New Contemporary Works in Collection on View at Reynolda House

WINSTON-SALEM, NC.- Three new works are on view at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Anni Albers’s “Red Meander” (1969) and Lee Krasner’s “Free Space I” and “Free Space II” (1975) can be seen in the historic house alongside a work already in the museum’s collection, “I-S, J” (1973) by Albers’s husband, Josef Albers. They will remain on view through August 15, 2010.

This small, unified grouping allows visitors to consider how abstract form and color theory continued to shape the printmaking practices of these three innovative artists late in their careers.

Anni Albers, born in Berlin in 1899, studied at the Bauhaus, where she met her future husband and teacher, Josef. When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, the Alberses moved to North Carolina, where they taught at Black Mountain College in Asheville until 1949. They then moved to Connecticut, where Josef Albers was named chairman of the Department of Design at the Yale University School of Art in 1950.

Anni Albers, a textile maker and print maker, won critical acclaim for her imaginative use of materials and innovative weaving techniques. She exhibited her work in a show at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949 and both lectured and wrote about the field. Later in life she developed an interest in printmaking, an area in which her husband was well-respected. While she incorporated the same sense of abstract form and geometric design found in her textiles, she also experimented with varying shades of color, as demonstrated in “Red Meander”.

From the age of thirteen, Lee Krasner knew she wanted to be an artist, eventually studying at prestigious art schools including Cooper Union and the National Academy of Art in New York. She was able to work full-time during the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, while she also studied with Hans Hofman, an early Abstract Expressionist. These two prints, “Free Space I” and “Free Space II”, were done later in her life as Krasner was influenced by minimalism. Here she experiments with cleaner lines, blockier shapes, and the effects of a brighter palette on identical compositions. Although often overshadowed by her better known husband, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner emerged as a prominent artist in her own right in the 1980s when exhibitions and retrospectives of her work solidified her reputation.

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