Nicholas Fox Weber graduated from Columbia College and Yale University. He is the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and the author of many books, biographies and catalogues. In the Seventies, when he was still a student, he had the chance to meet Josef and Anni Albers with whom he would have spent many hours till both - Josef in 1976 and Anni in 1994 - passed away.
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut.
He was a close friend of them and the person whom they told their own stories, whose spirit he succeded in capturing, revealing, beyond the extraordinary objectives in making art and teaching, their personal lives; the boy whom Abers would asked to find the lost Wiston&Newton cobalt green number 196, the one with which he would have finished his last Homages to the Square in 1976.
We met him in Modena, on the occasion of the Josef Albers retrospective at the Galleria Civica, an exhibition curated by Marco Pierini.
Fox Weber knows the means and rules of storytelling very well and were not they real, Josef and Anni Albers could be the main charachters of a succesfull novel unrolling up along the Nineteenth Century; at the same time he brigs us close to them, to Josef, to his daily life, to his passion for colors - his miracle -, to his anger and irony.
This is an intimate portrait of Josef Albers. If you are curious to know why he prefered Duccio to Giotto, the regard he had for Nelson Rockefeller, what he thought Gerald Ford's face looked like, what sort of opinion he had of the so called op art, listen to the interview or download the transcription here.
A great thanks to Nicholas Fox Weber for his generosity of words and time.