Final Weekend: Bauhaus at MoMA

This exhibition brings together over 400 works that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the Bauhaus school's productions, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting, and sculpture. It includes works by famous faculty members and well-known students including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl, as well as less well-known, but equally innovative, artists.

Josef Albers (1888-1976) is the second artist in the series of small exhibitions with the heading Louisiana – on paper, focusing on prints and drawings.

The presentation of Josef Albers is something of a sensation, featuring a whole series of works that have never been shown before. In other words, a new side of an old acquaintance for visitors to Louisiana can be experienced in the exhibition. Albers was a designer in the Bauhaus stable and is well known for his abstract paintings – his ‘squares’. But what he himself called his “obsession with color” led him from 1940 on to a number of experiments with color on paper, where he investigated color and abstract form in sketches and more finished works on a smaller scale.

The exhibition has been created in collaboration with Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, in Germany. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is one of the venues on a major tour that also includes the Gulbenkian in Portugal and the Morgan Library in New York.

Encompassing Albers' career from 1917 to 1973, this exhibition begins with four early self-portrait prints and follows to a group of boldly abstract compositions from Albers' tenure at Germany's revolutionary Bauhaus, where he taught alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Albers participated in the school's utopian aspiration to improve modern life through manufacturing and design—ideas that resonated throughout Albers' career. The Hirshhorn's show also includes a series of black-and-white designs intended for mass production in glass, such as "6 and 3" (1931), and an illuminated display of eight glass panels, in which the artist modernized and transformed the medieval tradition of stained-glass windows, best characterized by "Fugue (B)" (1925-28).

To see more images from the show, please visit the slideshow.