Van Cliburn Foundation president Richard Rodzinski has unveiled the official artwork for the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition which will be held May 22 to June 7, 2009. The work is a unique arrangement of nine individual pieces taken from the Treble Clef series created by twentieth-century master Josef Albers. New York artist Ivan Chermayeff designed the composite graphic for the competition.
Josef Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888. A teacher from the outset of his career, he held posts at Germany’s Bauhaus art school, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Yale University, among other notable institutions. His artwork appeared in significant exhibitions across the United States and in such venues as the Sidney Janis Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Squibb Gallery, where his work was included in the first American Abstract Artists exhibition. In 1971, Josef Albers became the first living artist to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Albers’ career spanned more than six decades, and he spent much of that time studying the effects of color and design on visual perception and interpretation. His series of Treble Clef images, begun in 1932, represents the first of several devoted to color exploration (the most well known of which is his Homage to the Square series, begun in 1950).
Albers’ Treble Clef collection features one of the most recognizable symbols in music-the G clef. The clefs are abstractly rendered, formed with flat areas of color bound by organic edges. The artist has produced a visual rhythm by juxtaposing certain hues and creating a focus on their variation and interplay. The relationship among the colors is not unlike the contrasts and harmonies produced by the musician. The ensemble of individual colors contributes to creating a visual harmony in the same way that assembled notes contribute to a harmonic chord.
“Josef Albers was, along with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, one of the great Bauhaus artists to be keenly aware of the connection between painting and music,” Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, remarks. “In his Treble Clefs, Albers used a symbol from music to explore aspects of painting, and created a series that engages us on multiple levels, just as a well performed sonata does. He would have been honored to have these images used for a competition associated with the dedication and masterful accomplishments of Van Cliburn.”
The unique graphic that will appear on competition posters, printed materials, and other signature items was designed by Ivan Chermayeff, who created the artwork for the Ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1993) and designed the Van Cliburn Foundation’s logo.
Mr. Chermayeff studied at Harvard University and the Chicago Institute of Design, and graduated from Yale University. He was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., and by the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He is a distinguished member of the Industrial Designers Society of America and the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Mr. Chermayeff is the co-founder of Chermayeff & Geismer, Inc. He is responsible for the design of the National Park Service signage system, and also designed logos for the United States Bicentennial celebration, Chase Manhattan Bank, Xerox Corporation, and Mobil Corporation.
The Treble Clef series was made available courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The artwork for the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was made possible through the generous support of Mrs. Shirley Anton, whose contributions helped underwrite the project. Mrs. Anton and her late husband Charles began sponsoring the competition artwork project in 1989, in memory of their son, Robert F. Anton.
