Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (1994)

Josef Albers (1888-1976), famous as a master at Germany’s Bauhaus until 1933, and then a professor in American schools such as Yale University, influenced many young artists. His Homage to the Square series of paintings remains an important example of 20th-century art. Yet Albers’s first great works – the glass pictures that he made in Germany beginning in 1921 – remain little known. Starting with found fragments of colored glass, and later employing a sophisticated sandblasting process, Albers created a new art form.

Glass, Color and Light is the first monograph devoted to Albers’s work in this medium. Reproductions, 62 in color, of every extant glass picture are accompanied by full documentation by Brenda Danilowitz of the Josef Albers Foundation. Also illustrated and discussed are 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.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 1994
ISBN 0810968649
152 pages
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Mediascape, catalogue (1996)

Catalog of an exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in association with ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and held at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, June 14 – September 15, 1996.

Exhibiting artists: Ingo Guenther, Jenny Holzer, Toshio Iwai, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Bill Seaman, Jeffrey Shaw, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola.

With texts by Heinrich Klotz, Ursula Frohne, Oliver Seifert, and Annicka Blunck.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York; with ZKM, Karlsruhe, 1996
ISBN 0892071729
68 pages
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Gary Garrels (ed.): Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (2000)

“Sol LeWitt, one of the most important American artists of this century, has spent the past four decades creating artworks that explore the potential of ideas for the making of visual forms. LeWitt transforms these ideas into objects of exquisite beauty and elegance, deliberately introducing elements of chance, intuition, or irrationality into the systems that govern the creation of his works. LeWitt’s delicate balancing act between thought and form, between order and disorder, between authorship and anonymity, has exerted an enormous influence on artists of subsequent generations. This book, the first retrospective of LeWitt’s work in more than twenty years, fosters a deeper understanding of the artist’s career and its significance to American art and thought.

Including essays by Gary Garrels, Martin Friedman, Andrea Miller-Keller, Brenda Richardson, Anne Rorimer, John S. Weber, and Adam D. Weinberg, the book charts the evolution of LeWitt’s art from his groundbreaking work in Conceptualism during the early 1960s through his turn toward a more lyrical and sensual form of abstraction around 1980. With more than 350 images, the book provides a stunning visual survey of LeWitt’s oeuvre from 1960 to the present, including sumptuous wall drawings, three-dimensional structures, and works on paper.”

Publisher San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000
ISBN 0300083580, 9780300083583
416 pages

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