Homage to the Square

Last updated
Homage to the Square
Josef Albers' Studies for Homage to the Square.jpg
Artist Josef Albers
Location Tate Modern, London

Homage to the Square is the title of a series of paintings produced by Josef Albers between 1950 and his death in 1976. In 1971, the paintings were the subject of the first solo show devoted to a living artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [1] There are over 1000 works within the series. [2] Albers used this series as a color study, to show the differences in how color behaves when painted in a pure form. [3] :6

Contents

Homage to the Square is heavily influenced by Albers' theories of art and his experiments with nontraditional techniques and art materials. The Homage to the Square series focuses on geometrically based abstraction, stemming from his time at the Bauhaus. [4]

Description

All of the paintings in the series show either three or four nested squares of color. The position of the interior squares is determined by a regular schema, with the margin below the square being smaller than the space above it. [5] The works range in size from 406 x 406 mm to 1.22 x 1.22 meters. [2]

Every piece of Homage to the Square lists the materials used within its production on the back of the panel. This has given scholars a greater understanding of the specific characteristics of each painting. [6] :67

Process of creation

Albers created the works under carefully controlled conditions to ensure uniformity across the series. He always painted the works on the rough side of Masonite panels. The panels were always covered with at least six coats of a white primer. Albers also controlled the lighting in the studio using fluorescent lights, which he arranged above his work table according to different patterns of light temperature. [2]

In addition to specificities of lighting and primer, Albers maintained a repetitive and methodical process in his creation of Homage to the Square. He used unmixed paint directly from the tube, applying it with his palette knife, generally beginning work on the central square and moving out toward the edge of the panel. [2] This process, working from the inside out, is due to his father, a house painter, who recommended this process so paint would not drip. [7] :13 The palette knife provided a distinctive texture to the painting. [3] :6

Albers used paint directly from the tube in order to show the differences in pure color. This allowed Albers to show how the same colors from different brands could perform differently. Albers would then paint over the squares using varnish, which would again provide insight into how different materials change the color of the squares. [3] :6 To maintain the purity of the color of the squares, Albers would often paint over the varnish. This led to various issues with later conservation attempts. [6] :66–67

Albers's theories

Repetition

The repetitive nature of Homage to the Square is related to Albers's belief that "there is no end to color." The repetitive form allowed Albers to change one element of the piece in order to see how it impacted the greater artwork. This was done in order to see the psychic effects of color and form. [8] :70–71

The repetitive use of squares, lines, and shapes focus on the form of the painting. This was done to highlight the role of form and its direct influence on color. For Albers, form required a repeated performance, which also trains the eye for both color and form. [8] :70

Color

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square Grafik nach Josef Albers.jpg
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square

Albers used his paintings in order to explore the relationship of colors. He placed the colors of the squares right next to each other in order to show how juxtaposition and contrast affected the appearance of color. In fact, various iterations of Homage to the Square used the same colors in different orders, in order to show the greater effects of juxtaposition. [9] :85 [10] His goal was to see how the colors reacted together, claiming that he wanted to "let the colors react in the prison in which [he] put them." [11] This juxtaposition was used to create different viewing experiences, such as one shade making another seem either lighter or darker. [7] :15–16 One example of the effect of the juxtaposition of the squares was the dimension it forced upon the paintings. Certain combinations of colors would create the effect of making squares seem like they are coming outward instead of inward. [9] :85

Often Albers would use color in relation to moral character, which he explored through his Homage to the Square series. Albers believed that colors took on moral character because they existed "in relation to others," making color both an individual and a member of society. This exemplified his belief that ethics and aesthetics were one in the same. [9] :86–87 This idea of color was directly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his theories of vision and color. Inspired by Goethe's understanding of vision as being shaped by color and proximity, Albers distinguished between "ocular seeing" and "vision." [7] :15–16

Form

Albers focused his pieces on the form of squares, claiming that he would make squares as long as he was able. [12] :462–464 The quasi-concentric order of the squares is the same in each version of the Homage, allowing the squares to be seen as singular entities or as a whole group. This allows for both distance and separation in unique ways. [10] Additionally, the squares acted as a vessel of color. Albers chose to use squares because they do not appear in nature, making the paintings seem man-made to the human eye. [12] :462–464 Albers also claimed that squares "sit," which allows the color within the works to be highlighted. [12] :462–464 These squares were also given a white frame, in order to provide both a beginning and an end to the works of art. [6] :63

Conservation efforts and reproductions

Albers's unique process in creating Homage to the Square has led to various issues in the conservation efforts of the series. Because Albers sometimes painted over varnish layers, severe alligator cracking has occurred. Conservators have attempted to use in-painting in order to preserve the works. Additionally, conservators sometimes struggle to match the historical colors in the paintings to modern colors. This has led conservators to mix dry pigments in order to replicate the high intensity colors. [6] :66–67

Reproductions often fail to capture the surface qualities of the paintings. In particular, the use of the palette knife added distinct texture and marks on the pieces, which are often lost in reproductions. [3] :6

Impact

The series inspired future abstract artists such as Bridget Riley, Peter Halley, Donald Judd, and Robert Rauschenberg. [13] [4] It has also influenced many Op artists who focused on large scale illusions. [13]

Examples

Examples of paintings from the series include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oil painting</span> Process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil

Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel or copper for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Op art</span> Art movement

Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Delaunay</span> French painter (1885–1941)

Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josef Albers</span> German-American artist (1888–1976)

Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919.

