Lot Essay
Josef Albers came to America in 1933 and over the next thirty years, he was one of the most influential art teachers of drawing and color and visual perception. In 1920, he began his education at the original Bauhaus where he became a teacher in 1923. Albers declared his aim to be "to open eyes" and inspired learning through experimentation among his many students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and subsequently at Yale University. Included among those students were Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. Albers's teaching of principles of color and design culminated in his publishing the landmark book entitled Interaction of Color in 1963, which laid out his discoveries for a generation of art students.
Albers is best known for his grand series of geometric abstractions called "Homage to the Square." Precisely composed squares of color are balanced, one inside the other, on square masonite panels. This composition allowed Albers to examine color relationships, and their emotive and psychological impact, in a relatively simple and stable format. Color is applied directly from the tube with a palette knife, in a restrained and even manner that minimizes any surface effect. The surfaces are pristine, elegant and otherworldly in their refinement. Albers' paintings are extremely rational constructs, pure statements of visual logic that have a feeling of the classic, the absolute, the timeless, like the work of Mondrian, Reinhardt and Newman. Albers's rational approach greatly affected artists such as Judd and Flavin, whose works display the same impersonal facture (in their case, industrial manufacturing techniques), and serial nature as his own.
But the Homage to the Squares are not without passion. Their highly controlled technique alone belies an emotional content--rational, cool, detached though it is. Like Despite Mist, virtually all of the series have titles that are emotionally charged, that display a romantic vision in which the attainment of rational perfection is the closest approximation of the complexity of nature. Despite Mist is the only diptych made by the artist. By adding the element of time taken to compare the two panels, the diptych format complicates the viewer's response to an already subtle examination of the closely toned hues of the paintings. Although the colors of the enclosed squares in each panel are the same, through subtle variations in the color of the outermost borders, both panels seem to transcend their frames and dissolve into one another. Through this method of careful color juxtapostion, Albers creates a composition that evokes a feeling of nature, of sea and sky, or of land slowly enveloped in mist.
Albers is best known for his grand series of geometric abstractions called "Homage to the Square." Precisely composed squares of color are balanced, one inside the other, on square masonite panels. This composition allowed Albers to examine color relationships, and their emotive and psychological impact, in a relatively simple and stable format. Color is applied directly from the tube with a palette knife, in a restrained and even manner that minimizes any surface effect. The surfaces are pristine, elegant and otherworldly in their refinement. Albers' paintings are extremely rational constructs, pure statements of visual logic that have a feeling of the classic, the absolute, the timeless, like the work of Mondrian, Reinhardt and Newman. Albers's rational approach greatly affected artists such as Judd and Flavin, whose works display the same impersonal facture (in their case, industrial manufacturing techniques), and serial nature as his own.
But the Homage to the Squares are not without passion. Their highly controlled technique alone belies an emotional content--rational, cool, detached though it is. Like Despite Mist, virtually all of the series have titles that are emotionally charged, that display a romantic vision in which the attainment of rational perfection is the closest approximation of the complexity of nature. Despite Mist is the only diptych made by the artist. By adding the element of time taken to compare the two panels, the diptych format complicates the viewer's response to an already subtle examination of the closely toned hues of the paintings. Although the colors of the enclosed squares in each panel are the same, through subtle variations in the color of the outermost borders, both panels seem to transcend their frames and dissolve into one another. Through this method of careful color juxtapostion, Albers creates a composition that evokes a feeling of nature, of sea and sky, or of land slowly enveloped in mist.