At Colour Studio, our job as architectural colorists is to please the eye, but visual perception of any one color is one of the hardest variables to control. Josef Albers, German-born American artist and professor, taught that all color is relative. His work explores the variances in color relationships and how subtle shifts in those relationships can have drastic results. Josef Albers "Homage to the Square" Albers stated that "... In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is." His teachings are based on the idea that the world is controlled by vision, and that our eyes become accustomed to the world around us and begin to take certain things for granted. He believed our brains process only what it expected and not the entire reality of what is actually in front of us. Teaching first at the Bahaus, and later as head of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Albers challenged his students to experiment with visual perception. A color has many faces, and one color can be made to appear as two different colors. Here it is almost unbelievable that the left small and the right small squares are part of the same paper strip and therefore are the same color. And no normal human eye is able to see both squares -- alike. - Maria Popova Albers's art work illustrates his ability to see beauty in the mundane. He worked with non-representational forms in an impersonal and detached style. Rooted in his theory on the art of seeing, his work is devoid of his own sentiment in order to challenge the viewer to form their own emotional reactions based on their perception of color and the subject matter. Josef Albers "Variants" 1947 His work is summed up in a treatise titled "Interaction of Color" published in 1963. Written while teaching at Yale, the book investigates the properties of color. An extension of his life long fascination with the deceptive nature of color, the treatise expands upon his teachings of visual perception as well as his own exploration of color relationship. "Homage to the Square" 1964 For example, in his series of oil on paper paintings Homage to the Square, Albers experimented with the effects of perception, such as the apparent oscillation between the flat surface design and the illusion of movement and depth. "Homage to the Square" 1972 Albers says of his work, "They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colors used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-called, texture." Forever trying to teach the mechanics of vision and show even the uninformed viewer how to see, Homage to the Square embodied a shift in emphasis from perception willed by the artist to reception engineered by the viewer. "SP-V" 1967 Albers work demonstrates that subtle shifts in color relationships can alter our perception. Color interactions can elicit emotional responses that influence the way we perceive our environments. Everyone sees and perceives color differently, but with thoughtful color combinations one can create with the eye and brain in mind. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first edition of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator for the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Philip Tiongson have developed an iPad app that expands upon principles and experiments featured in the book. Follow the link below and tell us what you think! http://yupnet.org/interactionofcolor/
Surround yourself with color and style with this easy DIY Josef Albers-inspired felt board and a collection of art-inspired furniture!
German born, color-field painter, Black Mountain College head of painting program(1934-1949). Teacher to the likes of Rauschenberg , Twombly...
The series Homage to the Square is considered one of Josef Albers most famous and important works.
Detail of Color Study for Homage to the Square I had always thought of Josef Albers as a rather cold and intellectual painter, whose grand project of Homages to the Square was rather dull and repetitive, and whose teaching foisted on art students the study of color using Color-aid papers. My thinking was turned about completely after seeing a splendid exhibition earlier this fall at the Morgan Library, Painting on Paper: Josef Albers in America. I just got the delicious (the color is a joy) catalog for the show, from which I photographed the images for this post. While delightedly wandering the show, I realized that for Albers painting was all about color, and in his studies on paper, I saw him experimenting with one color against another, slathering the paint thickly and exuberantly with a knife. These luscious studies were anything but dry; as Albers wrote: Color is the means of my idiom. It's autonomic. I'm not paying 'homage to the square'. It's only the dish I serve my craziness about color in. Almost Four (Color Study), 1936; oil on masonite, 13 1/2 x 15 1/4 in. Even in this early study we can see Albers' quirky and rich color sense. There is humor in the "almost" four (there's an oval missing), and in the tiny blue dots anchoring the lighter yellow. Color Study for a Variant/Adobe, n.d.; oil on blotting paper, 19 x 24 in. Albers and his wife Anni Albers moved to America in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College. They first visited Mexico in 1935, and returned many times over the next 30 years. Josef Albers found there an intensity of color and light that was a tremendous influence on the way he saw color, and the forms of the architecture inspired a series of Adobe paintings. Variant/Adobe, 1947; oil on blotting paper mounted on paper board, 17 1/4 x 24 in. By using the same format over and over again, Albers could concentrate on how colors affected each other. In 1947 he wrote to a friend: What interests me most now is how colors change one another according the the proportions and quantities [I use]...I'm especially proud when [I can make] colors lose their identity and become unrecognizable. Greens become blue, neutral grays become red violets and so on. Dark colors become light and vice versa. Color Study for Homage to the Square, n.d.; oil on blotting paper with varnish, 13 x 7 in. Albers began his Homage to the Square series in 1950 and he would work with it for the rest of his life, until he died in 1976. In the exhibition at the Morgan Library, the studies for these works were