Josef Albers

André Emmerich, New York

Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly lighter and brighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Enveloped in radiating tones of sumptuous yellow, Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square is exemplary of the artist’s revered eponymous series. Brimming with luminosity and exuding a vibrating sense of movement, the present work epitomises Albers’ belief in the primacy of colour and its changing effect when juxtaposed against varying gradients of pigment. By understanding colour as something that is in constant flux rather than in an absolute state, Albers explored the relativity of colour as a subjective source of visual experience. Created on the artist’s archetypal Masonite surface, Homage to the Square rigorously plunders the aesthetic potential of geometry via different hues, tones, and intensities of colour.

Albers’ vast research into the nature of colour was firmly embedded in his belief that colour is never to be understood from a purely theoretical perspective but also in terms of its psychological effect. While Goethe’s famous colour circle was derived hierarchically from the wisdom of natural science, Albers emphasised an approach that was based on dialogue, juxtaposition, and above all experimentation. In the introduction to his famous book, Interaction of Color, Albers wrote: “The aim… is to develop – through experience – by trial and error – an eye for colour. This means, specifically, seeing colour action as well as feeling colour relatedness” (Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, New Haven 2006, p. 1). In order to do so, Albers applied a rigorous methodology in his approach to the Homage to the Square series. The repeated enlargement and reduction of the square forms the structural basis of these paintings, with their specific organisation regulated by a fundamental checkerboard structure of 10 by 10 units that encompasses four possible variations on a rigid concentric schema. The first formal configuration contains four squares while the remaining three compositional types contain three squares in different arrangements, of which the present work is an example. This rational economy is reflected in Albers’ use of colour, the physical characteristics of which are almost completely denied owing to the artist's strict technique in which paint is immaculately applied with a palette knife onto a pristine white ground. Herein, the homogeneity of the surface is of primordial importance for Albers. Without any linear divisions, colour fields are in direct physical contact with each other, thus bolstering their transition from one gradient to the next. While this rigid economy of means is grounded in logic, it is in fact this very frugality that is prerequisite for Albers to create a cosmos of dazzling optical effects that ultimately exceed any logical or rational connotations.

Albers’ radical juxtaposition of colour theory and rigorous formalism has positioned his practice as one of the most influential of the Twentieth Century. As a student and later teacher at the famous Bauhaus in Weimar, Albers developed his theories alongside Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy. Upon his move to the US, Albers would become one of the leading figures of the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, working alongside Robert Motherwell and teaching young artists such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg; Albers later taught at Yale University, where his students included Eva Hesse. The influence of Albers’ teaching philosophy and his own pedagogic practice can be traced throughout the pantheon of post-war American art, from former pupil Mark Rothko's absorptive oil paintings through to the immersive chromatic spaces created by Dan Flavin's neon light installations. Albers believed that one learned as a result of a direct interaction with life and that the active engagement with the physical nature of the material world was a prerequisite to create art. As such, the ground-breaking Homage to the Square represent Albers’ most important contribution in declaring the autonomy of colour. The present work is thus not only testament to Albers’ theoretical prowess but it quintessentially demonstrates his ability to transform the viewer’s perception of chromatic experience through the interaction of pure colour.