Joseph Albers

Monograph
2022

Title page spread
Copyright and contents pages
Example of text pages with figures. The figures show Josef Albers's type designs which were the inspiration for the display typography in the book.
Page spread with images
Flipping through the entire book.

For this book about Josef Albers I used one of his own typeface designs (some of which are reproduced in the book) for the display typography. Otherwise, I prepared a clean and spare book design appropriate for the modernist subject matter.

More information about the book from the publisher:

An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.


With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.

Designer
Matt Avery
Studio
Monograph
Creative director (University of Chicago Press)
Jill Shimabukuro