An excerpt from Nicholas Fox Weber’s preface for the catalog of One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, on view at the Museum of Modern Art through April 2, 2017.

Weber writes: “Josef assembled these photo-collages in the years when he was also constructing furniture, sandblasting glass, and teaching the nature of form and materials at the Bauhaus. Some of us will fasten onto the personalities that come alive in these photographs, and details like Paul Klee’s impeccable choice in the white cotton knit sweater he wore at a beach resort; others of us will see the lines left in the sand when the ocean recedes at low tide as evidence that the natural world was the greatest geometric abstractionist of all times. Josef’s camera work, and the intuitive yet precise way in which he juxtaposed photos large and small, reflect the desire that was his lifeblood: ‘to open eyes.'”