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拍品專文
Looking at Josef Albers' Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I, the viewer is seduced by the vibrations between the colours, which create a symphonic effect through their subtle contrasts. Painted in 1956, this picture is an early example of Albers' celebrated series, Homage to the Square, which he pioneered six years earlier, shortly after becoming the chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University. This was one of a series of teaching positions that Albers had occupied in the United States, having moved there after the closure of the Bauhaus, where he had also been a teacher. Albers was hugely influential as a bridge between European avant garde thinking and the new generation of emergent American artists studying in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in particular, and his role as a teacher at the legendary Black Mountain College would have huge ramifications, both direct and at a remove, on many of the figures of the day.
One of Albers' great contributions was to the teaching of colour theory, and many of his ideas are encapsulated in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I. Albers believed that colour was hugely subjective, and indeed variable. Seen under different lights, or crucially juxtaposed with other colours, each paint layer can take on new qualities. This is seen in the central band in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I: shown bordering two different forms of yellow, it takes on varying effects. In order to harness such mysterious, shifting transformations in his paintings, Albers employed rigorously consistent means, creating his works in the Homage to the Square series with an incredible rigour, as he himself explained:
'On a ground of the whitest white available - half or less absorbent - and built up in layers - on the rough side of panels of untempered Masonite - paint is applied with a palette knife directly from the tube to the panel and as thin and even as possible in one primary coat. Consequently there is no under or over painting or modelling or glazing and no added texture - so-called...as a rule there is no additional mixing either, not with other colours nor with painting media' (J. Albers quoted in G. Alviani (ed.), Josef Albers, Milan, 1988, p. 104).
Albers even controlled the lighting conditions in his studio, ensuring that there were set numbers of warm and cold fluorescent bulbs, allowing him an incredible consistency. It was through these means that he captured the wonder of colour: applying it through a strict and near-clinical process, he nonetheless managed to achieve a poetry in the glows that emanated from his works, as is the case in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I. This picture perfectly demonstrates the extent to which these pictures were, as he himself said, 'Platters to serve colour' (Albers, quoted in N. Fox Weber, 'Josef Albers', pp. 10-11, Ibid., p. 10).
One of Albers' great contributions was to the teaching of colour theory, and many of his ideas are encapsulated in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I. Albers believed that colour was hugely subjective, and indeed variable. Seen under different lights, or crucially juxtaposed with other colours, each paint layer can take on new qualities. This is seen in the central band in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I: shown bordering two different forms of yellow, it takes on varying effects. In order to harness such mysterious, shifting transformations in his paintings, Albers employed rigorously consistent means, creating his works in the Homage to the Square series with an incredible rigour, as he himself explained:
'On a ground of the whitest white available - half or less absorbent - and built up in layers - on the rough side of panels of untempered Masonite - paint is applied with a palette knife directly from the tube to the panel and as thin and even as possible in one primary coat. Consequently there is no under or over painting or modelling or glazing and no added texture - so-called...as a rule there is no additional mixing either, not with other colours nor with painting media' (J. Albers quoted in G. Alviani (ed.), Josef Albers, Milan, 1988, p. 104).
Albers even controlled the lighting conditions in his studio, ensuring that there were set numbers of warm and cold fluorescent bulbs, allowing him an incredible consistency. It was through these means that he captured the wonder of colour: applying it through a strict and near-clinical process, he nonetheless managed to achieve a poetry in the glows that emanated from his works, as is the case in Study for Homage to the Square: Desert Glow I. This picture perfectly demonstrates the extent to which these pictures were, as he himself said, 'Platters to serve colour' (Albers, quoted in N. Fox Weber, 'Josef Albers', pp. 10-11, Ibid., p. 10).