Mesoamerican Monuments Influenced Abstract Works
Art is by definition polyglot and in flux, buffeted by the movement of objects and people across borders and among cultures. This is on display in “Josef Albers in Mexico,” an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that contrasts Albers’s little- known photographs of great Mesoamerican monuments with his glowing abstract paintings.
The show, which runs until February 18, grounds this German-born artist’s paintings in his Mexican travels between 1935 and 1967, clarifying his creative debt to the pre-Hispanic world. It reveals an artist from one culture being amazed by the achievements of another culture, and making work that might otherwise not have been possible without a change of scene.
How a German artist grew from his many journeys to Mexico.
The geometric grandeur and decorative reliefs of the pyramids, sanctuaries and complexes of the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec and other civilizations enabled Albers (18881976) to reach maturity. Namely they thawed the rigorous color theory he had learned and taught at the Weimar Bauhaus.
The Mesoamerican influence culminated in Albers’s signature “Homage to the Square” paintings, those pulsating arrangements of color, light and space he made from 1950 until his death.
Albers made more than a dozen trips to Mexico with his wife, the artist-weaver Anni Albers (18991994). They visited sites like Mitla, Monte Albán, Tenayuca and Uxmal. He took thousands of photographs. But Albers never exhibited his photoworks and usually hedged questions about the influences behind the “Homage to the Square” series. This show, organized by Lauren Hinkson, gives his development a transparency.
The Alberses were already interested in pre-Hispanic art and architecture when they arrived in the United States from Berlin in 1933, shortly after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. The values apparent in Mesoamerican objects dovetailed with Bauhaus principles.
“Josef Albers in Mexico” has a syncopation generated by the paintings’ colors, which alternate with the sepia of the photographs. T he paintings range from f ledgling works from 1935- 40 to a sweep of “Homage to the Square” paintings f rom t he 1960s and ’ 70s. Each has its own inner light, scale and spatial rhythm.
Albers’s camera captured extremes of l ight and shadow, which figure prominently in eight forthrightly titled “Variant/Adobe” paintings from the late 1940s — the core of the show. Layering of color creates a prismatic wavering of form.
Filtered through his photographs, Mesoamerican architecture showed Albers the accordion- like nature of pictorial space: it could be rendered as volumetric, flat and something in between at the same time. You see it in an ink drawing at the start of the show, “Study for Sanctuary” (1941- 42), which presents three black rectangles that are pushed in and then out by the concentric lines radiating around them, which also suggest stairs and elaborate doorframes. Frank Stella’s black- stripe paintings or the early reliefs of Donald Judd come to mind.
This is refined in the “Homage to the Square” paintings, which often read simultaneously as receding, protruding and holding steady in a single slightly vibrating plane.