Josef Albers Book Life and Work - Thames & Hudson

While Klee and Kandinsky, colleagues of Josef Albers at the Bauhaus, are household names, Albers himself remains enigmatic. He is best known as the painter of Homages to the Square, "a dish I serve up in colour" - a series of over two thousand meticulously controlled experiments in colour interaction. However, he did not begin these paintings until he was in his sixties, already several decades into his career as an artist, creator, and theorist, most of which he pursued in the United States after the Bauhaus was dissolved by the Nazis in 1933.

The son of a painter and decorator, Albers was fascinated by the everyday: his early Homages are in unmixed oil paint applied to hardboard with a palette knife, the outer squares crackling, and their handmade surfaces emphasising the apparent austerity of the series. They are austere, yet also deeply romantic.

The misunderstanding of the Homages reflects a broader misapprehension of Albers' life and work. He was married to the influential weaving and textile artist Anni Albers, and his papers include letters from other artists: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse; collaborators such as Buckminster Fuller and Philip Johnson; as well as fans and collectors, from composer Virgil Thomson to cartoonist Saul Steinberg. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so too were his interests. Albers began life at the Bauhaus as a glassmaker, ran a renowned wallpaper workshop, and designed furniture that remains in production eighty years later. He pioneered colour studies at Black Mountain College, organised the famous "Summer Sessions" with guest teachers from Willem de Kooning to Merce Cunningham, and later headed the design department at Yale.

Drawing on extensive unpublished writings, documents, and illustrations, Charles Darwent offers a broad insight not only into the artistic and political currents but also into the friendships and rivalries that formed the backdrop to Albers' extraordinarily influential work.

Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their greatest passion and mission was to create a "museum without walls" and to make the world of art accessible to a wide audience, as well as the research of leading scholars. To reflect international perspectives, the company's name combined the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolising friendship and intelligence, one facing east, the other west, suggesting a connection between the Old World and the New.

Today, still an independent, family-owned business, Thames & Hudson is one of the world's leading publishers of illustrated books with over 2000 titles in print. It publishes high-quality collector's books in all areas of visual creativity: the arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film and music, as well as archaeology, history, and popular culture. The list of children's books is also growing. Based in London with a sister company in New York and subsidiaries in Melbourne, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Paris, another subsidiary, Interart, distributes English-language books in France.

The History of the Thames & Hudson Brand

Walter Neurath was born in Vienna in 1903. In 1938, he left his hometown - where he ran an art gallery and published illustrated books - for London. Initially, he worked as production director at Adprint, a brand founded by Viennese émigré Wolfgang Foges. Neurath and Foges developed the innovative concept of what is now called book packaging (or co-edition publishing), where book ideas are developed, commissioned, produced, and sold to publishers operating in different markets and languages to create large print runs, thus reducing unit production costs. Neurath's concept was the first of many innovations he introduced to the publishing world through Thames & Hudson.

Wishing to continue packaging collector's books in a second edition and recognising the need to amortise the high production costs of illustrated books, Neurath established his own publishing house, with offices in London and New York in the autumn of 1949. Eva Neurath, who arrived in London from Berlin in 1939, was a co-founder.

Of the ten titles that were published on Thames & Hudson's first list in 1950, English Cathedrals, with photographs by Martin Hürlimann, was the first and most successful. A testament to the brand's strong belief in the longevity of books from the very beginning, it remained in print until 1971. In the first year of publication, "Out of My Later Years" by Albert Einstein also appeared, an early indicator of the programme's breadth. With the gradual and successful expansion of the list, which grew from ten titles in 1950 to 144 in 1955, the company moved its offices in High Holborn and in 1956 relocated to a Georgian townhouse at 30 Bloomsbury Street, near Bedford Square, then the epicentre of book publishing in London. The company remained at this address, eventually expanding to five houses, until 1999, when it returned to High Holborn.

In 1958, Thames and Hudson launched one of its most famous series, World of Art, which became a cornerstone of a very diverse list. Characterised by their pocket size and black spines, the series expanded in just seven years to include 49 titles. Almost 60 years later, the series featured over 300 titles, of which, according to Christopher Frayling, "there are 'paint-splattered copies' in every art school in the country."

Other important series that added depth and prestige to the list include Ancient People and Places, edited by Glyn Daniel, which since the 1950s contributed to pioneering interest in archaeology, both in book form and on television. Over 34 titles were published in the series over 34 years. The large-format series Great Civilizations, published in 1961, included contributions from such esteemed scholars as Alan Bullock, Asa Briggs, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Taylor, and John Julius Norwich.
After building one of the most important publishing houses in Europe in less than two decades, Walter Neurath died in 1967 at the age of 63. Sculptor Henry Moore wrote that "his death was a loss to our cultural life." Sir Herbert Read noted that Neurath "more than any other person was responsible for the revolution in publishing art books" and was "one of those rare entrepreneurs who successfully combined business acumen with idealism." Eva Neurath became chairperson. Walter's son, Thomas, who joined the company with his sister Constance in 1961, became managing director; Constance later served as art director for several decades. Both Thomas and Constance remain on the board of Thames & Hudson, as do Thomas's daughters, Johanna and Susanna.
From producing the first commercial edition of The Book of Kells to the triumphant publication of the six-volume Vincent van Gogh - Letters, from such technical innovations as "French folds" to the controversial documentation of graffiti art in Subway Art, Thames and Hudson has always been at the forefront, both culturally and in production techniques.

The year 2016 opened an extraordinary new chapter for the company, heralding a publishing partnership with two of the world's most important museums: the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The world of art and scholarship thus remains at the heart of Thames & Hudson's publishing programme, which remains true to its core principle: providing a "museum without walls."
Today, Thames & Hudson is a recognisable international brand, a symbol of English publishing. They offer thousands of amazing book titles, many of which are prestigious collector's books.