From the Back Cover
"Modern Art, if one grew up in Hitler's Germany, remained unknown terrain. Thus, at RISD, I gained my first long look at the art of my own time and came to love it passionately, in fact to love this art uncritically and happily far better then than I can love it now. It was a treasured, magical awakening one can experience only once...." "Because my principal overall endeavor was to develop an analytical, modern parallel to Cézanne's program of Color, Form and Composition, I began to look for means to do this task. And I found them partly in the understanding of the pioneering twentieth century that the basic visual parts of lines of varied weight, or colored shapes and fields of tone, hold visual worth and merit our deliberate attention. It seems an oddity, therefore, that we have no precise, inclusive study to demonstrate how far such basic visual parts can cooperate with one another to achieve an artist's aim and how richly they are able to express. As I tried to learn more about the capabilities of the fundamental parts - chiefly for articulating volume - I discovered how easily the new unfolding to my eyes was able to accompany the already known - of observation, for example, perspective and construction - in a progressive, seamlessly continuous tradition. My labors from the outset were intended to instruct and mend my troublesome and many ignorances. After some years I had redone nearly my entire training as an artist, so that there was quite a lot I was eager then to teach." Johannes H. von Gumppenberg, in "Letter to Claire Gadrow," 2003
About the Author
Johannes von Gumppenberg has a lifelong interest in modern art and design which inspired him to explore the fundamentals underlying new freedoms. Over the years as he expressed his ideas in prepared plates, he used his own teachings to make each illustration an individual work of art. He was born in Germany in 1931 and came to the U.S. in the winter of 1949-50. He graduated 1955 in Illustration at Rhode Island School of Design and continued with Painting at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Next he received an MFA at Yale in 1962, studying color under Josef Albers. He has taught several years each at University of Illinois, serving as head of Basic Design, and at Kalamazoo College, MI, as department chairman. From there he decided to work privately, continuing his creative art, writing, and community teaching, first for twenty years in Lancaster, PA and, after retirement, in Rhode Island.
