Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form
by Jeffrey Saletnik
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Cloth: 978-0-226-69917-2 | Electronic: 978-0-226-81939-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.
An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.
With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jeffrey Saletnik is assistant professor of art history at Indiana University Bloomington. He is coeditor of Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism.
REVIEWS
“Saletnik’s Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form is a brilliant, boldly original work of art-historical scholarship. He examines in rich detail the formation of Josef Albers’s pedagogy in Wilhelmine Germany, how it shaped his legendary teaching at Yale, and—this is the bold part—how his pedagogical exercises decisively shaped habits of mind and hand in the work of Yale alumni Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, two artists whose artistic practice seems far removed from Albers’s own. The book is an exemplary demonstration of the insights to be gained from exhaustive archival and historical research and close, thoughtful looking.”
— Charles W. Haxthausen, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, Williams College
“This very important study offers a new understanding of the significant impact that Josef Albers’s artistic and pedagogical commitments had on key figures of the ‘postminimalist’ generation of American artists, such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Most importantly, perhaps, its wide-ranging analysis radically questions the rigid distinctions commonly made between the closures of a modernist commitment to form and the experimental ethos of process-orientated art.”
— Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
"There is no doubt that Saletnik has given us a new view on Albers that is an important contribution to scholarship on a figure who had a profound impact on the direction of post-Second World War western art. This extends to an enhanced understanding of several of his pupils too, most notably Hesse and Serra, all delivered in a clear and elegant style that is eminently readable."
— History of Education
"For anyone interested in Josef Albers’s teaching and creative practice, there is much to be learned from Saletnik’s Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form. . . . Saletnik digs deep to reveal the historical and cultural roots from which Albers’s singular pedagogy developed."
— Journal of Design History
“This is an important book, backing up imaginative leaps between the various parts of Albers’s practice—typography, photography and painting—with meticulous and tightly focused research. It adds to existing writing on Albers’s teaching by considering both its forelife in the history of German pedagogy and its afterlife in late modernist art.”
— Burlington Magazine
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: “Bye, bye, Bauhaus” - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0001
[Josef Albers;perceptual abstraction;modernist aesthetics;Eva Hesse;Richard Serra;Bauhaus;modernist pedagogy;art historical writing;discourse network;educational thought]
This section details how Josef Albers’s close association with perceptual abstraction and the modernist aesthetics and educational traditions affiliated with the Bauhaus have occluded his importance to artists like Eva Hesse and Richard Serra and precluded understanding the relevance of his modernist pedagogy more generally. With respect to art historical writing, it considers the limitations of recent post-historical discursive structures and disciplinary assumptions about the historical logic of the avant-garde as constituted by radical breaks with the past. This critique introduces a question fundamental to the book: how does one write about relationships between teacher and student without returning to evolutionary narratives? The book’s three chapters and three vignettes are introduced as gesturing toward this end. In aggregate, they elaborate Albers’s design, drawing, and color instruction, eliciting relationships between his pedagogy and the practices of Hesse and Serra; showing how Albers’s pedagogy functioned as a discourse network that prioritized the contingency of artistic material and visual understanding; and, as importantly, revealing the extent to which Albers's pedagogy was informed by his explicit and implicit understanding of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought known to him well before he arrived at the Bauhaus. (pages 1 - 14)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
A: Linear Constructions - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0002
[Josef Albers;Linear Constructions;gestalt psychology;psychology of art;dynamic perception;Heinrich Wölfflin;Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi;modernist typeface]
This section shows that Josef Albers’s Linear Constructions are not merely artistic instrumentalizations of principles of gestalt psychology, as some scholars have claimed. Rather, they are works that interrogate discourse on the psychology of art while remaining true to Albers’s interest in the dynamic perception of space and form. The section contends that Albers’s knowledge of Heinrich Wölfflin’s psychologically inflected art historical writing and the pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, which was known to him through his training to be a primary school teacher, informed how he composed his Linear Constructions as well as the design of his modernist typeface. (pages 15 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1: From Object to Process: On Albers’s Pedagogic Forms - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0003
[Josef Albers;Jean-Jacques Rousseau;Immanuel Kant;Johann Bernhard Basedow;Johann Friedrich Herbart;John Dewey;active learning;Wilhelmine Germany;progressive education;teaching aids]
