Nicholas Fox Weber

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf."

The Iphone As the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

Ibauhaus

Josef Albers

Anni Albers

Martin Filler

The most comprehensive book on the furniture, textiles and other works of two of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. Featuring the many innovative objects that the couple designed while teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany and after their move to the United States in 1933, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century design.

Designs for Living

Josef + Anni Albers

A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut.

Equal and Unequal

Anni and Josef Albers

Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-three years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography). The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well these figures’ lesser-known wives and girlfriends. In this extraordinary group biography, Weber brilliantly brings to life the Bauhaus geniuses and the community of the pioneering art school in Germany’s Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s and early 1930s. Here are: Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the architect who streamlined design early in his career and who saw the school as a place for designers to collaborate in an ideal setting . . . a dashing hussar, the ardent young lover of the renowned femme fatale Alma Mahler, beginning when she was the wife of composer Gustav Mahler . . . Paul Klee, the onlooker, smoking his pipe, observing Bauhaus dances as well as his colleagues’ lectures from the back of the room . . . the cook who invented recipes and threw together his limited ingredients with the same spontaneity, sense of proportion, and fascination that underscored his paintings . . . Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born pioneer of abstract painting, guarding a secret tragedy one could never have guessed from his lively paintings, in which he used bold colors not just for their visual vibrancy, but for their “sound” effects . . . Josef Albers, who entered the Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and was one of the seven remaining faculty members when the school was closed by the Gestapo in 1933 . . . Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann, a Berlin heiress, an intrepid young woman, who later, as Anni Albers, made art the focal point of her existence . . . Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, imperious, decisive, often harsh, an architect who became director—the last—of the Bauhaus, and the person who guided the school’s final days after SS storm troopers raided the premises. Weber captures the life, spirit, and flair with which these geniuses lived, as well as their consuming goal of making art and architecture. A portrait infused with their fulsome embrace of life, their gift for laughter, and the powerful force of their individual artistic personalities.

The Bauhaus Group

six masters of modernism

The Bauhaus group

Press kit consists of press release, dated March 24, 1988 (4 leaves), and three photo sheets of works by Albers.

A Retrospective

A definitive study of the life and work of the influential, controversial architect looks at the role of Le Corbusier in developing a modernist architectural movement that sought to better society through innovative urban planning and discusses influences on his work, the evolution of his pioneering design theories, and his legacy on the history of architecture. 17,500 first printing.

A Life

Le Corbusier

"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." —New Yorker "Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." —John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar "This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues. What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman. Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires. Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.

The Great Doctor's Unresolved Confrontation with Antisemitism, Death, and Homoeroticism; His Passion for Paintings; and the Writer in His Footsteps

Freud's Trip to Orvieto

Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of the Josef Albers Foundation in New Haven, Connecticut, worked with Laurent to reconstruct the genesis of Babar and his shy queen, Celeste, and to explore the themes that have made the Babar books so enduringly successful.

Art of Babar

Fabio De Chirico

Josef Albers (1888-1976) believed firmly in art's spiritual dimension. Among his several aphorisms on the topic, none reflects the humble, ascetic character of his spiritual disposition better than the following: "Easy to know that diamonds are precious. Good to know that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous." Conceived by the renowned Albers expert Nicholas Fox Weber, who directed the Albers Foundation for 20 years and knew the artist well, Spirituality and Rigor presents a selection of work by Albers that illustrates his ascetic spirituality and his deeply felt Catholicism. The book stems in part from Fox Weber's The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist, and is augmented with additional work by Fabio De Chirico. It includes Albers' early drawings of country churches and cathedrals; "Rosa Mystica," his stained glass window for St Michael's Church, and other glass works containing religious imagery; his abstractions of crosses and geometric abstractions with spiritually themed titles, from his Black Mountain years; his prints of Mexican gods; photographic interpretations of the theme of angels; and a selection from the Homage to the Square series. This important volume is the most thorough portrait yet published of Albers' spiritual convictions.

spiritualità e rigore

This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its immediacy from the author's long and intense conversations with Balthus himself -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as Weber's interviews with the painter's closest associates. First published by Knopf in 1999, now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.

A Biography

Balthus

Catalog of an exhibition held at Waddington Galleries, London, Feb. 28-Mar. 24, 2007.

