Josef Albers Lot n° 637

Joseph Albers Walter Gropius in Ascona 1930 Vintage, gelatin silver print. 18 x 11.9 cm. Inscribed in ink on the reverse by Xanti Schawinsky. - Print with crease and expertly restored tear at right edge. Mounted under passepartout. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; Private collection, Switzerland This portrait of Walter Gropius, which looks like a private snapshot, was probably taken on the terrace of the "Albergo Monte Verità". In 1926, the banker and patron of the arts Eduard von der Heydt had acquired the legendary mountain with its artists' colony near Ascona and had a hotel built here in the New Building style with a view of Lake Maggiore. Around 1930, the place had become a fashionable meeting place for the avant-garde of artists. Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lionel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Xanti Schawinsky and László Moholy-Nagy were among the guests. Josef Albers, who saw himself deprived of his livelihood with the closure of the Bauhaus, emigrated to the USA with his wife Anni in 1933 and, like Xanti Schawinsky a short time later, found employment as a teacher at Black Mountain College, which was open to the progressive ideas of the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius, with whom he had a close friendship, repeatedly tried - unsuccessfully - to bring Albers to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Instead, he remained at Black Mountain College until 1949, in part because of the special freedoms the faculty enjoyed here. Introduction "From Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photographs from a Swiss Private Collection" see Lot 631