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radiobedlam:

→ Josef Albers

julianminima:

Julian Hoeber

cavetocanvas:

Homage to the Square: Ascending - Josef Albers, 1953

yama-bato:

Josef Albers

“Porta Negra”

silkscreen printed in colors, 1965, initialed in pencil, dated, titled and numbered from the edition of 50, from the series “Soft Edge - Hard Edge”, published by Ives-Sillman Inc, New Haven

beetleinabox:

Josef Albers, Growing, 1940 (oil on masonite; shown at the 1988 Albers exhibition at the Guggenheim).

Michael Palmer’s “Autobiography 4 (Idem)” (from The Promises of Glass):

Voice: Do you see that purple tint the sky has taken on?

Other Voice: I’d say mauve, it’s more a mauve.

V.: Is there any difference?

O.V.: One has more pink.

V.: Which?

O.V.: Which what?

V.: Which has more pink?

O.V.: I don’t really know.

V.: Then how can you…

O.V.: It sounds right for that.

V.: Do you always go by the sound?

O.V.: Sound?

V.: The sound, the…

O.V.: What does that mean, “Go by the sound”?

V.: I mean sometimes it begins with sounds—nothing else. You follow, you…

O.V.: Musical sounds?

V.: No, less organized.

O.V.: Like the sounds around us now?

V.: No, like the sounds not around us now.

O.V.: Sounds you can’t hear?

V.: Sounds you can’t hear.

O.V.: You listen to sounds you can’t hear?

V.: No.

O.V.: No?

V.: It’s before listening.

O.V.: Before listening?

V.: Listening is attention. Before attention.

O.V.: Mauve: “A delicate purple, violet or lilac color.”

V.: Purple: “A color of a hue between blue and red; one of the colors commonly called violet, lilac, mauve, etc.”

O.V.: Same and not.

V.: Same or not.

O.V. Same as not.

V.: Not same.

O.V.: Same not same.

V.: The form is fulfilled at thirty-six.

O.V.: Magenta.

beetleinabox:

Josef Albers, Scherbe ins Gitterbild [Glass Fragments in Grid Picture], 1921 (Albers Foundation, New York).

Andrew Zawacki writes:

The poetics of The Promises of Glass capitalizes on the absences effected in the composition of glass. A fusion of sand, soda, and potash, its peculiarity resides in how these elements are not perceived but effaced. Glass sublimates its ingredients into a unity that displaces them; the differences comprising glass are erased so glass may appear. “Isn’t there another story / consistent with sand?” Palmer asks, “How it turns to mirror-glass / when heated in your hand[?]” Glass retains no visible residue of its particles, since they would obstruct its clarity: there is a poeisis, then, of withholding. Yet glass, in turn, itself withdraws. It might hide in the form of a window, to facilitate transparency or translucence, or it might withdraw into a mirror, to enable an opacity permitting reflection. Glass promises to withdraw into an invisibility that allows one either to detect an object or light, or else to see oneself. But what one must not see is the glass itself.

art-history:

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Soft Spoken, 1969. Oil on Masonite, 48 x 48 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York