art review winter 2018
All About Albers
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Back t art review Editorial Director Alli Pichette Creative Director Alli Pichette Designer Alli Pichette Editors Madison Florence Julie Tran Consulting Director Judith Aronson artreview magazine winter 2018: Layout in InDesign CC 2017; Set in Akzidenz Grotesk; Printed on 80# cover stock and 70# text by the Simmons Copy Mail Center. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the editor, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law. All content in this magazine has been written and laid out by Alli Pichette as part of Communications 340: Advanced Design at Simmons College.
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All About Albers Alli Pichette p.2
Art History in the Modern World
Luke Romanak p.10
to the Bauhaus Judith Aronson p.12
On Responsive Design Julie Tran p.20
Victor Moscoso Madison Florence p.24
olor Blindness Alli Pichette p.28
Design at the 2018 Olympics Liz Donovan p.30
Closing Thoughts Alli Pichette p.34
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All Abou
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An artist and designer who was instrumental in transforming styles of art education as well as developing new theories on color.
ut Albers Alli Pichette
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Teachings Josef Albers began his studies at the Bauhaus in 1920, and by 1923 was given a teaching role for a basic design course. As such, Albers became the first student of the Bauhaus to be promoted to the role of professor. While working as a design professor, Albers also worked with glass and metal as well as furniture and typography. It was during his time teaching at the Bauhaus that he began to develop his theories on color as well as create a typeface known as Architype Albers that focuses heavily on the form of the letters through geometric shapes. The typeface is based on a
Albers was a beautiful teacher, but an impossible person. His criticism was so devastating that I wouldn't ask for it. But 21 years later, I'm still learning what he taught me. — Robert Rauschenberg limited palette of geometric shapes, primarily squares, triangles and circles, drawn on a grid to create a stencil sans-serif, with a primary use for posters and large scale signs. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 due to pressures from the Nazi regime, Albers emigrated to America where he began teaching at the new, experimental art school, Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Previous Josef Albers, 1888–1976, was born in Bottrop, Germany. He originally studied to be a schoolteacher, and worked as one from 1908 to 1913. From 1913 through 1915, Albers studied art education, and worked as a teacher for a few years, then worked as a printmaker as well as creating stained glass windows. Right Albers teaching a class at Yale’s College of Design.
The school was organized around John Dewey’s principles of education; that took a holistic approach to learning that put art at the center of a liberal arts education. Josef Albers headed the painting department from 1933 to 1949, while also teaching design courses. His design course was one of two courses required of all students regardless of their fields of study, the other course being one on Plato. After leaving Black Mountain College, Albers went on to head the design department at Yale for 8 years, where he worked to expand the newly emerging graphic design program. Under his chairmanship, Albers replaced the existing curriculum with one that focused on the fundamentals of design, drawing and color. Through his time at the school, Albers propelled the design program to the level of renown that it has today.
His teaching styles, inspired by Dewey’s work, his time at the Bauhaus and his earlier work teaching in primary schools, were heavily based off of observation and experimentation. He rarely gave lectures, and instead encouraged students to learn through hands on experimentation. He wanted to challenge the students’ perceptions and disrupt their ingrained patterns of thinking. Albers did so by having students draw basic lines and shapes over and over again in different ways to study how they change as well as interact with each other, creating rhythms and tensions. Drawing your name backwards, and then backwards and upside down taught students the amount of focus necessary for all acts of drawing. This further went along with his emphasis on breaking things down to their basic lines and shapes, as well as focusing on their negative spaces, to demonstrate that the negative spaces are as important as the positive spaces. All art that the students created was to be intentional, they were to treat their cheap newsprint pads as if they were expensive paper. His classrooms would be filled with abnormal materials, such as newspaper, cardboard and chewing gum, as he found his students worked with a greater sense of freedom when presented with the unfamiliar, and would challenge students to find the breaking points of the objects. These exercises were a lesson in using materials without distraction, and that the point was not to create pieces of art.
