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拍品专文
One of seven works by the artist offered as part of Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers, Red Front (1947-1956) belongs to Josef Albers’ important series of Variant works. From 1935 onwards, he and his wife made regular trips to Mexico, and became fascinated by the country’s art and architecture. Begun in 1947, the Variant paintings were inspired by the distinctive adobe houses that populated both Mexico and New Mexico. Albers had initiated this group of works while staying in one of these dwellings himself. The cycle, which continued until 1965, marked a significant turning point in his oeuvre. Based on underlying checkerboard-like structures, these works consolidated his embrace of serial geometric forms as vehicles for exploring the shifting perceptual properties of colour, paving the way for his Homages to the Square.
Albers was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Painter, designer, teacher and theorist, he left behind an extraordinary body of work that transformed our understanding of the chromatic spectrum. From his early days at the Bauhaus, to his landmark treatise Interaction of Colour (1963), his work had a profound impact upon future generations of artists. Assembled with astute connoisseurly vision, this remarkable group of seven works spans almost twenty-five years of Albers’ practice, capturing the precision, particularity and poetry that defined his oeuvre.
Albers was born in Germany in 1888: the son of a craftsman. He developed an interest in art early on, exploring both painting and printmaking during his youth as well as working as a teacher. In 1920 he enrolled in the Weimar Bauhaus, founded the previous year, and was one of the first students to be appointed a master after the school’s move to Dessau in 1925. Among his colleagues were Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. He also met his future wife Anni, who went on to become a celebrated textile artist. During his time there Albers worked across disciplines including metalwork, glass, photography, graphic design and carpentry.
Following the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, the couple emigrated to America, where Albers took up a teaching post at the revolutionary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. ‘Black Mountain is wonderful, deep in the mountains,’ he wrote to Kandinsky, who was by then exiled in Paris; ‘… the atmosphere is very youthful and very pleasant. A lot of the feel of the Bauhaus … our work is received with open arms’ (quoted in C. Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work, London, 2018, p. 197). Despite his limited English, his art spoke an international visual language that connected with his students and colleagues. His teachings on colour and form attracted notable young talent to the school, including Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa, as well as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jacob Lawrence as tutors. ‘If I had to sum up Albers’ philosophy, that would be it,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘He taught you to see’ (quoted ibid., p. 194).
It was during this period that Albers and his wife began to visit Mexico on a regular basis. Anni wrote to Kandinsky that it was ‘a country for art like no other’ (quoted in Josef Albers in Mexico, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2018, p. 14). Together, they explored pre-Columbian art and architecture, as well as visiting archaeological sites from Monte Albán and Teotihuacán to Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, and building their own substantial collection of sculpture and ceramics. Albers took extensive photographs of his travels, documenting geometries, materials and colours that nourished his burgeoning abstract language. ‘Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,’ he wrote, ‘for here it is already thousands of years old’ (quoted ibid., p. 16).
Albers’ photographs of the brightly-coloured, flat-roofed abode houses in Oaxaca and elsewhere fed into his Variant works. He would frequently refer to areas of the paintings as ‘walls’ or ‘windows’. While their repetitive structures constituted what he described as a ‘very strict painting diet’, however, Albers conjured a lyrical sense of internal dynamism in these works, captured by the term ‘Variant’. He described a ‘time-space order comparable to the beat measure in music perhaps also related to “Division on a Ground”, the old musical term for “Variations”’ (‘On my “Variant” paintings’, 1948, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archive).
In 1950, these investigations came to a head in what would come to be recognised as Albers’ most important body of work. That year, having taken up a new position as Head of the Department of Design at Yale University, he made his very first Homage to the Square. The series would occupy him for the next twenty-six years until his death. Composed of nested squares in varying dimensions, these works became laboratories for exploring the behaviour of colour in different contexts, or ‘climates’. Juxtaposing different shades at close range allowed Albers to examine their changing properties: the fluctuating ‘push and pull’ of their tonal values when placed in conversation with neighbouring hues. ‘We are able to hear a single tone,’ he explained. ‘But we almost never (that is without special devices) see a single colour unconnected and unrelated to other colours. Colours present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions’ (Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963, p. 5).
