Albers

Homage to the Square, La Tehauna

1951

ARTIST:

Albers, Josef b. 1888 Bottrop, Germany d. 1978 New Haven, Connecticut, USA


Technique:

Screenprint in colours


Paper:

wove 20.7 x 20.7 cm image


Condition:

excellent


Realisation / Publication:

Albers by Jurgen Wissmann (Portfolio) Aurel Bongers Verlag, Trautwein Kg, (BOTH) Recklinghausen, West Germany, 1977


Reference / Literature:

For some disputing the work of Albers on colour theory see: http://depts.washington.edu/jrphys/ph214A07/albers.pdf


Provenance:

Private Collector, Germany


Asking:

Contact for price


The Homage to the Square series, with its many incarnations, became one of the defining points of theoretical discussion in the art historical cannon that was modernism in the 20th dominated Albers’ career from the late 1950’s until his death. Within the harmonious hues of the square within a square, Albers was able to investigate the power of colour as a language unique to an abstraction devoid of representation. Albers’ extended the principles of abstraction and by extension, the relationship this had to the making of art and the necessary function of colour to investigate the possibilities of space and proportion during the creative process. In the work on offer, ( similar in scale to the many screen prints that were published in the 1970s in both Germany and the United States), Albers suggests the universality of the square and the language it conveys in the everyday, with changing arrangements of colour and line, tone one aspect of Homage that defined the artistic vocabulary that Albers founded, and left behind. A rich legacy if ever there was one.