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Color Theory
Between 1935 and 1967, Albers and his wife, the artist-weaver Anni Albers, made more than a dozen trips down to Mexico. While in Mexico, Albers was inspired by the colors and geometry of Mesoamerican culture. This inspiration was channeled into further development of his color theory, and prompted the painting series Homage to the Square, a study on color and form, which he worked on between 1935 and the late 1960’s. The series uses singular, simple geometric shapes to explore the range of visual effects that could be produced through color and spatial relationships. He captured how different hues, levels of saturation and brightness, as well as positioning, could make certain colors vibrate against each other. Victor Moscoso, a student of his at Yale, was heavily influenced by these concepts, and integrated them into his psychedelic rock posters, advertisements and comics during the 1960s and 1970s.
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A tiled series of some of Josef Albers many Homage to the Square paintings.
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In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. — Josef Albers
The 50th anniversary cover for Josef Albers’ most influential book, Interaction of Color.
His work with color was further developed and documented in his 1963 book, Interaction of Color, where Albers goes in depth on the function and perception of color. He demonstrates principles such as color relativity, intensity and temperature, vibrating and vanishing boundaries, and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds, using many color studies and examples to clearly explain his points. He found it best to use many images when discussing color, as “though there are innumerable colorsshades and tones-in daily vocabulary, there are only about 30 color names.� These examples helped to demonstrate the subjectivity of color, and how you can create a variety of different effects depending solely on how you use it. Trial and error, a key principle in his teachings, was fundamental to his developmental process of the book, and the effectiveness of the examples that he provided. The first edition of his book was a limited release with only 2,000 copies printed, contain 150 silk screen plates. It has since been reprinted several times, and is even available as an iPad app.
OMAGET
Homage to the Stamp
This set of stamps was designed by Alli Pichette for COMM 248 at Simmons College. It was designed in the style of Josef Albers and will be issued in the Spring of 2018 as part of the US Postal Service. Money from the stamps will go to the Albers Foundation.
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Color Blindness
Tritanopia 1% Protanopia 2.5% Deuteranopia 6.2% Normal Vision 91.4%
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Most of us share a common color vision sensory experience. Some people, however, have a color vision deficiency, which means their perception of colors is different from what most of us see. The most severe forms of these deficiencies are referred to as color blindness. People with color blindness aren’t aware of differences among colors that are obvious to the rest of us.
Those with tritanopia, also known as blue-yellow color blindness, lack blue cone cells. Green appears as blue and yellow appears as pink. Tritanopia is an extremely rare autosomal recessive disorder affecting less than 1% of the population.
For those with protanopia, there are no working red cone cells. Red appears as a muddy green. Certain shades of orange and yellow appear as yellow. Protanopia is an X-linked disorder that is estimated to affect about 2% of the population.
For those with deuteranopia, there are no working green cone cells. They tend to see reds as muddy yellow and greens as darky muddy yellow. Deuteranopia is an X-linked disorder that affects about 6% of the population.
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Closing
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g Thoughts This season’s edition of artreview comes to you courtesy of Judith Aronson’s Advanced Design course at Simmons College. We were tasked with designing a magazine that featured an article highlighting the designer we researched last semester, as well as creating an infographic on a topic relating to our designer. For this project, we also had to create a reader profile of who would be buying this magazine, and how it would be designed should it be a real magazine. My reader would be someone 20 years or older who has an interest in art and design, be it digital or print design, an art historian or an arts administrator. Articles would range in topics spanning the above disciplines as well as similar ones, and would feature an artist, style or period in each edition. It would be a subscription magazine released four times a year, $95 for a one year subscription. It would also be sold at art museums, such as the MFA, $30 for one edition. The style influence for the design of this magazine is Swiss/ International Style. I hope you enjoy reading this magazine as much as I enjoyed creating it, and hopefully one day I get to produce a full-size magazine full of real articles.
Alli Pichette