Prints Without Ink

Strollers along Manhattan's Madison Avenue last week did a double take at the Contemporaries Gallery windows. There seemed to be blank papers, framed and on show. A closer look from a sharp angle revealed that the papers were actually prints, but made without ink. They were geometrical constellations of straight, raised and interlocking lines, embossed on the paper. On close inspection the lines proved to border geometrical shapes in space, which seemed to keep shifting. These were puzzle pictures by Abstractionist Josef Albers.

An early luminary of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Germany, which developed such formgivers as Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, Albers came to the U.S. when Hitler closed the Bauhaus, taught at Black Mountain College and later headed Yale's Department of Design. At 70, Albers has the granitic and yet sensitive face of a northern Dante; though recently retired, he still finds opportunities to teach. "To distribute spiritual possessions," he may say to one shy talent, "is to multiply them." To another, more flamboyant, he may murmur in passing, "Calm down. What happens happens mostly without you."

Albers' inkless intaglios were made by pressing wet, heavy paper onto an engraved plate. They result from hundreds of ink and pencil drawings on graph paper made over the past decade. Why does he print without ink? "I am trying to reduce my means--it is a demonstration of my economic inclination," he explains with a sly twinkle behind his glasses. Albers has an equally simple explanation for the ambiguity of his new pictures and their shifting forms: "My purpose is to show that within the same skeleton different actions may appear. In Duo B the left and right figures come from the same module. The construction invites the spectator to see from different viewpoints within his own vision--to take changing viewpoints. As in most of my work, the esthetic aims are ethical aims."

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