| Josef
Albers
"The
beautiful pictures of our ugly age should be seen and read with
the eyes of a child.
The pictures of Albers are not only a treat for the eye but they
also convey meaning.
They grow in profundity as they are a mirror.
Each of his pictures has a heart. They never break into bits, crumble,
turn into dust.
They are not catigated lashes.
They have a clear and great content:
Here
I stand.
I am resting.
I am in this world and on earth.
I do not hurry away.
I won't have anyone harass and exasperate me.
I am not a frantic machine.
I am not faint-hearted.
I can wait.
I do not drive myself from the picture into the incommensurate.
I do not drive myself into bottomless depth. |
Many of my friends
and their pictures do no longer want to be here.
Neither friend nor picture have any longer an exixtence.
They want to go to the devil.
How one longs in their presence for an Albers.
The world that Albers creates carries in its heart the inner weight
of the fulfilled man.
To be blessed we have to have faith.
This holds also for art and above all for the art of our time.
Who would have forseen that our earth would be so led by our brain
to unbelief, to noise, to mechanical frenzy, to carefully recorded
raggedness, to teleguided disbelief."
Jean
Arp, Ascona,1957
Translated from the German original by Anni Albers |
