on the artist's abiding concern for clarity and simplicity. As the title suggests, Albers strove to attain the maximum effect with minimal media. This selection of works demonstrates the continuity of Albers' austere and luminous vision, as it permeated his teaching, furniture and design objects, photography, typographical design and his writings, from his early years as a schoolteacher in Germany and the Bauhaus years to the end of his artistic and teaching career at Yale. His prolific artistic output ranged from furniture design and figurative line drawing to engraving and painting, including his renowned Homage to the Square. This substantial, 362-page survey is exhilarating in its scope, encompassing some 170 works, archival documents such as Albers' notes and journals, and dozens of essays and scholarly discourses on art, pedagogy and philosophy. This carefully designed volume illuminates Albers' artistry and teachings and allows the reader to appreciate the incredible technical skill and the clarity of vision behind his apparently simple works.