The World of Interiors

From top right: Josef’s Study for Sanctuary c1941- 42  links the geometry

of adobe façades with that of Mesoamerican pyramids; this undated

photograph of a pre-Columbian stone figure was taken by Josef at a

museum in Morelia; Mexico also coloured work that was not Mexican

in interest – in this case the overlapping egg-shapes of Josef’s 1937

Proto Form A. By now it was clear that the Alberses would be childless; a

Peruvian panel fragment (late intermediate Chimù) collected by the couple

You can see him thinking about this in the photo-collages

he made of their trips – a black-and-white mosaic of the re-

peat motifs of a Peruvian stone-carving say. In 1949 he would

set to work on his own greatest series the thing for which he

is best known the paintings and prints of his ‘Hom age to the

Square’. By the time he died there would be more than 2000

paintings in this sequence alone roughly one for every four

days of the quarter-century that he had worked on it. Their

juxtapositions of colour were rooted in turn in another smaller

series made in Mexico in 1947 – paintings that Josef called

‘Variants’ or ‘Adobes’. Their nested squares started life as

the black-and-white ‘Graphic Tectonic’ studies which drew

on Mexican geometry.

Anni Albers made no bones about her debt to pre-Colum-

bian art: her 1965 book On Weaving was dedicated to ‘my great

teachers the weavers of ancient Peru’. Her fascination was

not just with colour and form but with technique and scale.

She was mesmerised by the way ancient Americans had woven

wide fabrics but also by the smallness of many pre-Hispanic

objects. The works she dubbed her ‘pictorial weavings’ her

own challenge to easel paintings were often tiny: one just

10cm high is called South of the Border. ‘The monumental can

be embedded in the minute’ she said with satisfaction $

‘A Beautiful Confluence: Anni and Josef Albers and the Latin American

World’ runs at the Museo delle Culture 56 Via Tortona 20144 Milan

until 21 Feb. For opening times ring 00 39 02 54917 or visit mudec.it

BAUHAUS BELOW THE BORDER

ALL IMAGES: © THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION APART FROM MUDEC COLLECTION: ©

2015

COMUNE DI MILANO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MUDEC

• MUSEO DELLE CULTURE MILANO