Josef Albers: A Retrospective

For most museum-goers, the name of Josef Albers (1888-1976) is synonymous with his famous Homage to the Square series, or perhaps his Bauhaus armchairs. This catalogue of a revelatory retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum gives us an artist whose craftsmanship and sense of order touched everything he did, from deft sketches of roosters and collages of leaves to large-scale murals and improvisational paintings that exult in strokes or daubs of pure color. Accompanied by 281 illustrations, the book includes five essays by scholars exploring how the colorful assemblages and sandblasted-glass constructions of the Bauhaus years prefigured the artist's later abstracts. Weber, director of the Josef Albers Foundation, struggles mightily to interpret the squares-within-squares as a spiritual odyssey, comparing them to cathedrals, steeples, ``the core from which everything emanates'' and medieval Madonnas. (September)