The Interaction of Color – Josef Albers' “Homage to the Square”: The significance of Josef Albers' radically reduced formal language for post-war Abstraction cannot be overstated. In the 1920s and 1930s, Albers, along with Wassily Kandinsky, taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and subsequently in Dessau, until the world-renowned art and architecture school was shut down by the Nazis in 1933. Kandinsky, whose abstract painting was defamed as “degenerate” by their cultural ideology, left Germany and went to Paris, where he died in 1944. Albers, only in his mid-forties at the time, fled to America with his wife, Anni, and, following a recommendation, accepted a teaching position at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which is now considered one of the most pioneering art schools for abstract painting. Albers taught at Black Mountain College until 1949, where his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, and others who would later become the most important protagonists of American post-war Modernism. In 1935, he traveled to Mexico for the first time. In the years that followed, he increasingly developed his characteristic, highly reduced formal language under the influence of the geometric structures of pre-Columbian architecture, which Albers and his wife, Anni, captured in many black-and-white photographs. In 1950, he finally reached a decisive turning point: Albers began his famous last series of works, “Homage to the Square,” which is today regarded as his most important. In these works, which he titled “Studies for Homage to the Square” to describe their particularly experimental character in terms of the effect of color, Albers achieved a maximum concentration of means and expressiveness. These works rank among the most critical positions in abstract painting and can be found in the most prestigious international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Tate Modern in London.

Albers always began his minimalist concept on a square painting surface, using three or four overlapping squares of varying sizes, which he arranged in a compelling interplay not only in terms of form but also in terms of their subtly nuanced colors. Albers applied the colors—as in the present glowing sunny yellow composition with the evocative subtitle “Tenacious”—in fascinating perfection, unmixed and directly from the tube, with small spatulas on the painting surface. Through the individual relationship of the colors to one another, their specific tones and intensity, Albers created captivating color interactions: “In visual perception, a color is rarely seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” (Josef Albers, in: Interaction of Color, Introduction, Yale University Press 1963) The influence of this outstanding last series of works on American art, particularly on Minimal Art, Hard Edge, and Color Field Painting produced by artists such as Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, is considerable. The artist sold the present composition "Study for Homage to the Square: Tenacious" directly to the renowned New York collection of Lee Eastman, which also comprises works by de Kooning and Giacometti. In 1988, it was chosen for the grand Albers retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, marking the artist's 100th birthday. [JS]