Josef Albers: To Open Eyes

Josef Albers (1888-1976) has long been admired for his progressive vision as an artist and designer who blurred distinctions between fine and applied art. Albers, a German-born artist and educator, was a remarkable classroom performer whose colorful language, wit, and dramatic flair held his students spellbound and turned his lessons into high adventure. Whether at the Bauhaus in prewar Germany, Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s, or at Yale in the 1950s, Albers the teacher was driven by one thing: the desire to open his students' eyes to a different way of perceiving art and, ultimately, life.

The son of a house painter and decorator from Germany's northwest Ruhr region, Albers grew up surrounded by artisans. As a child he learned how to paint, cut stone, and craft wood. Although his ambition had always been to become an artist, Albers entered teacher's training college at his father's insistence and spent his first professional year teaching six- to fourteen-year-olds in a single-classroom school. Later, Albers taught at the Koniglichen Kunstschule in Berlin's rough-and-tumble Alexanderplatz neighborhood. Living and teaching in Berlin exposed Albers to the city's hothouse cultural atmosphere, and helped him to merge his two great loves: art and education. This confluence allowed Albers to impact generations of future artists across the Western world, in both Europe and the United States.

Josef Albers: To Open Eyes takes the reader throughout Albers' life in teaching, beginning with his first years of teaching in the pioneering but politically fraught environment of the Bauhaus school. It follows Albers throughhis 1933 emigration to the United States, where he and his wife Anni became founding members and teachers at Black Mountain College, the experimental start-up in the mountains of North Carolina. The book also tells the full story behind his appointment in 1950 to the head of Yale University's then-newly-restructured Department of Design, and tells how Albers' teachings inspired such modern masters as Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly. Throughout his forty years in education, Albers influenced everyone he encountered not, as one former student says, as "a tour guide of the world of art, but rather as a living embodiment of that world."

Josef Albers: To Open Eyes also includes rare archival material, including documentary photography of Albers' life and teaching methods, as well as lush color reproductions of Albers' classic 1963 work, The Interaction of Color, taken from the original press proofs.