arranged in color groups, as is the catalog, so we can see some of the variations within similar hues. He also worked with blacks and grays, saying I can get the gloomiest gray to dance,...I love to make a very poor color rich, to let the adjacent colors make it beautiful. Color Study for Homage to the Square: Night Shades, ca. 1964; oil on blotting paper, 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. There are so many beautiful color thoughts in these simple studies. The dark, warm reds of Night Shades play wonderfully against the surrounding deep turquoise. This catalog is going to be a great resource for me in the studio, inspiring a lot of new ideas. I should point out that these photos are photos of photos, and so several times removed from the original work. As I tried to adjust the color to bring it as close as possible to the printed image, I kept adjusting the Hue/Saturation sliders in Photoshop, which in itself was a strong lesson in seeing color. I thought back to my student years, and one summer at Skowhegan, where Gabriel Laderman was always exclaiming "Hue! Value! Intensity!". Color Study for Homage to the Square, n.d.; oil on blotting paper with varnish, 13 1/4 x 12 in. On this work, as on several others, Albers painted a stripe of varnish over the color, to see what affect it would have. Color Studies for Homage to the Square, n.d.; oil on blotting paper; 8 1/4 x 18 3/4 and 4 1/2 x 9 3/8 in. Some of the works were small, quick explorations of color relationships. A fascinating aspect of Albers painting practice was that he never mixed colors; he used color straight from the tube, except for pink and purple, which he mixed. He sampled many different brands of the same hue, writing copious notes on the studies, and in that way, had complete control over the color relationships. Color Study for Homage to the Square, n.d.; oil on blotting paper with varnish, 13 1/4 x 12 in. I love the note on the bottom of this piece: "Try again". A quote from Albers tells us: I try to create the silence of an icon. That's what I'm after: the meditative icons of the 20th century. Color Study for Homage to the Square, Platinum, n.d.; oil on blotting paper, 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. While I was color-adjusting this image, I was admiring the way the central grays reacted with the yellows and oranges around them, how the gray moved in and out, making the edge vibrant. Study for Homage to the Square with Color Study, n.d.; oil on blotting paper, 11 3/8 x 11 3/8 in. Study for White Line Square (Homage to the Square), n.d.; oil, gouache, and graphite on blotting paper, 13 1/2 x 12 in. These final two works show Albers playing with cooler, lighter tones of greens and grays and yellows. The handling of the paint is particularly lively. After seeing this exhibition and meandering through the catalog, I will never think of Albers as a cool cerebral artist again. There is a marvelous quote from him that graces the back of the book, and makes his project much larger than selecting colors and form: I think art parallels life. Color, in my opinion, behaves like a man...in two distinct ways: first is self-realization and then in the realization of the relationship with others. In my paintings I have tried to make two polarities meet––independence and interdependence, as, for instance in Pompeian art. There's a certain red the Pompeians used that speaks in both these ways, first, in its relation to other colors around it, and then, as it appears alone, keeping its own face. In other words, one must combine both, being an individual and being a member of society....And from all this, you may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.
From Josef Albers and John Cage to Charles Olson and Robert Rauschenberg, the teachers and students of Black Mountain shaped postwar culture Founded in North Carolina in 1933, Black Mountain College ranks alongside the Bauhaus as one of the most innovative schools of the 20th century. Inspired by the forward-thinking pedagogical ideas of philosopher John Dewey, the experimental, interdisciplinary college combined the ideas of radical European modernism with the philosophy of American pragmatism and teaching methods designed to encourage personal initiative as well as the social competence of the individual. Visual arts, economics, physics, dance, architecture and music were all taught on an equal footing, and teachers and students lived together in a democratically organized community. The second director of the school was Josef Albers, and John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline and Charles Olson were among its teachers. As a result, the college played a foundational role in the development of a range of avant-garde practices, and exerted an enormous influence on the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century. Briefly out of print and quickly becoming a sought-after book, this gloriously designed and illustrated volume was first published for the exhibition An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 19331957, held at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. It remains unrivaled for its sympathetic design and fulsome documentation. A profusion of archival materialsincluding photographs of classes in progress and college housing with its Albers-designed furniture, and page spreads from college bulletins and issues of Robert Creeley's Black Mountain Reviewis presented alongside contemporary essays. Happily back in print, Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment 19331957 traces the key moments in the history of this legendary school.
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A review of Josef Alber's text 'Interaction of Color.' Albers was a painter, designer & educator who is regarded as a pioneer of 20th-century Modernism.
Every now and then, I need a break. I just want to be quiet and look at something cool for while. Enter Josef Albers' Homage to a Square.
This beautiful, hand-tufted, 100% wool rug is adapted from the 1951 oil on Masonite painting by Josef Albers. The rug is available in a limited edition of 150 and produced in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Josef Albers Homage to the Square 100% hand-tufted wool Dimensions: 5'9" x 5'9" (1.75 meters x 1.75 meters). Edition of 150.
