Josef Albers

(American, 1888-1976)

Study for Homage to the Square
1965

Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, under no. JAAF 1976.1.674.

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity issued by The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany.

Provenance
The Estate of Josef Albers, New Haven
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany
Waddington Custot Galleries, London
Private Collection, Switzerland
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Bologna, Museo Morandi, Josef Albers Omaggio al quadrato. Una retrospettiva, 2005, p. 123, no. 62, illustrated in colour
London, Waddington Galleries, Josef Albers: Works on Paper and Paintings, 2007 p. 69, no. 29, illustrated in colour



Few artists produce a body of work as groundbreaking as Josef Albers' Homage to the Square. Amounting to a passage in the artist's career that began at Yale in 1950 at the age of 62, and would continue until his death in 1976, it came to pave the way for geometric abstraction at large in the postmodern period. Amongst prints, drawings, tapestries and paintings, truly exceptional examples of Albers' Homage are instantly recognisable and highly sought-after; hand-painted in rich oils over masonite, their colours exude a warmth and spatiality that is teeming and concrete. The present work, Study for Homage to the Square, from 1965, is such a painting. Constructed in his signature tri-partite composition, the florid green over two lustrous greys create a pulsating window of colour that superbly demonstrates the visual and phenomenological games that Albers experimented with throughout his career.

A professor at the Bauhaus between 1923 and '33 – before moving to Black Mountain College where Josef and Anni Albers led the arts programme following their departure from Nazi Germany – his influence as a teacher and luminary to generations of artists that would follow him is without equal. A central figure of the revolutionary school that was at the centre of burgeoning European Modernism in art, architecture and design, Albers set about examining the compositional and formal effects of colour and shape, fascinated as he was by the versatility and fragility of perception. In Albers own words, "every perception of color is an illusion [...] We do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another. [...] This play of colors, this change in identity, is the object of my concern. It leads me to change my color tool, my palette, from one picture to the next" (the artist in: Eugen Gomringer, Josef Albers, New York 1967, p. 104).

It was at the midpoint of the Twentieth Century, shortly after joining the Yale faculty, that Albers began his definitive Homage to the Square series. What may initially be read as a fairly narrow compositional framework, this body of work allowed Albers to explore the finite, expressive potentials of colour and their intrinsic relationships. Entirely based on a mathematically determined format of several squares, each element appears to overlap and nestle within one another, both as an autonomous shape and integral part of a complete system.

The geometric abstraction that Albers had conceived of was a scientific and aesthetic method of exploring the subjective experience of colour. Albers' deliberate use of adjacent complimentary and combative colours and their effects on one another, combined with the flat planes of his compositions that appear to be staggered in a field of vision in the interior of the work, engaged an entirely novel visual style; one chiefly concerned with the experience of looking. In 1965, the artist wrote: "they all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional 'hand writing' or, so-called, texture. Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings – in proportion and placement – these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways" (the artist in: Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square, 1964, December 2012, Tate, online).

Not only is his influence on the timeline of modern art largely unparalleled, but Albers' legacy endured in the artists he taught, shared ideas with, and guided through the early years of their career, influencing the emergence of Colour Field Painting, Geometric Abstraction and Op Art. In his work at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, his students would include Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, the formidable Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. In short, Albers' role as a mentor and his significance as an artist can be traced through the pantheon of American artists and global artistic movements.

In the present work, the qualities that made Albers such a stalwart of the modern period are evident in abundance. His exceptional aesthetic sense plays out between the simplicity of his composition and colours, and in turn produces a work of outstanding, complex beauty. With comparable green paintings from the 1960s in the Tate Collection, London, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the present Study for Homage to the Square is a museum-quality painting that is a truly immaculate example of Albers' superlative aesthetic sense and globally celebrated oeuvre.