Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living

Josef Albers and Anni Albers

Anni Albers

Anni Albers

Anni Albers

Josef Albers 

The first comprehensive book on the furniture, textiles and other works of two of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. Designs for Living features innovative objects that the couple designed for their homes while teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany and following their move to the United States in 1933 and includes specially commissioned photographs of important but little-known works. Illuminating essays celebrate the Alberses' endless creativity and set their ground-breaking work in the context of International Modernism. This book will appeal to students, art historians, collectors and anyone interested in twentieth-century design.

Bauhaus Textiles

Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) was a German textile artist  who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop. As the Bauhaus’s only female master she created enormous change within the weaving department as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1927 and a full master the next year. She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, a year before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis.  The textile department was a neglected part of the Bauhaus when Ms. Stölzl began her career, and its active masters were weak on the technical aspects of textile production. She soon became a mentor to other students and reopened the Bauhaus dye studios in 1921. After a brief departure, Stölzl became the school's weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She applied ideas from Modern Art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials, and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

At Walter Gropius's Bauhaus Anni Albers began her first year under Georg Muche and then Johannes Itten. Women were barred from certain disciplines taught at the school, especially architecture, and during her second year, unable to get into a glass workshop with future husband Josef Albers, Anni Albers deferred reluctantly to weaving. With her instructor Gunta Stölzl, however, Albers soon learned to love weaving's tactile construction challenges.

Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonne - Nine Volume Set

Why simply do when you can totally overdo? 5,000 pages of every art piece Paul Klee did. Merry Excessmas to me....

Paul Klee Catalogue Raisonne: Nine-Volume Set

Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most significant and best-loved artists of the twentieth century. For the nine volumes of this landmark in Paul Klee scholarship, the Berne-based Paul Klee Foundation has researched intensively the artist's 9,600 drawings, prints, watercolors, and oil paintings, allowing the artist's complete works to be assembled and published for the first time. 

Presenting Klee's oeuvre in chronological order, each volume contains an introduction in German and English, an explanation of the catalogue system, a German-English glossary, a bibliography, and indexes. All the entries are illustrated and include catalogue numbers, technical descriptions, measurements, references to related works, details of provenance and location, relevant literature, and a list of exhibitions and auctions in which works have appeared. Klee's own entries from the catalogue he wrote from 1911 onwards are also included, and the most important works of his career are illustrated in color.

For example, Volume III follows Klee from 1919 through 1922, when he taught at the Bauhaus and became particularly involved with Bauhaus theater. Many of his works from this period -- masks, clowns, acrobats, ballet dancers -- reflect the influence of drama, ballet, the circus, and cabaret performances. 

This monumental set of publications is an essential reference work for libraries, art resources, and lovers of Klee's poetic, imaginative, and wholly original work.

Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye

Paul Klee : The Thinking Eye (The Notebooks of Paul Kless, The Documents of Modern Art Series, Vol. 15)Paul Klee; Jurg Spiller (editor); Ralph Manheim (translator), 1964.

This is the finest artist's notebook I've ever seen. Perhaps it's time to revisit my dream of studying its concepts more thoroughly. Copies of this out of print masterwork often range from $200-$800 in the antiquarian book market.

541 pages with hundred of illustrations in black and white as well as tipped in color plates; introduction, towards a theory of form production, contributions to a theory of pictorial form (lecture notes from the Bauhaus at Weimar and at Dessau).

Paul Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Paul Klee (1879-1940).