Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon

Introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber, with texts by Josef Albers, Elaine de Kooning, and Colm Tóibín

Highlighting the rich diversity of effects Josef Albers drew from a narrow range of colors, this publication centers around the groundbreaking Homage to the Square (A), 1950, the inaugural painting in the series that would occupy the artist until his death in 1976. The pairing of two palettes—black, white, and gray and an array of yellows—stems in part from Albers’s 1964 series of lithographs, Midnight and Noon, which brought together these two opposing color sets in a single portfolio. Together they address the limitless possibilities the artist found in color and form in relation to light. The impossible simultaneity of “midnight” and “noon” moreover speaks to Albers’s transcending of what he called “factual facts” in favor of the play of perception and illusion possible in art.

Hardcover: 144 pp
Publisher: David Zwirner Books (2017)
Language: English
Dimensions: 8 x 10 1/2 in.
Illustrations: 75 color + 2 b/w
ISBN 978-1-941701-62-1