Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (Guggenheim Museum)

As a master at Germany's Bauhaus until 1933, and then as a professor in American schools such as Black Mountain College and Yale University, Josef Albers (1888-1976) influenced scores of young artists. His Homage to the Square series of paintings remains a touchstone of twentieth-century art. Yet Albers's first great works of art - the glass pictures that he made in Germany starting in 1921 - remain little known. First using found fragments of colored glass, and then employing a sophisticated sandblasting process on glass, Albers created a new art form as spectacular in its mastery of color and light as it was inherently fragile.
Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light is the first monograph devoted to Albers's work in glass. Accompanying the color reproductions of every extant glass picture is full documentation by Brenda Danilowitz of the Josef Albers Foundation. This volume also illustrates and provides information on Albers's architectural commissions in glass and those works that were lost or destroyed after the artist fled Nazi Germany. Essays by Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of the Josef Albers Foundation, and Fred Licht, Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, illuminate the many themes suggested by this extraordinary group of works, while a chronology of Albers's life and professional career places the glass works in the context of his entire oeuvre. A statement by the artist, an exhibition history, and a select bibliography make this the first comprehensive source on the subject.