This chapter explores the instructional parameters and mediating forms of Josef Albers’s pedagogy, as well as the emphasis it placed upon activity in relation to the educational thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Bernhard Basedow, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and others. It shows how Albers’s pedagogy was indebted to a long-standing tradition of Enlightenment and Romantic thought that prioritized active learning, which was known to him through his training to become a primary school teacher and that also informed John Dewey’s and Georg Kerschensteiner’s notions of progressive education. Thus, the chapter demonstrates that, to be fully understood, Albers’s pedagogy must be positioned relative to the educational thought and pedagogic practices he enacted as a primary school teacher in Wilhelmine Germany. It attends to how teaching aids were theorized in this context and provides an overview of Albers's instruction in design, drawing, and color at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and the Yale University School of Art that shows how he transformed the structures of his own education into an analytical subject. (pages 27 - 66)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
B: Photography - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0004
[Josef Albers;personal expression;objectivity;photographic perception;Heinrich Wölfflin;modern vision]
This section details Josef Albers’s attitude toward photography and what he perceived to be the medium’s artistic limitations. For Albers, photography was burdened by personal expression despite the medium’s seeming objectivity. The section shows the extent to which Albers’s understanding of photographic perception was formed through his experience as a primary school teacher in Wilhelmine Germany and how it corresponds with Heinrich Wölfflin’s attitude about modern vision and the educational employment of photography. (pages 67 - 80)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2: FoldManifold: On Eva Hesse and Albers - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0005
[Josef Albers;Eva Hesse;intellectual labor;haptic history;design instruction;color study;drawing instruction;material investigation;paper folding;Friedrich Fröbel]
This chapter demonstrates the extent to which Eva Hesse approached her creative practice methodically and in a manner in keeping with Josef Albers’s example and ambition. It does so in contrast to the tendency among scholars to discuss Hesse’s work as being the product of her psyche, as sensuous, and as the result of emotional rather than intellectual labor. The chapter reveals a haptic history of Hesse’s work, one in which the artist drew upon her experience of Albers’s curriculum as well as the instructional ethos he fostered. It explores how Albers’s design instruction, color study exercises, and drawing instruction emphasized material investigation. Toward that end, the chapter attends especially to the paper folding exercises Albershad students perform. It draws upon the history of fashion, domesticity, and early childhood education, including the use of paper folding by followers of Friedrich Fröbel in Kindergarten curricula, to situate Albers’s paper folding exercises within a long-standing educational tradition that exploited the material’s inherent flexibility. It was this kind of flexible, adaptive mode of material inquiry that Hesse inherited from Albers. (pages 81 - 118)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
C: Painting - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0006
[Josef Albers;Homage to the Square;Heinrich Wölfflin;painterly vision;color autonomy;visual instability]
This section articulates how Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square paintings are in line with Heinrich Wölfflin’s conception of painterly vision. It shows that it was only after Albers removed explicit linear gestures from his painting practice, and thereby insisted upon color autonomy, that he achieved the demonstrative visual difficulty he desired of painting. In these works, Albers liberated color, which was not used to construct the appearance of concrete elements, but rather to portray visual instability itself. (pages 119 - 126)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3: Color Aid: On Richard Serra and Albers - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0007
[Josef Albers;color instruction;Richard Serra;applied psychology;gestalt psychology;Philipp Franck;Kunstschule zu Berlin;Hans Rupp;German Teaching Exhibition]
This chapter elaborates ways in which the exercises of Josef Albers's color instruction, through which students discovered the perceptual-material dynamics of color, resonate with Richard Serra's attitude toward material in his early work, his engagement with the medium of film and video, and his mining of the relationship between subject and object in his large-scale steel sculpture. It offers a narrative of Serra’s practice that runs parallel to dominant accounts of his work as being opposed to a modernist understanding of the gestalt associated with Albers. In contrast, the chapter shows how applied psychology, rather than gestalt psychology, was at the root of Albers’s practice and teaching. It reveals how the psychologically inflected pedagogy of Philipp Franck, Albers's drawing instructor at the Kunstschule zu Berlin, and concurrent research in applied educational psychology performed by Hans Rupp and presented at the German Teaching Exhibition informed Albers's color instruction and, by extension, Serra's work. (pages 127 - 153)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Epilogue: Playtime - Jeffrey Saletnik
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226819396.003.0008
[Josef Albers;Carpenter Center for the Arts;Bauhaus idea;art teaching;teaching;Harvard Graduate School of Education;Project Zero;learning]
This section details Josef Albers’s refusal to participate in a Bauhaus exhibition mounted at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, which was meant to explore how the so-called Bauhaus idea informed art teaching at the university. It contrasts this effort with research on teaching and learning conducted concurrently by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s program Project Zero. (pages 155 - 156)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
