Josef Albers

(1888-1976)

Homage to the Square: Study to Young Prediction
1951

Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, under no. JAAF 1976.1.193.

Provenance
The Estate of Josef Albers, Connecticut
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut
Waddington Galleries, London (no. B37854)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Josef Albers: Works on Paper and Paintings, 2007, p. 37, no. 13, illustrated in colour



An exquisitely vibrant and mesmerizing example of Josef Albers' most celebrated series, Homage to the Square: Study to Young Prediction from 1951 offers a rare opportunity to acquire a true masterpiece from one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Boasting an immaculate provenance directly from the estate of the artist and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, the work only went into private hands in 2008 where it has remained since. With its three concentric squares of oil paint, each slightly gravitating to the lower edge of the Masonite panel, the disarmingly simple work features a rare combination of vivid pigments - pink, ochre, and orange - reminiscent of a blazing sky at sunset. The grouping of colour is only seen in three other examples throughout the entire series to which the artist dedicated over twenty-five years of his life.

Having studied at the Bauhaus in Germany, where he was later a faculty member, Albers was among those who decided to close the school rather than comply with the Third Reich and adhere to its rules and regulations. Together with his wife Anni, he arrived in the United States in 1933 to programme the visual arts curriculum at the influential Black Mountain College. His subsequent influence as a teacher to generations of artists that followed would be without equal; Albers' students included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. Years later, Rauschenberg would say "I'm still learning what he taught me, because what he taught had to do with the entire visual world [...] I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had" (M. E. Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, Cambridge, MA 1987, p. 126).

The Homages occupied Albers from 1950, when he began teaching his colour theory course at Yale University's Department of Design, until his death in 1976. He set about examining the compositional and formal effects of colour and shape, fascinated as he was by the versatility and fragility of perception. In Albers own words, "every perception of color is an illusion [...] We do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another. [...] This play of colors, this change in identity, is the object of my concern. It leads me to change my color tool, my palette, from one picture to the next" (the artist in: Eugen Gomringer, Josef Albers, New York 1967, p. 104).

What may initially be read as a strict, narrow compositional framework, the Homage to the Square series allowed Albers to explore the finite, expressive potentials and optical properties of colour and their intrinsic relationships. Entirely based on a mathematically determined format of several squares, each element appears to overlap and nestle within one another, conjuring advancing and receding planes, appearing as both autonomous shapes and integral parts of a complete system.

Applied with a palette knife directly from the tube onto a white, primed Masonite panel, Albers worked his way from the inside outwards with the board flat on the table, achieving perfect edges and lines without a ruler or masking tape. The perception of depth- for some the squares recede, for others they are stacked on top of each other and protrude- is down to the individual perception of the viewer and can shift from viewing to viewing. Sometimes the differences in tone are minimal, but in the present work, Albers has opted for a more dramatic and striking tonal difference between his elements. There is a vibrancy to some early Homage to the Square paintings before 1955-56, the present work included, that can surprise those who know the artists more restrained, classical works of the late 1950s and through the 1960s.

The pigments seen in Homage to the Square: Study to Young Prediction from 1951 - a vibrant pink, rich ochre, and luminous orange - were used in only three other paintings of the series. Whilst all four works vary in appearance due to different tonalities of the inner pink square (a mixture of pink and white), and the density of the paint application on the surface of the ground, they all bear the same title and feature the same composition. The present work is the very first study and has a denser, more thickly painted surface, as is typical of Homage paintings from 1951. It also features an overpainted earlier Homage on the reverse, along with the carefully recorded inscriptions of technical details typical for the series. The second study recorded in Albers' notes was completed in 1954; a third example dated 1951-1955 is presently in a private German collection. The last and final work called Young Prediction (Homage to the Square) has remained in the same private collection since it was acquired in 1955 and is currently on view in the exhibition 'Anni et Josef Albers: L'art et la vie' at the Musée d'art Moderne de Paris which will run through to January 2022 before travelling to the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in Valencia.

Josef Albers was the first living artist ever to be honoured with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971. His Homage to the Square paintings are cornerstones of the most prestigious public and private art collections around the world. Not only is his influence on the timeline of modern art largely unparalleled, but Albers' legacy endured in the artists he taught, collaborated with, and guided through the early years of their career, influencing the emergence of Colour Field Painting, Geometric Abstraction and Op Art.

Far from, a mere variation of a strict format of squares within squares, Homage to the Square: Study to Young Prediction from 1951 pulsates with light, tension and energy, and brilliantly incorporates the qualities that made Albers such a stalwart of the modern period. His exceptional aesthetic sense plays out between the simplicity of his composition and colours, and in turn produces a work of outstanding, complex beauty.