Josef Albers - Legacy

Legacy

The Josef Albers papers, documents from 1929 to 1970, were donated by the artist to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in 1969 and 1970. In 1971 (nearly five years before his death), Albers founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a non-profit organization he hoped would further "the revelation and evocation of vision through art." Today, this organization not only serves as the office Estate of both Josef Albers and his wife Anni Albers, but also supports exhibitions and publications focused on Albers works. The official Foundation building is located in Bethany, Connecticut, and "includes a central research and archival storage center to accommodate the Foundation's art collections, library and archives, and offices, as well as residence studios for visiting artists." The U.S. copyright representative for the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. The executive director of the foundation is Nicholas Fox Weber, an author of fourteen books. Later the foundation has been instrumental in having four Albers fakes from Italy, on sale in auction houses and galleries in France and Germany, seized by the police.

In 1997, one year after auction house Sotheby's had bought the Andre Emmerich Gallery, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the main beneficiary of the artists' estates, did not renew its three-year contract with the gallery. Today the foundation is represented by The Pace Gallery, New York, Waddington Custot Galleries, London, and the Alan Cristea Gallery, London.

A large part of his estate is now held by the Josef-Albers-Museum in Bottrop, where he was born.