Nicholas Fox Weber is a cultural historian and has been the Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for nearly five decades. Besides writing numerous books and catalogue essays about the Alberses, he has written seven books published by Alfred Knopf, among them biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier as well as biographies of various collectors and arts patrons. His latest book, The Art of Tennis, came out in November 2025. He also spearheads Le Korsa, a non-profit organization he founded in 2005 to assist with medical care, education, and the visual arts in Senegal.
I take an immense amount of pleasure in writing. This may sound trite, but life is full of hardship—God only knows that. And life is full of a lot of bad things. I find that I've been blessed with an ability to feel pleasure rather intensely when I write. When I wrote about the artist Mondrian, I wanted to enhance the reader's pleasure in looking at a Mondrian painting—enhance it by following the forms, or by understanding the history of the artist and the painting. When I write about tennis, I want you to have an amusing experience as a reader. I don't want you to be bored; I want you to be in there imagining some of the colorful human exchanges that take place. I want you to imagine some of the amazing physical feats that take place. So, is—and I hope the word doesn't seem pretentious—but I think of myself as a celebrant. That's what I want to be.On a personal note, I'm very close to my grandsons. And I know that, realistically, there'll be a time when I'm not around, so I hope that when they read what I've written in years to come, they'll enjoy … 'oh, there's Baba's sense of joy in things', and they'll understand it a little bit and have some smiles out of it.
Nicholas Fox Weber, The Art of Tennis, Godine, 356 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN: 9781567928310
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