One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers

Published by The Museum of Modern Art in 2016, this volume is the first publication to reproduce, in full, the photocollages Josef Albers (1888-1976) made from photographs he shot at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932, a body of work unknown until after the artist's death.

Edited by MoMA curator Sarah Hermanson Meister with essays by Elizabeth Otto and Lee Ann Daffner, the book presents roughly seventy collages built from Albers's own snapshots of stadium crowds and scaffolding, regridded into serial arrangements that anticipate the adjacency, repetition, and handcraft-versus-mechanical concerns of his later painting. It accompanied a 2016-17 MoMA installation drawn largely from a 2015 acquisition of ten photocollages, making the Museum's holdings the most extensive outside the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 128 pages, 100 illustrations, hardcover.

Albers is best known as a teacher and theorist, at the Bauhaus and later Black Mountain College and Yale, where his treatise Interaction of Color and ongoing Homage to the Square series made him central to postwar geometric abstraction. These photocollages complicate that legacy, showing a more improvisatory, vernacular eye behind the systematic colorist and situating Albers within the Bauhaus's wider culture of experimental photography.