This Hardcover Book item from Phaidon Press was reviewed on 6-Nov-2008.
Search ISBN:071484599X offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale Reference Book. Classifications : Albers, Josef ( A-C ) Artists, A-Z Arts & Photography Subjects Books General Artists, A-Z Arts & Photography Subjects Books General AAS Artists, A-Z Arts & Photography Subjects Books Criticism History . Click the following link to view the cover of Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale. Related topics: Albers, Josef. ( A-C ). Artists, A-Z. Arts & Photography. Subjects. Books. General. Artists, A-Z. Arts & Photography. Subjects. requestid: f526b622-5032-4d57-911d-be88ef143f42
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1) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. This is a book about color not history! This book is about a profound and universal approach to art, color, teaching and ultimately life. There is a thread of integrity, passion and experimentation running through all of Josef Albers´ paintings, drawings, designs and teaching. Sometimes by learning about how he taught we gain more profound access to his paintings. Other times, by looking at his paintings we find we want to learn about how he approached teaching and how he achieved such insight into both the world at large and the world of color. Regardless of how you enter Josef´s world or come under Josef´s influence, the benefits are the same: an irrevocable expansion and enrichment of one´s own sensory world. I could go on at length as to how curious it is that Albers is frequently misunderstood as having been someone cool and controlling instead of the playful, spontaneous, generous and flexible man described in "To Open Eyes". But what you need to know is how significant this book is. There are thousands of books that offer dogma and theory for you to advance your own work or teaching. There really has never been a book like "To Open Eyes" which clarifies the Albers story while simultaneously imparting Josef´s most important lessons about color and seeing. If you could have only one book in your studio, this would be it.¤ 2) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. Horowitz and Danilowitz have written and assembled a remarkable and generous companion to the famous, Interaction of Color. One of the strongest criticisms of the Interaction of Color is that without the plates found in the original 1963 edition Albers´ writing and ideas are hard to access. "To Open Eyes" solves this problem and it is the most enjoyable and important book published on color since the original I of C. Everyone who works with color should own this book!¤ 3) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. Josef Albers: To Open Eyes by Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, is a beautiful, magnificent book about this internationally eminent artist, teacher of art, and theorist of design and color. It simply could not be better.
Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, writes about the biography of Albers, 64 pages, while Frederick A. Horowitz, a former student of Albers at Yale, who taught a The University of Michigan School of Art & Design in Ann Arbor and at Washtenaw Community College, devotes 181 pages to Albers as teacher of design, drawing, color and painting. An additional 34 pages cover Notes, Bibliography, Sources, Illustrations and Index. To find out what made Albers such a unique and revered teacher Frederick Horowitz interviewed a total of 160 students at Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Yale and Harvard as well as 9 of his professional colleagues.
Albers was first a student and then a member of the faculty of the original Bauhaus in Germany. When Hitler took over Germany in 1933 and the faculty, led by Mies van der Rohe, closed the Bauhaus, Albers came to the U.S. to teach, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then, beginning in 1950, at Yale as Head of the Department of Design. By 1962 Yale University awarded him an honorary Doctorate at the same time she similarly honored President John F. Kennedy and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Albers experimented with color relationships in the form of nested squares of color. His great dedication resulted in a retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, an honor only rarely given to a living artist. Another retrospective was organized in 1988 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
At Yale all first-year graduate students in architecture, undergraduates majoring in architecture and design, and all students in design took Albers´ courses in color and in drawing, while his basic design course was meant for undergraduates majoring in architecture.
Albers had a wide influence on generations of artists, architecture and design. The book makes it eminently clear why Albers was as influential a teacher as he was and why his courses and theories became the basis of art teaching all over the United States.
The text of this truly remarkable book is very informative and well written. The illustrations are superlative, carefully chosen and in many instances unique, not available anywhere else since they come from the Albers Foundation. I counted 284 illustrations, 103 in color.
By describing the life and artful work of Josef Albers this book demonstrates to teachers and lovers of art at all levels how to impart a life-long desire to experiment with fundamental principles of art and with novel materials to create new objects of art.
¤ 4) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. "Josef Albers: to Open Eyes" by F.A.Horowitz and B. Danilowitz is not only a review into the life and work of a great complex artist and teacher. It also signals the end of a debatable era called "postmodernism" whose glitz, pomp and kitsch we have been witnessing universally since Tom Wolfe´s pamphlet "From Bauhaus to Our House". "Josef Albers: to Open Eyes" also gives hope to the rediscovery of relevance. This elaborate study deserves to be part of the curriculum of the future art generation in its defining process.
