Josef Albers. [Ed. Italiana e Inglese]

The retrospective dedicated to Josef Albers (1888-1976), the largest ever to be organised in Italy, sets out to trace all the key stages of the artist's life, from his years at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, through to those at Black Mountain College, at Yale University, and lastly those in which he dedicated his time entirely to painting.
This exhibition is organised with the collaboration of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany (Connecticut), which has lent the 179 works on show.
From his years at the Bauhaus,12 works in glass produced between 1921 and 1932 will be displayed, along with 29 photographs and photo collages, a small section on woodcuts and gouaches as well as several items of furniture.
While the glass works already clearly show the rigour of his composition and the extraordinary sense of colour which was to characterise Albers' later and more famous oil paintings, the photographs represent the work of a careful and passionate eye. His first moves in the field of oil paintings took place during his early period in America, and is represented in the show by some 10 paintings from the second half of the '30s and '40s, in which the artist's painstaking care for chromatic relationships and their physical perception is already pre-empting the better-known series "Variant" (1947-1952) and "Homage to the Square" (1950-1976).
Lastly, there is a display of the seven record sleeves designed for Command Records, the record company founded by Enoch Light with the innovative openable "gatefold sleeve" - the invention of which may be attributed to the collaboration between Josef Albers and Enoch Light.