Nicholas Fox Weber - Böcker

The first major biography on Anni Albers traces the complex personality and influential artistic career of the groundbreaking modern artist Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers’s death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers’s life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision.Capturing Albers’s extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist’s pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers’s trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in Connecticut. He considers her complex relationship with her world-renowned husband, Josef Albers, as well as her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Louise Nevelson. He also describes her torturous, late-life obsession with film star Maximilian Schell, thirty-one years her junior. Weber foregrounds Albers’s perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her.

As he turns 100, the definitive monograph of Wayne Thiebaud's work is now available in a reformatted, accessibly priced edition, and including his most recent paintings. This is the most comprehensive monograph to date on Wayne Thiebaud, with new works added, in a reformatted size. Spanning the length of his career from the 1950s to the present, the book has been made in close collaboration with the artist. Thiebaud selected the works himself, making the book an act of autobiography in a sense. At age 100, he looks back over his life and his work, rich with breakthroughs in painting and masterful individuality. Required reading for those who have a healthy appetite for provocative art. -Bloomberg Business This comprehensive monograph of more than 200 illustrations can literally be considered eye candy. American artist Wayne Thiebaud is famed for his brightly coloured canvases of cakes, diner pies, pastries, ice cream cones, candy and brightly coloured gumball machines. . . . Whether still lifes or landscapes, Thiebaud's paintings are akin to visual Prozac; you simply cannot be in a bad mood looking at them. -Kansas City Magazine While Thiebaud is best known for his heavily pigmented still lifes of cakes, pies, and candies, [this] book shows his broader range, from vibrant landscapes depicting highways and farmland to portraits of solitary figures. . . The texts examine Thiebaud's influences as well as his impact on the art world and the individual viewers of his work. -Architectural Digest

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.Balthus’s complexities are clarified and his genius understood in this book that derives its immediacy from Nicholas Fox Weber’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 artist’s closest associates. This biography was first published by Knopf in 1999 and is now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.

A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and designJosef - 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.Accessibly written, the book is packed with more than 750 artworks, archival images, and documents - many published here for the first time - all tracing the remarkable lives and careers of this legendary couple.Dispersed throughout area series of short essays on artists that focuses on the Alberses relationship with a number of important artists and architects of the 20th century, like Ruth Asawa, Marcel Breuer, Merce Cunningham, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, and many more.The beautifully cloth-bound package utilizes an elegant color palette and design that speaks to the work of both artists. This comprehensive visual biography showcases the artists' rich and dynamic lives, and their infinite influence on each other, as they shared the profound conviction that art was central to human existence.

"[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 WebsterAfter 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.

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. Text in English and French.