Malgré la ligne droite: The French title is a quasi-translation of Albers’s 1977 Despite Straight Lines, with a nod at the French “clear line” aesthetics of certain forms of comics language, but above all an immediate foregrounding of the very center of the book, namely the two meanings of the word “line” in English (line + verse), and the countless implications of this ambivalence for the artistic production and importance of Josef Albers, whose work is not only an homage to the square (to quote another of his titles), but above all to the line, as Broqua convincingly demonstrates in this wonderful and highly innovative study.
Broqua offers indeed a truly new approach to Josef Albers, not just by rejecting or bypassing the existing scholarship but by revising, fine-tuning, expanding and eventually displacing and reframing it by reading Albers’s visual work through the lens of his less-known yet never really...