Rendered in exquisite gem-like hues, in the largest scale of the series, and during a seminal year of Josef Albers’s career, Homage to the Square in Green Frames is a superlative example from one of the most iconic series in all of the twentieth century. Albers had a pivotal impact on the course of Contemporary art, as both an artist and a teacher. In 1963, the same year as he completed the present work, Albers published Interaction of Color, a watershed text on the interplay of colors when juxtaposed, which would influence successive generations of artists and tabulate the basis for his own practice. Albers’s cardinal text elucidated his exploration of the optical impact produced when pure color pigments are contrasted against one another. His revelations on the dynamism of color and assertion of the primacy of practice over theory had a watershed impact on the trajectory of Contemporary art and teaching. Acquired by William S. Paley shortly after its creation in 1967 via gallerist Sidney Janis, Homage to the Square in Green Frames was immediately recognized for its significance in Albers’s oeuvre. The present work, composed of a consummate combination of vibrant celadon green, oceanic teal, amethyst purple, and golden ochre, is a treasured example of one of the most fascinating artistic explorations of the last century.

Born the son of a craftsman in Bottrop, Germany in 1888, Albers was exposed to artisanal skills which would continue to bleed into his practice for years to come. Albers began his career in print-making and stained glass, studying at the pioneering Bauhaus school in 1922. Spearheaded by Walter Gropius, Bauhaus was famous for educating its students in both the traditional Replica Handbags s as well as so-called “craft” disciplines, expanding the definition of modern artmaking. Albers was soon enrolled in Johannes Itten’s “preliminary course” in which he instructed students in his own color theory principles. After only a few years, Albers himself lead the course and would spend the next decade at the school. In 1933, amid growing Nazi presence in Germany, Josef and his wife Anni emigrated to the United States where he was appointed a teaching position at the newfound Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he would establish himself as a key influencer on the next generation of artists in America, helping to cultivate the practices of Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1949, Albers left Black Mountain College for his final teaching position as Director of the Design Department at the Yale University graduate program. There, he would begin his seminal and culminating series, Homage to the Square, which was not only most critically lauded in his career, but also one of the most pivotal and influential in the history of Contemporary art.

Engrossing the last twenty-six years of his life, the Homage to the Square series was an exploration of the behavior of colors when they are situated against one another within one of four predetermined templates of nested squares. Albers would create numerous paper studies of these chromatic contrasts, devising optimal optical solutions and generating magnificent painted compositions. Composed of either three or four colors, rendered in concerted concentric forms, Albers’s compositions produced a sense of recession or protrusion – as if the squares were disappearing into the picture plane or jutting out towards the viewer. Inexplicably, his mesmerizing compositions often even seem to conjure both optical sensations at once. Notably rendered in the largest scale that Albers produced in this series, Homage to the Square in Green Frames spans 48 by 48 inches – entrancing the viewer in its jewel-like colors.

In his own practice, Albers considered color not as the tool to articulate his subject, but as the very content of his painting itself. What his comparisons revealed, was the transgressive and complex power of color to create different optical effects for the viewer based on context. Despite the title of the series, which might suggest the primacy of the square as a symbol, Albers considered the square simply a controlled variable upon which he could sincerely articulate the chromatic potential of color comparisons – underscoring the simultaneity of what he called the “independence and interdependence” of pure pigments. As one of the foremost scholars on the artist, Nicolas Fox Webber, noted in the Josef Albers 1988 retrospective catalogue: “The Homages become, in a generalized way, living beings. As such, like much great late work, they grapple with ultimate, essential truths. Grounded solidly in their craft, they touch upon sublime mysteries…. They conquered the gap between speaker and stat.mes nt, between writer and words, between painter and medium: Josef Albers and the Homages were one” (Nicolas Fox Webber, “The Artist as Alchemist,” Josef Albers: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , New York, 1988, p. 48).

Albers notably painted on Masonite panels, turning the boards to their rough side to provide unique texture to his works. And rather than using a brush, Albers employed a palette knife to apply paint to his works. Almost always, the artist used unadulterated pigment directly from the tube and only occasionally added white to adjust the hue. Albers’s meticulous attention to chromatic harmony is evinced in the bold and dynamic composition of the present work. Uniquely powerful, the work envelops the viewer in a succulent combination of cyanic outer squares against a warm, ochre center. Albers has carefully noted the exact paint colors used in each section of the composition on the reverse of the Masonite – a test.mes nt to the thoughtful processes and intellectual discovery foundational to his artmaking and teaching.

A vestige of his upbringing with a craftsman father, Albers followed a specific method when creating his Homages. Having painted many doors as a craftsman, Albers’s father taught his son to always begin at the center and then move outward to the edges – this, importantly, would keep his shirt sleeves clean. As articulated by art historian Kelly Feeney, this history is beautifully echoed in Albers’s culminating body of work: “The Homages operate like doors – physically, optically, psychologically, and metaphorically. They are entrances, exists, and thresholds, beginnings and endings. Somet.mes s it is not clear on which side of the door we are. The door opens both out and in, onto the past, the present, and onto an endless, inescapable hall of doors…. And the possibilities are both limited and limitless, just as Albers conceived of his paintings…” (Kelly Feeney, Josef Albers: Works on Paper, Alexandria, Virginia, 1991, p. 86.)

Artist

Josef Albers