Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

"There is no doubt that Saletnik has given us a new view on Albers that is an important contribution to scholarship on a figure who had a profound impact on the direction of post-Second World War western art. This extends to an enhanced understanding of several of his pupils too, most notably Hesse and Serra, all delivered in a clear and elegant style that is eminently readable." * History of Education *
"For anyone interested in Josef Albers’s teaching and creative practice, there is much to be learned from Saletnik’s Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form. . . . Saletnik digs deep to reveal the historical and cultural roots from which Albers’s singular pedagogy developed." * Journal of Design History *
“This is an important book, backing up imaginative leaps between the various parts of Albers’s practice—typography, photography and painting—with meticulous and tightly focused research. It adds to existing writing on Albers’s teaching by considering both its forelife in the history of German pedagogy and its afterlife in late modernist art.” * Burlington Magazine *
“Saletnik’s Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form is a brilliant, boldly original work of art-historical scholarship. He examines in rich detail the formation of Josef Albers’s pedagogy in Wilhelmine Germany, how it shaped his legendary teaching at Yale, and—this is the bold part—how his pedagogical exercises decisively shaped habits of mind and hand in the work of Yale alumni Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, two artists whose artistic practice seems far removed from Albers’s own. The book is an exemplary demonstration of the insights to be gained from exhaustive archival and historical research and close, thoughtful looking.” -- Charles W. Haxthausen, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, Williams College
“This very important study offers a new understanding of the significant impact that Josef Albers’s artistic and pedagogical commitments had on key figures of the ‘postminimalist’ generation of American artists, such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Most importantly, perhaps, its wide-ranging analysis radically questions the rigid distinctions commonly made between the closures of a modernist commitment to form and the experimental ethos of process-orientated art.” -- Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan