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Lot Essay
‘[Mexico] is truly the promised land of abstract art. For here it is already 1000s of years old’ (Josef Albers)
A poem in nocturnal green and warm ochre, Variant/Adobe (1948-1955) is a captivating example of Josef Albers’ major series of the same name. Executed in oil paint on Masonite, it presents a set of nesting and overlapping rectangular colour fields. Within a slender border of white-primed ground, there is an outer zone of verdant green, applied with a palette knife such that the grain of the board beneath is visible. The green field contains a further box of cool grey, which itself frames a more elaborate construction using three distinct shades of ochre. Simultaneously flat and volumetric, these forms resemble a distilled depiction of the adobe houses of Mexico and the southwestern United States. Taken as a whole the work bears a resemblance to a textile pattern, such as those designed by Albers’ wife, Anni.
Josef and Anni Albers met in the 1920s while working and studying at the Bauhaus, the fabled German art and design school. Josef initially specialised in glasswork, and the intense, clear hues of stained glass would remain an influence over his future investigations into colour. When the National Socialists closed down the institution in 1933, the couple emigrated to the United States. Josef became a teacher, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then at Yale, and he taught artists including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg. He and Anni also explored further afield. From 1935 to the late 1960s, they visited Mexico at least fourteen times. They took hundreds of photographs of pre-Columbian archaeological sites and vernacular architecture. Mexico, Albers wrote in a letter to fellow painter Wassily Kandinsky, ‘is truly the promised land of abstract art. For here it is already 1000s of years old’ (J. Albers, quoted in L. Hinkson, ‘Ruins in Reverse: Josef Albers in Mexico’, in Josef Albers in Mexico, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2018, p. 16).
On one 1947 foray south, they settled temporarily in an adobe house in La Luz, New Mexico. Albers created his first Variant/Adobe works on this trip. He would produce them for over a decade, from 1950 in tandem with his revered Homage to the Square project. They represent a turning point in his career, bridging the geometric explorations of this earlier work and the meditative colour studies of the Homages. ‘With this new series of paintings’, writes Brenda Danilowitz, ‘Josef put aside the linear elements of his paintings and narrowed the medium down to the material of pure paint. He took up the challenge of discovering how paint behaves when subjected to similar restrictions to those that exist in weaving, where it is physically impossible to mix colours’ (B. Danilowitz, ‘From Variants on a Theme to Homage to the Square: Josef Albers’s Paintings 1947-49’, in Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, exh cat. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid 2007, p. 143). At once architectural and abstract, the present Variant/Adobe exemplifies Albers’ boundless curiosity and lifelong exploration of form and colour.
A poem in nocturnal green and warm ochre, Variant/Adobe (1948-1955) is a captivating example of Josef Albers’ major series of the same name. Executed in oil paint on Masonite, it presents a set of nesting and overlapping rectangular colour fields. Within a slender border of white-primed ground, there is an outer zone of verdant green, applied with a palette knife such that the grain of the board beneath is visible. The green field contains a further box of cool grey, which itself frames a more elaborate construction using three distinct shades of ochre. Simultaneously flat and volumetric, these forms resemble a distilled depiction of the adobe houses of Mexico and the southwestern United States. Taken as a whole the work bears a resemblance to a textile pattern, such as those designed by Albers’ wife, Anni.
Josef and Anni Albers met in the 1920s while working and studying at the Bauhaus, the fabled German art and design school. Josef initially specialised in glasswork, and the intense, clear hues of stained glass would remain an influence over his future investigations into colour. When the National Socialists closed down the institution in 1933, the couple emigrated to the United States. Josef became a teacher, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then at Yale, and he taught artists including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg. He and Anni also explored further afield. From 1935 to the late 1960s, they visited Mexico at least fourteen times. They took hundreds of photographs of pre-Columbian archaeological sites and vernacular architecture. Mexico, Albers wrote in a letter to fellow painter Wassily Kandinsky, ‘is truly the promised land of abstract art. For here it is already 1000s of years old’ (J. Albers, quoted in L. Hinkson, ‘Ruins in Reverse: Josef Albers in Mexico’, in Josef Albers in Mexico, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2018, p. 16).
On one 1947 foray south, they settled temporarily in an adobe house in La Luz, New Mexico. Albers created his first Variant/Adobe works on this trip. He would produce them for over a decade, from 1950 in tandem with his revered Homage to the Square project. They represent a turning point in his career, bridging the geometric explorations of this earlier work and the meditative colour studies of the Homages. ‘With this new series of paintings’, writes Brenda Danilowitz, ‘Josef put aside the linear elements of his paintings and narrowed the medium down to the material of pure paint. He took up the challenge of discovering how paint behaves when subjected to similar restrictions to those that exist in weaving, where it is physically impossible to mix colours’ (B. Danilowitz, ‘From Variants on a Theme to Homage to the Square: Josef Albers’s Paintings 1947-49’, in Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, exh cat. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid 2007, p. 143). At once architectural and abstract, the present Variant/Adobe exemplifies Albers’ boundless curiosity and lifelong exploration of form and colour.