It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library. I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well. So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before. These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me.
Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe. Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form. In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure – an oblong house front with two windows – from different color schemes. There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces. The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper. Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside. It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself. Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else. These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise.
