March 15: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain

In his family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay (the Penguin Press), the literary critic Christopher Benfey recounts the escape of his great-aunt and -uncle, the famed Bauhaus artists Anni and Josef Albers, from Nazi Germany to the American South. Josef helped establish and guide the curriculum of North Carolina’s tiny Black Mountain College, an experimental school that became a hub for American art in the forties and fifties, drawing avant-gardists Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Willem de Kooning.

Photo: Copyright 2011, the Imogen Cunningham Trust