“What he [Josef Albers] was talking about was abstracting from the material. Rather than being concerned with your own design ideas, and forcing something into it.” —Ruth Asawa
“Is this the most beautiful show of the year?” Sebastian Smee asks, probably rhetorically, in his Washington Post review of “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, through February 16, 2019. In these excerpts from Robert Snyder’s 1978 documentary about Asawa, we see her discussing the influences of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller (mentors and colleagues at Black Mountain College) on her work, as well as her interests in purity of form.