Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

By Jeffrey Saletnik  
  
“This very important study offers a new understanding of the significant impact that Josef Albers’s artistic and pedagogical commitments had on key figures of the ‘postminimalist’ generation of American artists, such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Most importantly, perhaps, its wide-ranging analysis radically questions the rigid distinctions commonly made between the closures of a modernist commitment to form and the experimental ethos of process-orientated art.”—Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan 
 
An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.
 
An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.

With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.

Hardcover
320 pages | 53 color plates and 87 halftones
University of Chicago Press, 2022
7 x 10 inches
ISBN 9780226699172
Monograph, Josef Albers