Bright and beautiful: the year’s best art books reviewed

When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ — Josef Albers — would proclaim ‘art is svindle’ in heavily accented English at least ten times a day. By that provocative remark Albers probably meant not so much that art was a cheat but that intellectualising about it is usually bogus. He once thanked his lucky stars that his father was a painter-decorator rather than an intellectual. For him it involved simple forms, clear colours and no nonsense.

Albers and his equally brilliant wife are the subject of a remarkable and visually beautiful joint biography, Anni & Josef Albers by Nicholas Fox Weber (Phaidon, £100). During their lifetimes, Josef was better known; but of late Anni, who was the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern, has been more prominent. This book suggests that while they were both too soberly Teutonic to proclaim, like Gilbert & George, ‘we are two people but one artist’, their art was almost as intimately intertwined.