Executed in 1962, Josef Albers’ Study for homage to the square: distant glow is an elegant example of the artist’s most iconic and instantly recognisable series. Imbued with chromatic nuance and geometric subtlety, the present work is a testament to the power of repetition and the infinite variability of colour. Albers sheer mastery is illuminated here in vibrant shades of crimson, a colour of particular significance to the artist. In his foundational text ‘Interaction of Color’ first published by Yale University Press in 1963, Albers declared, “If one says ‘Red’… and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different” (J. Albers, Interaction of Color, New Haven & London 2006, p. 3). The present work illuminates three quasi-concentric squares of mesmerizing scarlet – their differences in hue subtle yet profound. Distant glow is thus a work that is constantly shifting and evolving before the viewer, a visual experience exactingly controlled by Albers. The artist himself wrote, “in visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art” (Ibid., p. 1).

Albers began the Homage to the square series between 1949 and 1950, adjusting tone, intensity and hue across 2,000 works executed until the artist’s death in 1976. Chronologically, Study for homage to the square: distant glow was created at the series’ mid-point and is a pivotal example of the artist’s eradication of variation in space, form, and shape. The paintings within the series employ four possible variations on a rigid concentric schema; the first formal configuration contains four squares while the remaining three compositional types contain three squares in different arrangements. The present work displays the latter, in which three quadrants comprise the pictorial composition. Albers’ revolutionary language of geometric abstraction was the basis for which the artist could investigate the highly subjective experience of viewing colour, as well as the illusion of viewing adjacent hues, seemingly receding in space.

Albers’ colour theory – the very basis of the Homage to the square series – was deeply rooted in the artist’s experience at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in the 1920s. Indeed, a central theme in the Bauhaus curriculum was the contrasting effects of form and colour. Albers became a teacher at the Bauhaus in 1925, before emigrating to the United States eight years later. In the US he was appointed as a teacher at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina – a pillar for twentieth-century avant-garde art. There, he was among a range of prominent teachers, including his wife Anni Albers, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and composer John Cage. With a critical emphasis on experimentation, this group taught the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Kenneth Noland. Albers was one of the earliest pioneers to embrace institutions such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College and use them as vehicles to spread his artistic beliefs. The influence of Albers, therefore, within the pantheon of post-war American art, and his effect on the subsequent generation of Abstract Expressionist artists, is immense; including Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella, to name only a few. This extraordinary influence was institutionally validated in 1971 when Albers became the first living artist to be given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Today, Albers’ Homage to the square paintings reside in the permanent collections of countless international institutions, including The Met and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Albertina Museum, Vienna. Electrifying and mesmeric, the three quasi-concentric squares of hypnotic scarlet on the surface of Study for homage to the square: distant glow present a pristine example of Albers’ career-long investigation into the visual potential and subjective experience of colour.