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JOSEF ALBERS (German, 1888-1976) BRUNO & SCHIFRA CANERESI, ASCONA, VIII titled and dated in penci...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:20,000.00 - 30,000.00 USD
JOSEF ALBERS (German, 1888-1976) BRUNO & SCHIFRA CANERESI, ASCONA, VIII titled and dated in penci...
JOSEF ALBERS
(German, 1888-1976)
BRUNO & SCHIFRA
CANERESI, ASCONA, VIII
titled and dated
in pencil below image on mount
photo-collage consisting
of 1 vintage gelatin silver print
mounted by artist on board
9 x 6 in. (22.9 x 15.2 cm)
mount: 115?8 x 163?8 in. (29.5 x 41.6 cm)
1930
ESTIMATE: $20,000-30,000
PROVENANCE
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
Deborah Bell Photographs, NEW YORK
Eleanor Barefoot, NEW YORK
LITERATURE
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF JOSEF ALBERS: A SELECTION FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE JOSEF ALBERS FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, The American Federation of Arts, 1987, pl. 17 (illustrated)
In 1920, at age 32, Josef Albers entered the Bauhaus after having previously studied at three other schools. Certified as a teacher since he was twenty and considerably older than the other Bauhaus students, Albers was in fact only five years younger than Walter Gropius, the school’s director. By 1928, when Albers began to use photography as a means of artistic inquiry, he was thus already a mature artist with a depth and breadth of training. Experimenting with a variety of techniques, Albers photographed nature and architecture and also shot portraits—his subjects included friends Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky.
Although Albers’s reputation as a major international influence on modern art arises from his work in painting and graphics (best demonstrated by his series Homage to the Square), his lifelong investigations into the relationships between color, light and proportion are evident in the remarkable photographs of this period as well. His active interest in photography lasted only five years: in 1932, political pressures forced the closing of the Bauhaus and Albers emigrated with his wife, Anni, to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he took a teaching position. Albers didn’t resume his photographic endeavor in the United States, nor did he attempt to publish or exhibit his photographs. Although he took up the camera sporadically for the rest of his life, the later work was casual and lacked the sense of serious artistic purpose that these early photographs embodied.