Works on Paper and Paintings

Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the acclaimed Patron Saints (“Exhilarating avant-garde entertainment”—Sam Hunter, The New York Times Book Review) and Balthus (“The authoritative account of his life and work”—Michael Ravitch, Newsday), gives us now the idiosyncratic lives of Sterling and Stephen Clark—two of America’s greatest art collectors, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and for decades enemies of each other. He tells the story, as well, of the two generations that preceded theirs, giving us an intimate portrait of one of the least known of America’s richest families. He begins with Edward Clark—the brothers’ grandfather, who amassed the Clark fortune in the late-nineteenth century—a man with nerves of steel; a Sunday school teacher who became the business partner of the wild inventor and genius Isaac Merritt Singer. And, by the turn of the twentieth century, was the major stockholder of the Singer Manufacturing Company. We follow Edward’s rise as a real estate wizard making headlines in 1880 when he commissioned Manhattan’s first luxury apartment building. The house was called “Clark’s Folly”; today it’s known as the Dakota. We see Clark’s son—Alfred—enigmatic and famously reclusive; at thirty-eight he inherited $50 million and became one of the country’s richest men. An image of propriety—good husband, father of four—in Europe, he led a secret homosexual life. Alfred was a man with a passion for art and charity, which he passed on to his four sons, in particular Sterling and Stephen Clark. Sterling, the second-oldest, buccaneering and controversial, loved impressionism, created his own museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts—and shocked his family by marrying an actress from the Comédie Française. Together the Sterling Clarks collected thousands of paintings and bred racehorses. In a highly public case, Sterling sued his three brothers over issues of inheritance, and then never spoke to them again. He was one of the central figures linked to a bizarre and little-known attempted coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. We are told what really happened and why—and who in American politics was implicated but never prosecuted. Sterling’s brother—Stephen—self-effacing and responsible—became chairman and president of the Museum of Modern Art and gave that institution its first painting, Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad. Thirteen years later, in an act that provoked intense controversy, Stephen dismissed the Museum’s visionary founding director, Alfred Barr, who for more than a decade had single-handedly established the collection and exhibition programs that determined how the art of the twentieth century was regarded. Stephen gave or bequeathed to museums many of the paintings that today are still their greatest attractions. With authority, insight, and a flair for evoking time and place, Weber examines the depths of the brothers’ passions, the vehemence of their lifelong feud, the great art they acquired, and the profound and lasting impact they had on artistic vision in America.

The Clarks of Cooperstown

Mary Jane Jacob

Richard S. Field

WEBER NICHOLAS FOX

WOVEN GRAPHIC ART ALBERS

The Drawings of Joseph Albers

Press kit consists of press release, dated March 24, 1988 (4 leaves), exhibition brochure (1 folded sheet ([10] p. : col. ill. ; 23 x 50 cm. folded to 23 x 11 cm.)), and three photo sheets of works by Albers.

His tales translated into 17 languages, Babar the elephant fled the jungle and entered Western civilization in 1931 in a book by the de Brunhoffs. Here, for the first itme, is a fascinating look at the story behind Babar and his creators. 280 illustrations, 256 in full color.

The Work of Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff

The Art of Babar

Elie Wiesel

John Russell

Marc Klionsky

Stunning colour plates of the artist's work from his years in the Soviet Union through his life in New York today. The benchmark reference on the artist's life and his renowned achievements in portraiture, with captivating documentary materials. 100 colour & 50 b/w illustrations

This work of cultural history tells the stories of five young art patrons - Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M.M. Warburg, Agnes Mongan, James Thrall Soby and A. Everett (Chick) Austin, Jr - who, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were instrumental in bringing modern painting, sculpture and dance to America.

Five Rebels who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943

Patron Saints

Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi

Among the foremost textile designers of the 20th century, Anni Albers was a central figure of the Weaving Workshop at the Bauhaus in prewar Germany. Accompanying a centennial retrospective of her work, this volume contains full-color reproductions of Albers's most important weavings, drapery materials and wall coverings, as well as scores of her highly influential commercial textile designs. Anni Albers had an enormous effect on the design of yard materials worldwide. A comprehensive illustrated chronology details her fascinating life and career in Germany and in the United States, where she moved in the 1930s with her husband, the famed painter and instructor Josef Albers.

Nicholas Fox Weber

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