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Lot Essay
Painted in 1973, the present work is a luminous example of Josef Albers’s iconic ‘Homage to the Square’ series. It consists of four concentric squares of different colours, with a warm ochre surround brightening through three shades of Naples yellow towards a light blue-grey centre. Its appearance oscillates between two and three dimensions: it might be read as a view from inside a passage towards an exterior space, or as a stacked succession of translucent squares. Each hue shifts in relation to its neighbour. Created across more than twenty-five years, Albers’s ‘Homage to the Square’ works form a joyfully diverse investigation into the interaction of colour. The present example was painted in the last decade of his life, during which his work found a newly wide appreciation. Its palette evokes the work of Paul Cezanne, a key influence upon Albers, who made similar use of bands of colour parallel to the picture plane to suggest depth, protrusion and recession in space.
Following his first professorship at the Bauhaus in Germany, Albers relocated in 1933 to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he honed his ideas on colour theory. He had his students overlay different combinations of coloured paper, observing how colours were not isolated entities, but rather—as he would later write in his treatise Interaction of Colour—‘present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions’ ( J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven 1971, p. 5). Albers embarked on his ‘Homages’ in 1950, when he began teaching at Yale University’s Department of Design, and made them until his death in 1976. Each example is its own chromatic education. They share the format of four concentric squares of differently coloured paint, aligned towards the picture’s lower edge. Albers used the paint straight from the tube and spread it with a palette knife onto a primed masonite support. Having defined the colour-scheme beforehand through precise experimentation, he executed the paintings with total control. Yet he worked by hand, without mechanical aids such as masking tape, and the imperfect edges between the colours vibrate with tension.
The 1970s saw mounting critical recognition for Albers, who was by then well-known beyond his reputation as an educator. In 1971 he became the first living artist to have a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The hundred paintings shown—98 of them from the artist’s personal collection—greatly impressed the critic Peter Schjeldahl. ‘Albers is such a subtle technician of colour that the more one sees of his “Homages,” the more inexhaustible the possibilities of this quiet, squares-within-squares motif come to seem’, he wrote. ‘… Probably no artist before him has set about so determinedly, and with such success, to focus and celebrate the well-known psychological and poetic powers of colour’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Art That Owes Nothing to “Nature”’, But Everything to Man Himself’, The New York Times, 28 November 1971, section D., p. 21).
The following year, Albers published Formulation : Articulation, a two-volume set of 127 screenprints comprising what T. G. Rosenthal calls ‘the most important and most cherished images of his long and inventive career’ (T. G. Rosenthal, ‘Josef Albers and Formulation : Articulation’, in Josef Albers: Formulation : Articulation, London 2006, p. 21). Albers drew upon more than four decades of work across media including woodcuts, sandblasted glass pictures and oil paintings to create the portfolio, which was two years in the making. Among the thirty-eight ‘Homages’ he included are a pair which each use a pale grey centre square in combination with various Naples yellows and cadmium yellows. These were likely related to a group of four paintings made in 1971, followed in 1973 by three further examples with similar colour compositions—among them the present work. ‘A very light optical grey, in each case amidst three light yellows’, Albers noted in his accompanying statement, ‘appears blind, bluish and dark’ (‘Josef Albers’s Statements of Content, Portfolio I’, in ibid.).
The squares in the ‘Homages’ can create a variety of visual readings. Weighted towards the base of the painting, they invite an impression of ground and horizon. Nested in diminishing size, with four diagonals following their corners, they often create an illusion of dimensionality, telescoping either inwards or outwards. Their asymmetrical 1:2:3 construction, meanwhile—the intervals beneath the central square are doubled to the left and right, and tripled above it—lends them a subtle quality of ascension. As Nicholas Fox Weber writes, the paintings ‘have their feet on the earth and their heads in the cosmos … the spiritual element is achieved with a soft voice rather than a loud shout’ (N. Fox Weber, ‘The Artist as Alchemist’, in Josef Albers: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1988, p. 47). This element is palpable in the present work. It is a product of wide-eyed wonder at the world, expressed through the methodical means of a craftsman.
Following his first professorship at the Bauhaus in Germany, Albers relocated in 1933 to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he honed his ideas on colour theory. He had his students overlay different combinations of coloured paper, observing how colours were not isolated entities, but rather—as he would later write in his treatise Interaction of Colour—‘present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions’ ( J. Albers, Interaction of Colour, New Haven 1971, p. 5). Albers embarked on his ‘Homages’ in 1950, when he began teaching at Yale University’s Department of Design, and made them until his death in 1976. Each example is its own chromatic education. They share the format of four concentric squares of differently coloured paint, aligned towards the picture’s lower edge. Albers used the paint straight from the tube and spread it with a palette knife onto a primed masonite support. Having defined the colour-scheme beforehand through precise experimentation, he executed the paintings with total control. Yet he worked by hand, without mechanical aids such as masking tape, and the imperfect edges between the colours vibrate with tension.
The 1970s saw mounting critical recognition for Albers, who was by then well-known beyond his reputation as an educator. In 1971 he became the first living artist to have a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The hundred paintings shown—98 of them from the artist’s personal collection—greatly impressed the critic Peter Schjeldahl. ‘Albers is such a subtle technician of colour that the more one sees of his “Homages,” the more inexhaustible the possibilities of this quiet, squares-within-squares motif come to seem’, he wrote. ‘… Probably no artist before him has set about so determinedly, and with such success, to focus and celebrate the well-known psychological and poetic powers of colour’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Art That Owes Nothing to “Nature”’, But Everything to Man Himself’, The New York Times, 28 November 1971, section D., p. 21).
The following year, Albers published Formulation : Articulation, a two-volume set of 127 screenprints comprising what T. G. Rosenthal calls ‘the most important and most cherished images of his long and inventive career’ (T. G. Rosenthal, ‘Josef Albers and Formulation : Articulation’, in Josef Albers: Formulation : Articulation, London 2006, p. 21). Albers drew upon more than four decades of work across media including woodcuts, sandblasted glass pictures and oil paintings to create the portfolio, which was two years in the making. Among the thirty-eight ‘Homages’ he included are a pair which each use a pale grey centre square in combination with various Naples yellows and cadmium yellows. These were likely related to a group of four paintings made in 1971, followed in 1973 by three further examples with similar colour compositions—among them the present work. ‘A very light optical grey, in each case amidst three light yellows’, Albers noted in his accompanying statement, ‘appears blind, bluish and dark’ (‘Josef Albers’s Statements of Content, Portfolio I’, in ibid.).
The squares in the ‘Homages’ can create a variety of visual readings. Weighted towards the base of the painting, they invite an impression of ground and horizon. Nested in diminishing size, with four diagonals following their corners, they often create an illusion of dimensionality, telescoping either inwards or outwards. Their asymmetrical 1:2:3 construction, meanwhile—the intervals beneath the central square are doubled to the left and right, and tripled above it—lends them a subtle quality of ascension. As Nicholas Fox Weber writes, the paintings ‘have their feet on the earth and their heads in the cosmos … the spiritual element is achieved with a soft voice rather than a loud shout’ (N. Fox Weber, ‘The Artist as Alchemist’, in Josef Albers: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1988, p. 47). This element is palpable in the present work. It is a product of wide-eyed wonder at the world, expressed through the methodical means of a craftsman.