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Lot Essay
‘Mexico is a country for art like no other... the promised land for abstract art. For here it is already thousands of years old.’
– Josef Albers
‘The items repeatedly isolated by [Albers’] camera - windows, doors, staircases, striated walls, rectangular ball courts, trapezoidal plinths - have a kinship with the voids within voids, the floating parallelograms, and the thin, straight or notched intersecting lines that were part of his vocabulary as an abstract painter. He liked to photograph the rhythms of shapes, and he painted in the same spirit.’
– Richard Woodward
Concentric squares of lustrous colour yield to one another in Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Michoacan, 1960. First mars orange gives way to gold ochre, and then together, they are both subsumed by two shades of deep green. Albers dedicated each painting in the Homage to the Square series, but often these titles were confoundingly enigmatic; in the present work, however, refers to the state of Michoacán in Mexico, a fertile province that borders the Pacific Ocean. Albers and his wife Anni first travelled to Mexico in 1935; by the 1960s, they had returned over thirteen times. Propelled by a growing passion for pre-Colombian arts, they amassed an enormous collection of stone and clay figures, vessels, and Andean textiles. The architectural vocabulary of sites such as Monte Albán and Tenayuca, among others, influenced Albers’ understanding of pictorial space, which was henceforth a flattened ‘accordion-like’ plane (R. Smith, ‘Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstractions’, New York Times, December 14, 2017). Echoes of these stepped pyramids are visible in the geometry of Homage to the Square: Michoacan, whose towering squares extend upwards towards the heavens.
Homage to the Square, begun in 1950, would occupy Albers until 1976. Repeating the ostensibly simple composition of three or four embedded squares, Albers produced hundreds of variations in an array of dazzling colour. At its essence, these works were less an aesthetic consideration that a prolonged exploration of colour theory: for each composition, the artist methodically placed one colour next to another, and from these experiments, he synthesized a philosophy of colour. Writing in Interaction of Colour, 1963, Albers explained that ‘colour evokes innumerable readings. Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules of colour harmony, distinct colour effects are produced through recognition of the interaction of colour by making, for instance, two very different colours look alike, or nearly alike’ (J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963, p. 1). By nesting saturated squares of colour, Albers’ chromatic juxtapositions took on new resonances and timbres as they evoked depth within a vibrating two-dimensional image. In accepting that ‘colour deceives continually’, Albers understood his paintings to be unstable and mercurial (J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963). As both an autonomous and plastic entity, colour always requires a context to affix it in place. Within the iridescent bands of Homage to the Square: Michoacan is a personal evocation of the Albers’ many journeys throughout Mexico, and a systematic appreciation of the mutability of colour.
– Josef Albers
‘The items repeatedly isolated by [Albers’] camera - windows, doors, staircases, striated walls, rectangular ball courts, trapezoidal plinths - have a kinship with the voids within voids, the floating parallelograms, and the thin, straight or notched intersecting lines that were part of his vocabulary as an abstract painter. He liked to photograph the rhythms of shapes, and he painted in the same spirit.’
– Richard Woodward
Concentric squares of lustrous colour yield to one another in Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Michoacan, 1960. First mars orange gives way to gold ochre, and then together, they are both subsumed by two shades of deep green. Albers dedicated each painting in the Homage to the Square series, but often these titles were confoundingly enigmatic; in the present work, however, refers to the state of Michoacán in Mexico, a fertile province that borders the Pacific Ocean. Albers and his wife Anni first travelled to Mexico in 1935; by the 1960s, they had returned over thirteen times. Propelled by a growing passion for pre-Colombian arts, they amassed an enormous collection of stone and clay figures, vessels, and Andean textiles. The architectural vocabulary of sites such as Monte Albán and Tenayuca, among others, influenced Albers’ understanding of pictorial space, which was henceforth a flattened ‘accordion-like’ plane (R. Smith, ‘Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstractions’, New York Times, December 14, 2017). Echoes of these stepped pyramids are visible in the geometry of Homage to the Square: Michoacan, whose towering squares extend upwards towards the heavens.
Homage to the Square, begun in 1950, would occupy Albers until 1976. Repeating the ostensibly simple composition of three or four embedded squares, Albers produced hundreds of variations in an array of dazzling colour. At its essence, these works were less an aesthetic consideration that a prolonged exploration of colour theory: for each composition, the artist methodically placed one colour next to another, and from these experiments, he synthesized a philosophy of colour. Writing in Interaction of Colour, 1963, Albers explained that ‘colour evokes innumerable readings. Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules of colour harmony, distinct colour effects are produced through recognition of the interaction of colour by making, for instance, two very different colours look alike, or nearly alike’ (J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963, p. 1). By nesting saturated squares of colour, Albers’ chromatic juxtapositions took on new resonances and timbres as they evoked depth within a vibrating two-dimensional image. In accepting that ‘colour deceives continually’, Albers understood his paintings to be unstable and mercurial (J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963). As both an autonomous and plastic entity, colour always requires a context to affix it in place. Within the iridescent bands of Homage to the Square: Michoacan is a personal evocation of the Albers’ many journeys throughout Mexico, and a systematic appreciation of the mutability of colour.