JOSEF ALBERS DESPITE STRAIGHT LINES FIRST EDITION BOOK

For Heraclitus, ultimate creative force lies in motion and change which govern both the atom and cosmic movement in a balance of birth and destruction.

Today, at the beginning of a new world age, motion, process, and relativity have become basic concerns of intelligent humanity. The artist, an originator as well as a sensitive interpreter of the spiritual forces shaping history, recognizes and reflects this deep involvement and has again transformed complex philosophical and theoretical systems into images which can be understood by all who have sharpened their visual perception.

Process, relativity, and motion are essential concerns of the seemingly chaotic artistic production of our time. Most contemporary creators show us a universe in dynamic flux. But none of them has concentrated his attention on the relativity of visual phenomena as tenaciously as Josef Albers.

In the static vanishing-point system of Renaissance perspective dominant to the end of the 19th century, parallel lines met on the horizon, and made the infinite tangible for the viewer. With Mondrian they became parallels once more which could meet only outside our immediate world of experience. For the Abstract Expressionist a painting is a never-ending process. For the modern sculptor mass is not fixed. It may actually move, as in the mobiles, or else its complex texture of polished brillance or pierced material may make it elusive. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation finds its echo in the mountains and the blazing plane of the Mediterranean, while Ronchamp's sweeping roof line demands contact with universal space.

This awareness of a constantly changing and ever intangible image of reality forms the paintings and especially the graphic constructions of Josef Albers, and makes him truly a contemporary, or, in other words, a man who has submitted himself to the full impact of the present.