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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation.
When Albers joined the faculty of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, his art reflected an intense engagement with materials, including glass. His early Scherbenbilder (Shard pictures) were composed of rough scraps of glass that he found during walks around the city. Albers' work began to evolve in tandem with the Bauhaus, which responded to a demand for the arts-and-crafts movement to advance with industry and for the school to produce more commercial products.
Achim Borchardt-Hume wrote:
"Being put in charge of the stained-glass workshop, Albers initially fulfilled the early Bauhaus ideal of the artist-craftsman by designing large-scale architectural commissions including windows for the Director's Office in Weimar, Gropius's Haus Sommerfeld and the Ullstein Publishing House in Berlin. When modernist architecture and its rejection of ornament made such windows obsolete (the stained glass workshop was abandoned following the Bauhaus's move to its new Gropius-designed dwellings in Dessau in 1925), Albers embarked on an innovative series of sandblasted glass pieces that mimic the format of easel paintings. The prevalence of geometric grids and right angles, and the potential for serial production -made with a stencil the pieces could theoretically be replicated- indicate Albers's new-found kinship with the architecture and design discourse of the period.
Yet, at the same time, they retain an element of craft. Adapted from a process originally invented to reduce the cost of engraving gravestones, the precise sandblasting draws at least as much attention to the skill of the craftsman as to the semi-industrial technique itself." (A. Borchardt-Hume, "Two Bauhaus Histories," Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, exh. cat. New Haven, 2006, pp. 68-69).
Albers's study for the present work, a gouache and graphite work on paper also titled Steps, is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
When Albers joined the faculty of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, his art reflected an intense engagement with materials, including glass. His early Scherbenbilder (Shard pictures) were composed of rough scraps of glass that he found during walks around the city. Albers' work began to evolve in tandem with the Bauhaus, which responded to a demand for the arts-and-crafts movement to advance with industry and for the school to produce more commercial products.
Achim Borchardt-Hume wrote:
"Being put in charge of the stained-glass workshop, Albers initially fulfilled the early Bauhaus ideal of the artist-craftsman by designing large-scale architectural commissions including windows for the Director's Office in Weimar, Gropius's Haus Sommerfeld and the Ullstein Publishing House in Berlin. When modernist architecture and its rejection of ornament made such windows obsolete (the stained glass workshop was abandoned following the Bauhaus's move to its new Gropius-designed dwellings in Dessau in 1925), Albers embarked on an innovative series of sandblasted glass pieces that mimic the format of easel paintings. The prevalence of geometric grids and right angles, and the potential for serial production -made with a stencil the pieces could theoretically be replicated- indicate Albers's new-found kinship with the architecture and design discourse of the period.
Yet, at the same time, they retain an element of craft. Adapted from a process originally invented to reduce the cost of engraving gravestones, the precise sandblasting draws at least as much attention to the skill of the craftsman as to the semi-industrial technique itself." (A. Borchardt-Hume, "Two Bauhaus Histories," Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, exh. cat. New Haven, 2006, pp. 68-69).
Albers's study for the present work, a gouache and graphite work on paper also titled Steps, is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.