J. Hoberman reviews Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through March 28, 2018.

Hoberman writes that the exhibition “makes Albers’s appreciation [of Mexico] evident, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs. Serially organized in irregular grids, and sometimes including picture postcards, these photo-collages (never previously exhibited) appear to be Albers’s means of assimilating what he saw. By breaking down architecture and façades into basic patterns, they also provide a way to analyze his art. “