Josef Albers (1888-1976. Germany/USA)

Josef Albers (1888-1976. Germany/USA) 

Homage to the Square
ca 1966-7
Fiber, ht. 69.5, wd 67.5 in.

Albers joined the Yale faculty in 1950, and later began his celebrated Homage to the Square series. This would become a body of more than a thousand works executed over a period of twenty-five years, including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. 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. When one speaks of Albers and weaving, one expects the subject to center on his wife Anni, the most significant of the modernist fiber artists. Both were trained at the Bauhaus School and emerged with a strong feeling for materials before moving to Black Mountain in North Carolina. Josef's tapestries are rare and were made between 1966 and 1967, hand loomed in the traditional weaving center, Aubusson, in France. Architect Harry Seidler would show this tapestry to his apprentices so they would learn 'the effect of tensional opposites on the apparatus of the eye', or how the seemingly precisely defined squares of his original prints and paintings from this iconic series became unstable and dissolved into a field of fluctuating, pulsating colour and ragged line.

Reference: Weber, Nicholas Fox (ed). Josef Albers: Homage to the Square. Boston: Albers Foundation, 1997. 

Acquired by current owner from XX Gallery New York, 1988

Excellent original condition.