Madeleine D'Arcy
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Josef Albers

5/11/2012

1 Comment

 
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I’m an agnostic. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. I’d like to believe in something beyond the secular, something amazing that would ground me and simultaneously uplift the old psyche... 

Satori.

Enlightenment.

Understanding.

In my youth, religion provided none of these. I respect those who have genuinely-held religious beliefs – but I don’t. The Catholicism I was taught made no sense to me so I rejected it. Don’t get me started on the subject of Limbo…

When I was eight years old I wanted to be a nun. By the time I was 12, I wanted to be a prostitute. My understanding of what either of these vocations entailed was vague, but it was clear I’d made a choice and religion wasn’t it.

The current exhibition at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery is called ‘The Sacred Modernist – Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist’.

When I was younger, the religiosity of this title would have made me blench, perhaps even recoil in horror.

But I’ve mellowed somewhat over the years, so, despite the religious label, I tootled in for a look.

I’m glad I did.

Josef Albers was a German artist and educator, born in Germany in 1888. He studied art in Berlin, Essen and Munich before attending the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus School, where he was first a student and then a teacher. When the Bauhaus was closed in 1993 due to Nazi pressure, he was forced to move to America with his wife. He taught in Black Mountain College, Carolina, and later at Yale and kept on working as an artist until he died.

As well as being famous for his art, his work as an educator was hugely influential on the way art is taught today.

The image, above, is a stained glass assemblage (Untitled, 1921, Glass, wire and metal, set within a metal frame).

This is a very early work. Albers made it while a student, using fragments of bottles he found in the local dump since he was initially too poor to buy art supplies. Plus ça change – and hurrah for recycling!

It seems to me that all of the elements Albers would later develop and refine are here. I love this piece. It seems so fresh and modern it could have been made yesterday. My photograph does not do it justice.

Tautonym (B) 1944, Oil on masonite (below) is another work that greatly appealed to me.

(Ok, for some reason I can't bung it in here - I have to learn how to do that...!!)

In his later years Josef Albers devoted his time to hundreds of paintings he called ‘Homages to the Square’. He began these paintings in 1950 when he was 62 and continued until his death at age 88, in 1976. The curator’s notes say:

“He never tired of creating new ‘colour climates’ and did not believe there were right or wrong colour systems so much as endless possibilities for visual excitement.”

And here’s the bit I like most:

‘For twenty-six years, the artist deliberately stayed at a remove from the trends of the art world and focused on what he believed was everlasting. When asked how he chose his colours, Josef would reply, “I work and I work and I work, I try this tube and that, I compare a Mars Yellow made by Windsor & Newton to one made by Grumbacher, and then I look up and I thank God”.’

Persistence, hard work, independent thought, endless possibilities, joy. These are things I can believe in.

'The Sacred Modernist – Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist’.
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland.
T+ 353 21 4901844/info@glucksman.org

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1 Comment
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9/5/2013 07:43:45 pm

Josef Albers’s works were totally different. Homage to the Square is the first of his works that I had the chance to see. After that, I have tried to collect as many of his works as possible. I think Proto-Form is the best work.

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    Author

    Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal legal aid solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son. She began to write fiction in 2005.

     Madeleine’s début collection of short fiction, Waiting For The Bullet (Doire Press, 2014) won the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Prize 2015 (UK).

     In 2010 she received a Hennessy X.O Literary Award for First Fiction as well as the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.

     Her work has been short-listed and commended in many other competitions.

     Publication credits include: Sunday Tribune; Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories; Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press); Irish Examiner; Necessary Fiction; Irish Independent; Irish Times; The Penny Dreadful; Long Story Short; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts; Short Story (University of Texas, Brownsville, Vols 20.2, 21.2); Unbraiding the Short Story (Ed. Maurice A Lee); Surge: New Writing From Ireland (O’Brien Press, 2014) and Quarryman (UCC/Bradshaw Books, 2014), and Headstuff.org (10 July 2015).

     New stories are forthcoming in The Elysian Anthology and Edge Hill Press Anthology 2016.

    Her work has also featured on RTE Radio programmes Arena and Sunday Miscellany.

    Madeleine was a scholarship student on the inaugural MA in Creative Writing in UCC from 2013-2014 and obtained First Class Honours.

    A short film of her story ‘Dog Pound’, featuring the distinguished Irish actor Frank Kelly, was premièred at the Hennessy Literary Awards in April 2014 and can be viewed on Youtube: 
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSl3orufxqE


    She ran Probys Quay Writers’ Workshop from 2009-2011. She has facilitated workshops at West Cork Literary Festival 2014, Doolin Writers’ Weekend 2015 and in Cork City. She is currently writing a novel.

    You can contact Madeleine at madeleinedarcy@eircom.net or via Facebook, where her account is Madeleine D’Arcy Lane, and she will get back to you as soon as possible.




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