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Homage to the Square
Artist
Josef Albers
(Born 1888, Germany; died 1976, United States)
Date1967
MediumOil on fiberboard
DimensionsUnframed: 30 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 1 in. (78.11 x 78.11 x 2.54 cm)
Framed: 32 1/4 x 32 1/4 x 1 in. (81.92 x 81.92 x 2.54 cm)
Framed: 32 1/4 x 32 1/4 x 1 in. (81.92 x 81.92 x 2.54 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Mrs. Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation, Inc.
Object number1980.5
Status
Not on viewInscribedverso artist's formula [in script] (detailed description of how the work was painted)
Copyright© 2020 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York
Category
Label TextJosef Albers began Homage to the Square in 1950, when the artist was sixty-two, and the series eventually encompassed more than a thousand paintings and prints. The works became widely known during the twentieth century (one even appeared on a 1980 United States postage stamp) and influenced two generations of hard-edge abstraction and minimalist art.
The series extends Albers’s experiments with abstraction and his fascination with color. These interests first manifested when he enrolled in the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, in 1920. Five years later, he became a master there and taught the important introductory course required of all students. When the Nazis forced the closing of the school in 1933, Albers and his wife, Anni, also an artist, immigrated to the US to teach at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. After imparting Bauhaus principles at Black Mountain for sixteen years, Albers became the chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University. As a teacher and artist, he had a profound impact on a wide range of artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Albers constructed his Homages by laying paint as thinly as possible with a palette knife directly onto a white ground. Paint generally came straight from the tube, and the edges of the squares were painted without masking tape. The artist would begin a composition with the center square and work his way out, never painting one square on top of another. The concentric squares are flat yet evoke depth through their illusion of overlapping, and they appear to expand upward and outward while simultaneously remaining fixed. Albers achieved these effects through careful placement: the spacing between the bottoms of the squares, their sides, and their tops is at a ratio of 1:2:3.
The Modern holds three paintings from the series, from 1951, 1966, and 1967. More than academic exercises in color manipulation, Albers’s Homage to the Square compositions encompass an extraordinary range of feeling while affirming the directness and subtlety of vision.
The series extends Albers’s experiments with abstraction and his fascination with color. These interests first manifested when he enrolled in the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, in 1920. Five years later, he became a master there and taught the important introductory course required of all students. When the Nazis forced the closing of the school in 1933, Albers and his wife, Anni, also an artist, immigrated to the US to teach at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. After imparting Bauhaus principles at Black Mountain for sixteen years, Albers became the chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University. As a teacher and artist, he had a profound impact on a wide range of artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Albers constructed his Homages by laying paint as thinly as possible with a palette knife directly onto a white ground. Paint generally came straight from the tube, and the edges of the squares were painted without masking tape. The artist would begin a composition with the center square and work his way out, never painting one square on top of another. The concentric squares are flat yet evoke depth through their illusion of overlapping, and they appear to expand upward and outward while simultaneously remaining fixed. Albers achieved these effects through careful placement: the spacing between the bottoms of the squares, their sides, and their tops is at a ratio of 1:2:3.
The Modern holds three paintings from the series, from 1951, 1966, and 1967. More than academic exercises in color manipulation, Albers’s Homage to the Square compositions encompass an extraordinary range of feeling while affirming the directness and subtlety of vision.