Working flat on the table, Albers applied paint straight from the tube with a palette knife, beginning with the central square and moving outwards. Rather than masking the edges of each square, he worked freehand, often leaving a week or more between each so that the paint could fully dry. A testament to his skill and control as a craftsman, this approach produced a greater sense of tension between the contrasting hues, their edges vibrating with the trace of the artist’s hand. The rough side of Masonite—a compressed wood fibreboard originally developed as a building material—became his preferred support. While Albers typically worked according to four designs of nested squares, he occasionally added contrasting strips of colour to the top and bottom. In rare cases, such as Homage to the Square (1961), he employed other materials: the work is one of 45 painted on aluminium between 1951 and 1965, lending it a luminous sheen.
As demonstrated by the present selection, Albers deployed a range of evocative titles throughout the series, sometimes hinting at the quality of the palette yet often simply relishing the resonance of the chosen word. David Butcher credits elements of this approach to Albers’ Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten, who understood colour as a mystical, spiritual entity. ‘The non-objective character of the paintings in the Homage to the Square series, together with the mysterious titles Albers gave them—Warm Silence, Earth Glow, Earthbound—bear witness to Itten’s influence,’ he writes (De Renoir à Sam Szafran. Parcours d’un Collectionneur, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny Suisse, 2010, p. 138). While many titles include the word ‘study’, the term rarely indicated that the work was preparatory. Rather, as Jeannette Redensek writes, it ‘points to the experimental nature of the whole enterprise, and perhaps also signals the artist’s humility before the great, unfinishable errand that was the Homage to the Square’ (‘Notes on the Methods and Materials Albers used to paint the Homage to the Square’, in Josef Albers: Homage to the Square 1950–1976, exh. cat., Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat Bottrop, 2023, p. 325).
Demonstrating an erudite eye for quality and significance, the six Homages offered here present a snapshot of the series at its finest, capturing the range of formats, scales and chromatic temperatures deployed between 1959 and 1971. Two exquisite examples—Study for Homage to the Square: Earth Glow (1963) and Study for Homage to the Square: Warm Silence (1971)—were previously owned by Lee V. Eastman, the celebrated lawyer and collector who represented artists including de Kooning and Albers himself. A true connoisseur of the latter’s oeuvre, Eastman acquired only the very best Homages, which sat in his extraordinary collection alongside works by Picasso, Giacometti, Matisse and the Abstract Expressionists. He also conceived the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, which became a vital force for the dissemination of the couple’s work. Nicholas Fox Weber, the Foundation’s director, wrote that the works Eastman acquired ‘were unquestionably among the finest from that renowned series,’ their selection aided by Albers himself (‘Property from the Collection of Lee V. Eastman’, Christie’s, Post-War and Contemporary Art Morning Session New York, 9 November 2005, p. 18).
Eastman worked closely with the curator Henry Geldzahler to organise Albers’ retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1971. It was the institution’s first exhibition by a living artist, and a defining moment in his career. Included in the show was the striking all-red R-I d-1 (1968), a dazzling exposition of one of Albers’ most important colours. With examples held in museums worldwide, writes Redensek, the all-red Homages ‘might be the most iconic of Albers’ paintings. Bold blasts of pure pigment with luscious surfaces capture the eye and make it hard to look away’ (Josef Albers: Homage to the Square 1950–1976, op. cit., p. 217). Begun in earnest in 1966, and continued into the 1970s, these works made use of more than sixty different red paints from fifteen manufacturers. Redensek explains that working with reds side by side produced startling new perceptual phenomena, particularly at the meeting points between light and dark shades. ‘When staring at the centre, sometimes for fleeting moments, the corners appear slightly rounded’, she writes. ‘The square ceases to feel like a square. The red Homages become less tectonic, more organic’ (ibid., p. 218).
The selection also captures Albers’ shifting approach to chromatic juxtaposition throughout the series. In earlier examples such as Study to Homage to the Square: Earthbound (1959)—which shares its subtitle with a work held in Yale University Art Gallery—the artist deploys contrasting hues of green, blue and burgundy. Gradually, however, Albers began to move away from these distinct bands of colour, favouring fluid interaction between closely-related tones. In the catalogue for the artist’s 1988 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Weber compares Study for Homage to the Square: Warm Silence to a related work that uses the same four shades of yellow in reverse order. Not only does ‘the central square [seem] to be closest to the viewer in one painting and furthest away in the other’, he writes, but ‘identical paints appear to be very different colours solely because their position has changed.’ Moreover, he adds, the sizes of the individual squares, ‘although the same, appear at odds. And the paintings have two very different emotional climates’ (Josef Albers: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988, p. 41).
