Finding 23: Josef Albers: A Retrospective Panel Discussion

From March 24–May 29, 1988, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented a retrospective of Josef Albers's work. The exhibition later traveled to Baden-Baden and Berlin, Germany, and Pori, Finland. In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum hosted a panel discussion on April 5 that consisted of panelists Peter Halley, Donald Judd, Paul Overy, and Harry Seidler and moderator Nicholas Fox Weber. While speaking of the relationship between Albers’s theories and his work, one panelist gave the following anecdote:  “When you refer to Albers’s scale and his European sense of scale, it made me think of a time when a critic visited Albers in Connecticut in the early 1970s. The critic had observed that for years Albers had created the works in his Homage to the Square series in sizes ranging from 16 x 16 inches to 40 x 40 inches, and [the critic] said ‘Professor Albers, in 1962 you suddenly began to work in the size of 48 x 48, and I wondered if this was your reaction as a European to the vaster scale of life in America or in fact to the American attempt to conquer space and reach larger dimensions?’ And Albers looked at him and said ‘young man that was the year we got a bigger station wagon.’”

As part of this grant project, the lecture will be digitized and available for public research later this year. In addition to painting, Albers taught at Black Mountain and then at Yale University. Among his students were Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, and Eva Hesse.

—Martha Horan, archives assistant