Josef Albers Homage to the Square

In 1920, the young artist Josef Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus, the recently founded school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany. In the "preliminary course," a curriculum designed to prepare the students for further study in the school's various workshops; the course's central concept was the "contrasting effects" of form, texture, and—most importantly for Albers—color. After completing his course of study, Albers was appointed as a teacher at the Bauhaus in 1925, and he remained there until the school closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi party. He emigrated to the United States with his wife Anni and taught first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then at Yale University in New Haven, CT. He published the influential treatise Interaction of Color (1963), a study of color theory that was used widely in art instruction.

Around1950, Albers began his celebrated Homage to the Square series, more than a thousand works executed over a period of twenty-five years. The entire series was based on a mathematically determined format of several squares, which appear to be overlapping or nested within one another. This geometric abstraction was Albers' template for exploring the subjective experience of color—the effects that adjacent colors have on one another, and the illusion of flat planes of color advancing or receding in space. (Degenfelder Family Collection 1970)