Study for Homage to the Square: Not Looking (1971) also plays with closely-related shades of yellow, offset in the centre by a square of light blue-grey. In 1972, Albers published Formulation : Articulation, a two-volume set of 127 screenprints comprising what T. G. Rosenthal described as ‘the most important and most cherished images of his long and inventive career’ (‘Josef Albers and Formulation : Articulation’, in Josef Albers: Formulation : Articulation, London, 2006, p. 21). 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—including Not Looking—followed in 1973 by three further examples with similar colour compositions. ‘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.).
Beyond his paintings, Albers’ teaching practice formed a vital part of his oeuvre. Championing direct observation, his classes directed students’ attention to fleeting perceptual phenomena: the lingering spot of light on a switched-off television screen, for example, or the way in which the colour of tea darkened in a glass. At Yale, his students included Eva Hesse and Richard Anuszkiewicz, the latter of whom wrote that ‘He liked the square for its simplicity. It was like a self-portrait. When you saw that square looking at you, it was Albers looking at you’ (quoted in C. Darwent, op. cit., p. 18). His lessons continued to reverberate long after his retirement, with alumni such as Stanley Whitney and Howardena Pindell both recalling the force of his legacy at the institution. Interaction of Colour, moreover—a staggering overview of much of his life’s research—would go on to instruct future generations for many years to come.
Albers’ influence, however, ultimately went beyond specific didactics. His work placed chromatic perception at the very core of art-making, positing it as a fundamental, life-affirming pursuit. Artists in his wake would continue to delve deep into its mysteries, from Bridget Riley and Donald Judd to Gerhard Richter and Damien Hirst. The impact of his work would also transcend the art world altogether, bleeding into the realms of high fashion: both Hermès and Roksanda drew inspiration from his oeuvre. For Albers, colour was a universal force that held the key to understanding human experience. ‘In the end,’ he explained, ‘the study of colour again is a study of ourselves’ (in conversation with S. Fesci, ‘Oral history interview with Josef Albers, 1968, June 22-July 5’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, online).
Albers was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Painter, designer, teacher and theorist, he left behind an extraordinary body of work that transformed our understanding of the chromatic spectrum. From his early days at the Bauhaus, to his landmark treatise Interaction of Colour (1963), his work had a profound impact upon future generations of artists. Assembled with astute connoisseurly vision, this remarkable group of seven works spans almost twenty-five years of Albers’ practice, capturing the precision, particularity and poetry that defined his oeuvre.
Albers was born in Germany in 1888: the son of a craftsman. He developed an interest in art early on, exploring both painting and printmaking during his youth as well as working as a teacher. In 1920 he enrolled in the Weimar Bauhaus, founded the previous year, and was one of the first students to be appointed a master after the school’s move to Dessau in 1925. Among his colleagues were Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. He also met his future wife Anni, who went on to become a celebrated textile artist. During his time there Albers worked across disciplines including metalwork, glass, photography, graphic design and carpentry.
Following the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, the couple emigrated to America, where Albers took up a teaching post at the revolutionary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. ‘Black Mountain is wonderful, deep in the mountains,’ he wrote to Kandinsky, who was by then exiled in Paris; ‘… the atmosphere is very youthful and very pleasant. A lot of the feel of the Bauhaus … our work is received with open arms’ (quoted in C. Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work, London, 2018, p. 197). Despite his limited English, his art spoke an international visual language that connected with his students and colleagues. His teachings on colour and form attracted notable young talent to the school, including Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa, as well as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jacob Lawrence as tutors. ‘If I had to sum up Albers’ philosophy, that would be it,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘He taught you to see’ (quoted ibid., p. 194).
