Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany
September 2019
September 22, 2019–January 12, 2020 Marking the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, Early Josef Albers: Becoming Modern centers on the early years of Josef Albers’s career, exploring the social and artistic climate in which the artist shaped his burgeoning artistic practice. Beginning in the city of Bottrop, where the artist was born, to the years bracketing the outbreak of the First World War—his venture into modernity and the horror of impending Nazi encroachment—are the focus of the exhibition. While stimulated by intellectual currents and artistic movements in Germany and neighboring countries such as France and the Netherlands, Josef Albers opted for independence over any singular direction, choosing to pursue his training as an art teacher and artist. Amid the most influential artistic movements of the modern era, from impressionism and art nouveau to symbolism and expressionism, Albers sought out his own distinctive creative expression. The exhibition focuses on early drawings of portraits and landscapes and includes some paintings and watercolors, primarily still lifes with flowers. Selected works by Albers’s teachers at the academies in Berlin and Munich and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Essen, as well as works from the magnificent collection of the then Folkwang Museum in Hagen, are shown together with Josef Albers’s own works.