The exhibition Anni et Josef Albers: L’art et la vie, now on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, explores the creative couple’s rich legacy.
It wasn’t his art history degree from Columbia University that would lead Nicholas Fox Weber, now the Executive Director of the Albers Foundation, into the art world. It was romance. Or, more accurately, an attempt at one. “I fell in love with a girl who, to my disappointment, was not in love with me,” Weber tells W. “But she still took me to meet her parents, who collected work by Josef and Anni Albers, the pioneering modernist couple known for their uniquely intertwined approaches to color and geometry. Upon seeing it, I was absolutely awestruck.”
At the time, Weber was in his early 20s and, conveniently, a mother of one of his friends was acquainted with the Alberses. They would meet in person a few years later. “I thought I was dressed rather neatly,” Weber says, noting his beige corduroy pants. But, the car grease that got on his clothes from trying to fix his engine moments before would be the first thing Josef noticed. “He didn’t even say hello. He looked at me up and down and said ‘What do you do, boy?’”
Josef and Anni Albers first met at the Bauhaus, and became early purveyors and innovators of twentieth-century modernism. Josef typically worked with glass and wood, while Anni boasted her skills with textiles and printmaking. Paintings from Josef’s iconic “Homage to the Square” series hang in The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (during the Obama administration, one hung in the White House). Even Hermès has paid homage to the late artist, taking his signature square works and printing them on silk scarves.