(10 April-8 September 2024)
When Nicholas Fox Weber, president of the “Josef and Anni Albers Foundation” saw our favourite Villa Empain in Brussels, he exclaimed: “this is the perfect place for a retrospective exhibition of such a big names in abstract art. Restored by the Bogossian family (after vandalism in the 1970s), the Villa, the purest beauty of the purest example of Art Deco by Michel Polak, the number one architect of this style in Belgium, which is based on squares, is more suited than any other museum to the exhibition of Joseph Albers (and his wife Annie), who painted more than 3,000 squares in his lifetime.
The exhibition brings back to Europe the name of the German artist, professor at the Bauhaus School, friend of Kandinsky and Paul Klee, widely known and loved in America, where he emigrated in 1933 as the Nazis came to power.
This distinguished couple had a fine career in the US – Joseph taught at Yale University and Black Mountain Art College in North Carolina, and his works are in some of America’s finest collections. One of his famous students is the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. But in Europe the Albers surname has been all but forgotten, unlike the names of their friends and associates. We see them in the photo next to Walter Groppius, the founder of Bauhaus.
The exhibition “Josef and Anni Albers. Iconic Couple of Modernism” fills in the gaps of historical memory. To the title of the exhibition one could add “Homage Carre”, as the “Square” is so important in the work of Josef Albers. Not with a brush, but with a special knife reproduced countless times on canvas. The artist can safely be called the forerunner of kinetic art – his squares play visual trickery with you. “To change the eye of the beholder, it must first be deceived” – said Joseph, the theorist of abstractionism and a great teacher.
Annie is a match for her husband – her works in textiles are not weaving (which is also beautiful), but experiments in art of the finest and highest calibre. There is a lot of maths in them, as there is in her husband’s works. Anni was one of the first women at the most progressive twentieth century Bauhaus School of Architecture and Art and Industry, founding the textile faculty (!), experimenting and teaching students and female students. But, of course, in our memory of Anni Albers will remain the story of her unintentional late (she was 90 years old) love for the actor and director Maximiliann Schell and their friendship. What a woman, what talent and charisma, that a collector of her husband’s work and handsome man was so attached to and treasured this woman’s opinion.
