Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

by Jeffrey Saletnik

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226699172
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/13/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Saletnik is associate professor of art history at Indiana University Bloomington. He is coeditor of Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: “Bye, bye, Bauhaus”
A Linear Constructions
1 From Object to Process: On Albers’s Pedagogic Forms
  Learning by Doing
  Progressive Education
  Educating Albers
  Pedagogic Form
B Photography
2 Fold/Manifold: On Eva Hesse and Albers
  Lightweight and Weighted Down
  Folding and Unfolding
C Painting
3 Color Aid: On Richard Serra and Albers
  Working Methods
  Disciplined Disorientation
Epilogue: Playtime
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Image Credits
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[In this book] we learn something profound about how teaching was reinvented in the twentieth century as a process of form-creation that unfolded across both still and moving images. . . . Saletnik’s first chapter, an indispensable overview of Albers’ pedagogy, traces a procedural conception of art education as pioneered by the German school teacher. . . . Saletnik makes the convincing case that Albers’ encounter with the learning aids of the German education system, in his training as a grammar school teacher, prompted him to reflect on this conventional method of teaching and to transform ‘the structures of his own education into an analytical subject’. . . . While Josef Albers’s pedagogy has been the subject of other studies . . . Saletnik moves beyond these precedents by mounting a case for the dynamic interplay between art pedagogy and art making."

Art History

"With Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form, Saletnik offers an in-depth analysis of the specifics of Josef Albers’s pedagogy and its earliest roots. . . . In bringing together educational thought in Germany around 1900 and Albers’s teachings at Yale in the 1950s, Saletnik succeeds in moving Josef Albers out of the isolation of the 'monotonous tradition aligned with so-called Bauhaus modernism'. The beautifully designed monograph is richly illustrated with examples of assignments and educational objects, and draws on a plethora of primary sources. . . . Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form offers original and new views on a pedagogue and artist, who seems to be well-established within the history of modernism, yet turns out to be surrounded by a sea of teaching tools and educational thought, posing crucial questions concerning what it means to learn, whether it is in the field of art or in the classroom of the Volksschule."

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte

"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

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

"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

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

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