Homage to the Square
Homage to the Square, 1970
Josef Albers (German-born, American, 1888 – 1976)
#0000.1994
Josef Albers was born into a family of craftsmen in Germany in 1888. After working as a schoolteacher in his hometown he went on to train as an art teacher in Berlin. Albers enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in 1920, and in 1922 he joined the faculty of the school. The Bauhaus closed due to Nazi pressure in 1933, and Albers emigrated to the United States to become head of Black Mountain College. He later went on to head the department of design at Yale University.
While Albers is an accomplished art teacher, he also produced art in several different mediums throughout his life, from stained glass to painting to printmaking, among other things. This print, Homage to the Square, is part of a series of prints created between 1950 and 1976 for which Albers is best known. This composition features four squares precisely situated one within another, each a different tone of yellow, meant to use nested forms to show the interaction of different colors—a subject explored by Albers at length both in prints and his book Interaction of Color (1963). In 1971, Albers was the first living artist honored with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