It was during this period that Albers and his wife began to visit Mexico on a regular basis. Anni wrote to Kandinsky that it was ‘a country for art like no other’ (quoted in Josef Albers in Mexico, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2018, p. 14). Together, they explored pre-Columbian art and architecture, as well as visiting archaeological sites from Monte Albán and Teotihuacán to Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, and building their own substantial collection of sculpture and ceramics. Albers took extensive photographs of his travels, documenting geometries, materials and colours that nourished his burgeoning abstract language. ‘Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,’ he wrote, ‘for here it is already thousands of years old’ (quoted ibid., p. 16).
Albers’ photographs of the brightly-coloured, flat-roofed abode houses in Oaxaca and elsewhere fed into his Variant works. He would frequently refer to areas of the paintings as ‘walls’ or ‘windows’. While their repetitive structures constituted what he described as a ‘very strict painting diet’, however, Albers conjured a lyrical sense of internal dynamism in these works, captured by the term ‘Variant’. He described a ‘time-space order comparable to the beat measure in music perhaps also related to “Division on a Ground”, the old musical term for “Variations”’ (‘On my “Variant” paintings’, 1948, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archive).
In 1950, these investigations came to a head in what would come to be recognised as Albers’ most important body of work. That year, having taken up a new position as Head of the Department of Design at Yale University, he made his very first Homage to the Square. The series would occupy him for the next twenty-six years until his death. Composed of nested squares in varying dimensions, these works became laboratories for exploring the behaviour of colour in different contexts, or ‘climates’. Juxtaposing different shades at close range allowed Albers to examine their changing properties: the fluctuating ‘push and pull’ of their tonal values when placed in conversation with neighbouring hues. ‘We are able to hear a single tone,’ he explained. ‘But we almost never (that is without special devices) see a single colour unconnected and unrelated to other colours. Colours present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions’ (Interaction of Colour, New Haven, 1963, p. 5).
Working flat on the table, Albers applied paint straight from the tube with a palette knife, beginning with the central square and moving outwards. Rather than masking the edges of each square, he worked freehand, often leaving a week or more between each so that the paint could fully dry. A testament to his skill and control as a craftsman, this approach produced a greater sense of tension between the contrasting hues, their edges vibrating with the trace of the artist’s hand. The rough side of Masonite—a compressed wood fibreboard originally developed as a building material—became his preferred support. While Albers typically worked according to four designs of nested squares, he occasionally added contrasting strips of colour to the top and bottom. In rare cases, such as Homage to the Square (1961), he employed other materials: the work is one of 45 painted on aluminium between 1951 and 1965, lending it a luminous sheen.
As demonstrated by the present selection, Albers deployed a range of evocative titles throughout the series, sometimes hinting at the quality of the palette yet often simply relishing the resonance of the chosen word. David Butcher credits elements of this approach to Albers’ Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten, who understood colour as a mystical, spiritual entity. ‘The non-objective character of the paintings in the Homage to the Square series, together with the mysterious titles Albers gave them—Warm Silence, Earth Glow, Earthbound—bear witness to Itten’s influence,’ he writes (De Renoir à Sam Szafran. Parcours d’un Collectionneur, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny Suisse, 2010, p. 138). While many titles include the word ‘study’, the term rarely indicated that the work was preparatory. Rather, as Jeannette Redensek writes, it ‘points to the experimental nature of the whole enterprise, and perhaps also signals the artist’s humility before the great, unfinishable errand that was the Homage to the Square’ (‘Notes on the Methods and Materials Albers used to paint the Homage to the Square’, in Josef Albers: Homage to the Square 1950–1976, exh. cat., Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat Bottrop, 2023, p. 325).
Demonstrating an erudite eye for quality and significance, the six Homages offered here present a snapshot of the series at its finest, capturing the range of formats, scales and chromatic temperatures deployed between 1959 and 1971. Two exquisite examples—Study for Homage to the Square: Earth Glow (1963) and Study for Homage to the Square: Warm Silence (1971)—were previously owned by Lee V. Eastman, the celebrated lawyer and collector who represented artists including de Kooning and Albers himself. A true connoisseur of the latter’s oeuvre, Eastman acquired only the very best Homages, which sat in his extraordinary collection alongside works by Picasso, Giacometti, Matisse and the Abstract Expressionists. He also conceived the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, which became a vital force for the dissemination of the couple’s work. Nicholas Fox Weber, the Foundation’s director, wrote that the works Eastman acquired ‘were unquestionably among the finest from that renowned series,’ their selection aided by Albers himself (‘Property from the Collection of Lee V. Eastman’, Christie’s, Post-War and Contemporary Art Morning Session New York, 9 November 2005, p. 18).
