Saturday, 17 August 2013

Josef Albers Album Covers

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was, amongst other things, a colour theorist, observer and artist. He also designed album covers. Here is an exhibition of some of his best, four of which are below.


 In an essay on them Joseph Masheck makes the following connection with the work of Cyril Stanley Smith:
Persuasive Percussion (1959; in this case not the Light Brigade but Terry Snyder and the All Stars) shows a tightly packed grid or lattice of small black disks from which a few wander up and out like stray molecules of some light gas; or better still, like the diagrams from a classic essay in which Cyril Stanley Smith would show how natural lattice structures are surprisingly tolerant of irregularities (“Structural Hierarchy in Science, Art, and History,” 1974-75, 1978).