Art News. Vasari Codex

rate_review review schedule May 22, 2026 visibility 8 link 14 artists

Anni Albers Wasn’t Afraid to Start From Zero

Nicholas Fox Weber's new biography, *Anni Albers: A Life*, draws on his nearly 25-year friendship with the artist to offer an intimate, nuanced portrait of the pioneering textile artist. The book traces Albers's journey from her birth in Berlin in 1899, through her studies and teaching at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, her escape from Nazi Germany in 1933, and her later years in Connecticut. Weber, who serves as executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, fills the biography with lively anecdotes—from her love of Kentucky Fried Chicken to her sharp wit—while correcting the "stock stories" she often repeated, revealing her personality and artistic dedication with rare depth.

newspaper Hyperallergic open_in_new Read original

Lionel Wendt: The Politics of the Male Nude

ArtReview publishes an essay by Qingyuan Deng analyzing the first US solo exhibition of Lionel Wendt's photographs at American Art Catalogues in Manhattan's West Village. The show presents Wendt's haunting gelatin silver prints of male nudes, still lifes, and solarized images, positioning him as a canonical figure of South Asian modernism. Deng argues that while the exhibition correctly identifies homoerotic desire in Wendt's work, it over-relies on queer theory's framework of opacity and fails to fully address the political radicality of Wendt's practice under British colonial rule in Ceylon, where homosexuality was criminalized under the 1883 Penal Code.