Frank R Schmidt, Princeton, NJ
¤ 5) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. Many people may not know that Josef Albers played a large part in revolutionizing teaching art in the 20th Century. Many people do not know how many 2oth century artists lives were in some way affected by his teaching--either directly or indirectly.
It is surprising that it has taken this long for a book on the remarkable teaching career of Josef Albers to appear, but here it finally is. Fred Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz do a superb job of bringing the pedagogical thinking of perhaps the greatest 20th century art educator to life as well giving us a clear picture of the teacher himself. If this is the only book you ever read on teaching art you will give yourself the greatest gift possible.
The explanations and analysis of individual projects in four foundations courses, are coherent and represent the meat of this remarkable book. Plentiful fine illustrations from the Albers Foundation Archives, the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College make clear the descriptions of the problems and the reasons Albers found these to be indispensible in developing visual thinking--in opening eyes.
The choice of type weight, spacing, margin widths, and the light value of the ink may make reading the text a little difficult, but you should persevere--because real gold lies within the text. This is not just a book for the pictures!!
The publishers should take note, however, that Josef Albers as a designer would have deplored the way the layout and typography makes the reading a difficult task. I wonder whether the book designers took the trouble to read the text, or if they might benefited from some of the basic lessons imparted in Albers´ famous Design courses.
I hope that with the publishing of this book, the vital lessons that Albers made the core of his life teaching will once again be brought alive and vigorous into the Foundations classrooms of colleges and art schools worldwide.¤ 6) Hardcover Book Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale by Phaidon Press. The First Comprehensive Book to Examine the Teaching Methods of the Artist Renowned for the Homage to the Square Paintings. Josef Albers (1888-1976) has long been admired for his progressive vision as an artist who blurred distinctions between fine and applied art, but rarely has his work as a teacher been examined in detail. The German-born artist was a remarkable classroom performer whose colorful language, wit, and dramatic flair held his students spellbound and turned his lessons into high adventure. Whether at the Bauhaus in prewar Germany, Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s, or at Yale in the 1950s, Albers was driven by one thing--the desire to open his students´ eyes to a different way of perceiving art and, ultimately, life. JOSEF ALBERS: TO OPEN EYES by Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, is the first book to focus on how the legendary artist Josef Albers influenced generations of artists, architects, and designers, including Robert Mangold, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Bertrand Goldberg, and Tom Geismar, through his work and legacy as an educator. Marking the 30th anniversary of Albers´s death, the book examines his life and teaching methods, and reveals his philosophies on art, life, and the nature of perception based on first-hand accounts of more than 175 students and colleagues spanning more than 40 years. The book will coincide with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art which will run from November 2, 2006- January 21, 2007. JOSEF ALBERS: TO OPEN EYES takes the reader through Albers´s life in teaching. He began his career in 1923, when Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the Bauhaus in Germany, where he quickly replaced the school´s standard course curriculum with his own innovative methods. After moving to the United States in 1933, he and his wife Anni became founding members and teachers at the experimental start-up Black Mountain College. In 1950, he was appointed to head Yale´s newly restructured Department of Design and remained there until he retired in 1958. Although he is widely perceived as a strong-minded theoretician, as this book reveals, Albers opposed rigid dogma and encouraged his students to develop lively and original solutions to his many and varied design exercises. On their first day in his classroom, Albers´s students were informed that his goal was to educate their eyes and that he was going to teach them how to think and to see--an agenda belied by the somewhat prosaic course names "Basic Drawing" and "Basic Design" and "Color." With energy and flair, Danilowitz and Horowitz have charted Albers´s world-changing role as a teacher. Through their archival research of original correspondence, documents, student course notes, and student work produced in his courses, and their interviews of former students, colleagues, and associates of Albers, they reveal the way that Albers´s ideas on education and his complex personality have made an indelible imprint in the lives and work of artists all over the world. This book provides not only a compelling study of a key figure of 20th century art, but also ponders what constitutes art and how it is made and taught.¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 4-Dec-2008, 071484599X9780714845999, 200-540-2X0-860-8X0-9X0-8 
Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, Book, Image © Phaidon Press
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