Eastman worked closely with the curator Henry Geldzahler to organise Albers’ retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1971. It was the institution’s first exhibition by a living artist, and a defining moment in his career. Included in the show was the striking all-red R-I d-1 (1968), a dazzling exposition of one of Albers’ most important colours. With examples held in museums worldwide, writes Redensek, the all-red Homages ‘might be the most iconic of Albers’ paintings. Bold blasts of pure pigment with luscious surfaces capture the eye and make it hard to look away’ (Josef Albers: Homage to the Square 1950–1976, op. cit., p. 217). Begun in earnest in 1966, and continued into the 1970s, these works made use of more than sixty different red paints from fifteen manufacturers. Redensek explains that working with reds side by side produced startling new perceptual phenomena, particularly at the meeting points between light and dark shades. ‘When staring at the centre, sometimes for fleeting moments, the corners appear slightly rounded’, she writes. ‘The square ceases to feel like a square. The red Homages become less tectonic, more organic’ (ibid., p. 218).
The selection also captures Albers’ shifting approach to chromatic juxtaposition throughout the series. In earlier examples such as Study to Homage to the Square: Earthbound (1959)—which shares its subtitle with a work held in Yale University Art Gallery—the artist deploys contrasting hues of green, blue and burgundy. Gradually, however, Albers began to move away from these distinct bands of colour, favouring fluid interaction between closely-related tones. In the catalogue for the artist’s 1988 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Weber compares Study for Homage to the Square: Warm Silence to a related work that uses the same four shades of yellow in reverse order. Not only does ‘the central square [seem] to be closest to the viewer in one painting and furthest away in the other’, he writes, but ‘identical paints appear to be very different colours solely because their position has changed.’ Moreover, he adds, the sizes of the individual squares, ‘although the same, appear at odds. And the paintings have two very different emotional climates’ (Josef Albers: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988, p. 41).
Study for Homage to the Square: Not Looking (1971) also plays with closely-related shades of yellow, offset in the centre by a square of light blue-grey. In 1972, Albers published Formulation : Articulation, a two-volume set of 127 screenprints comprising what T. G. Rosenthal described as ‘the most important and most cherished images of his long and inventive career’ (‘Josef Albers and Formulation : Articulation’, in Josef Albers: Formulation : Articulation, London, 2006, p. 21). 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—including Not Looking—followed in 1973 by three further examples with similar colour compositions. ‘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.).
Beyond his paintings, Albers’ teaching practice formed a vital part of his oeuvre. Championing direct observation, his classes directed students’ attention to fleeting perceptual phenomena: the lingering spot of light on a switched-off television screen, for example, or the way in which the colour of tea darkened in a glass. At Yale, his students included Eva Hesse and Richard Anuszkiewicz, the latter of whom wrote that ‘He liked the square for its simplicity. It was like a self-portrait. When you saw that square looking at you, it was Albers looking at you’ (quoted in C. Darwent, op. cit., p. 18). His lessons continued to reverberate long after his retirement, with alumni such as Stanley Whitney and Howardena Pindell both recalling the force of his legacy at the institution. Interaction of Colour, moreover—a staggering overview of much of his life’s research—would go on to instruct future generations for many years to come.
Albers’ influence, however, ultimately went beyond specific didactics. His work placed chromatic perception at the very core of art-making, positing it as a fundamental, life-affirming pursuit. Artists in his wake would continue to delve deep into its mysteries, from Bridget Riley and Donald Judd to Gerhard Richter and Damien Hirst. The impact of his work would also transcend the art world altogether, bleeding into the realms of high fashion: both Hermès and Roksanda drew inspiration from his oeuvre. For Albers, colour was a universal force that held the key to understanding human experience. ‘In the end,’ he explained, ‘the study of colour again is a study of ourselves’ (in conversation with S. Fesci, ‘Oral history interview with Josef Albers, 1968, June 22-July 5’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, online).