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Lot Essay
“They contain simple, great statements such as: I’m standing here. I’m resting here. I’m in the world and on earth. I’m in no hurry to move on. While Mark Rothko sought transcendence, Albers looked for fulfilment here on earth” (H. Arp, quoted in W. Schmied, ‘Fifteen Notes on Josef Albers’, in Josef Albers, exh. cat., The Mayor Gallery, London, 1989, p. 9-10).
Making its Asian auction debut, Homage to the Square: Between 2 Scarlets is a rare and large-scale exemplar from Josef Albers’s iconic series that defined his artistic career. Measuring 40 by 40 inches (101.2 by 101.2 cm.), Between 2 Scarlets belongs to the second largest size category completed in the series, with the largest being 48 by 48 inches (121.9 by 121.9 cm.). It is one of the only seven all-red paintings completed on this scale, another of which is held in the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop. Previously housed in the Daimler Art Collection, now renamed as the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, for over three decades, this painting was extensively published and exhibited around the world.
“Colour 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 colour in.” -Josef Albers (N. Welliver, ‘Albers on Albers’, ArtNews, January 1966)
Josef Albers began the Homage series in 1950 when he was teaching at Yale University. It has never lost its appeal for the artist and has been a continuous embodiment of his fascination with the interaction of colour until his death in 1976. The German-born American artist and educator was best known for his theory that colours are not static entities but rather have the power to influence and change the surrounding colours. Albers’s legendary book Interaction of Colour from 1963, published just a year after Between 2 Scarlets was painted, is considered a seminal work on colour theory and continued to influence generations of artists. In this series, Albers began each composition with the innermost square and a careful progression onto the next rigidly measured grids. He never painted one square on top of another or mixed paint. Instead, he applied oil colour with a palette knife directly from the manufacturer’s tube onto the rough side of primed Masonite panel. In fact, Albers’s meticulous use of colour and paint is further reflected in its titular reference. Albers recorded the details of each work on the back of the panel, including the shades and brands of the paints used, any varnishes or other materials applied to the surface of the painting, and the dimensions. The title is decoded on the reverse where the names of the paints used on the outermost and the centre squares are ‘Cadmium Scarlet’ by Windsor and Newton and ‘Cadmium Red Extra Scarlet’ by Shiva respectively. Homage to the Square was a prolific series with over two thousand works, but out of all of his renditions, the red compositions held special interest for Albers as he noted, “if one says ‘Red’ (the name of a colour) 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, quoted in P. Sloane, The Visual Nature of Colour, New York 1989, p. 1).
Born in Germany and a professor at the Bauhaus, Albers emigrated to the United States with the invitation to lead the painting program at the newly-founded experimental liberal arts institution Black Mountain College, whose students included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly and Ruth Asawa. He later left to head the design department at Yale University, during which he started the Homage to the Square series. Albers was the first living artist to have a solo retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971. Not only a colour master in the 20th Century but also an avid educator, Albers’ legacy prevails as he acted as a bridge between European avant-garde traditions and the generation of aspiring American Post-War artists.
Making its Asian auction debut, Homage to the Square: Between 2 Scarlets is a rare and large-scale exemplar from Josef Albers’s iconic series that defined his artistic career. Measuring 40 by 40 inches (101.2 by 101.2 cm.), Between 2 Scarlets belongs to the second largest size category completed in the series, with the largest being 48 by 48 inches (121.9 by 121.9 cm.). It is one of the only seven all-red paintings completed on this scale, another of which is held in the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop. Previously housed in the Daimler Art Collection, now renamed as the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, for over three decades, this painting was extensively published and exhibited around the world.
“Colour 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 colour in.” -Josef Albers (N. Welliver, ‘Albers on Albers’, ArtNews, January 1966)
Josef Albers began the Homage series in 1950 when he was teaching at Yale University. It has never lost its appeal for the artist and has been a continuous embodiment of his fascination with the interaction of colour until his death in 1976. The German-born American artist and educator was best known for his theory that colours are not static entities but rather have the power to influence and change the surrounding colours. Albers’s legendary book Interaction of Colour from 1963, published just a year after Between 2 Scarlets was painted, is considered a seminal work on colour theory and continued to influence generations of artists. In this series, Albers began each composition with the innermost square and a careful progression onto the next rigidly measured grids. He never painted one square on top of another or mixed paint. Instead, he applied oil colour with a palette knife directly from the manufacturer’s tube onto the rough side of primed Masonite panel. In fact, Albers’s meticulous use of colour and paint is further reflected in its titular reference. Albers recorded the details of each work on the back of the panel, including the shades and brands of the paints used, any varnishes or other materials applied to the surface of the painting, and the dimensions. The title is decoded on the reverse where the names of the paints used on the outermost and the centre squares are ‘Cadmium Scarlet’ by Windsor and Newton and ‘Cadmium Red Extra Scarlet’ by Shiva respectively. Homage to the Square was a prolific series with over two thousand works, but out of all of his renditions, the red compositions held special interest for Albers as he noted, “if one says ‘Red’ (the name of a colour) 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, quoted in P. Sloane, The Visual Nature of Colour, New York 1989, p. 1).
Born in Germany and a professor at the Bauhaus, Albers emigrated to the United States with the invitation to lead the painting program at the newly-founded experimental liberal arts institution Black Mountain College, whose students included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly and Ruth Asawa. He later left to head the design department at Yale University, during which he started the Homage to the Square series. Albers was the first living artist to have a solo retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971. Not only a colour master in the 20th Century but also an avid educator, Albers’ legacy prevails as he acted as a bridge between European avant-garde traditions and the generation of aspiring American Post-War artists.