Richard Joseph Anuszkiewicz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color field</span> Art movement

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ad Reinhardt</span> American painter and printmaker

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art and against what he described as "the disreputable practices of artists-as-artists".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Stanczak</span> Polish-born American painter

Julian Stanczak was a Polish-born American painter and printmaker who is considered a central figure of the Op art movement in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. Described as an artist whose work "evinced a tremendous geometric inventiveness", Stanczak is primarily known for his large-scale polychromatic abstract compositions made using acrylic paint on canvas in which he explored the perceptual dimensions of color.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">20th-century Western painting</span> Art in the Western world during the 20th century

20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Komarin</span>

Gary Komarin is an American artist. Born in New York City, Komarin is the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer.

<i>Colored Landscape with Aquatic Birds</i> Painting by Jean Metzinger

Colored Landscape with Aquatic Birds is an oil painting created circa 1907 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques is a Proto-Cubist work executed in a Post-Divisionist style with a unique Fauve-like palette. Metzinger's broad omnidirectional brushstrokes in the treatment of surfaces render homage to Paul Cézanne, while the luscious subtropical imagery in the painting are an homage to Paul Gauguin and Metzinger's friend Henri Rousseau.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paintings conservator</span>

A paintings conservator is an individual responsible for protecting cultural heritage in the form of painted works of art. These individuals are most often under the employ of museums, conservation centers, or other cultural institutions. They oversee the physical care of collections, and are trained in chemistry and practical application of techniques for repairing and restoring paintings.

<i>Red Square</i> (painting) Painting by Kazimir Malevich

Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, also known as Red Square, is a 1915 painting by Kazimir Malevich. Red Square was part of Malevich's Suprematist art movement (1915-1919), which aimed to create artworks that were universally understood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Felrath Hines</span> American painter

Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. was an African American visual artist and art conservator. Hines served as a conservator at several institutions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and his paintings can be found in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation and restoration of paintings</span> Preservation of heritage collections

The conservation and restoration of paintings is carried out by professional painting conservators. Paintings cover a wide range of various mediums, materials, and their supports. Painting types include fine art to decorative and functional objects spanning from acrylics, frescoes, and oil paint on various surfaces, egg tempera on panels and canvas, lacquer painting, water color and more. Knowing the materials of any given painting and its support allows for the proper restoration and conservation practices. All components of a painting will react to its environment differently, and impact the artwork as a whole. These material components along with collections care will determine the longevity of a painting. The first steps to conservation and restoration is preventive conservation followed by active restoration with the artist's intent in mind.

The conservation and restoration of ancient Greek pottery is a sub-section of the broader topic of conservation and restoration of ceramic objects. Ancient Greek pottery is one of the most commonly found types of artifacts from the ancient Greek world. The information learned from vase paintings forms the foundation of modern knowledge of ancient Greek art and culture. Most ancient Greek pottery is terracotta, a type of earthenware ceramic, dating from the 11th century BCE through the 1st century CE. The objects are usually excavated from archaeological sites in broken pieces, or shards, and then reassembled. Some have been discovered intact in tombs. Professional conservator-restorers, often in collaboration with curators and conservation scientists, undertake the conservation-restoration of ancient Greek pottery.

Martha Joanne Alf was an American artist. Her work consists of paintings, drawings and photographs of everyday objects, including pears and rolls of toilet paper.

Conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins <i>The Gross Clinic</i> Ongoing treatment of an 1875 painting

The conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic refers to the on-going conservation-restoration treatments of American painter Thomas Eakins' 1875 painting The Gross Clinic throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These treatments are a testament to the changing methodologies undertaken in the field of paintings conservation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Goldenberg</span> American painter

Tom Goldenberg is an American artist, best known for landscape and abstract paintings. He has shown throughout the United States and internationally, and his work has been covered by The New York Times, The New Criterion, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, and The New York Observer, among other publications. Critics often note his landscape works for their contemporary interplay of stylization and observation and concern for form over verisimilitude, pointing to his beginnings in abstraction as a foundation that underlies his ordered pictorial structures. In the later 2010s, Goldenberg has returned to abstraction that sometimes suggests interior or "fictive" landscapes. The New Criterion editor and writer Roger Kimball described his paintings as leading "double lives, as memorable evocations of rural landscape and tightly organized arrangements of abstract planes of color." Hilton Kramer characterized his work as "deeply mediated by aesthetic reflection" and classical rather than romantic in feeling. Goldenberg and his wife, Michelle Alfandari, have lived in Sharon, Connecticut since 2016, after being based in New York City since the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harriet Korman</span> American painter

Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.

References

  1. Geldzahler, Henry (1971). Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Exhibition of His Paintings and Prints. Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN   978-0-87099-114-1.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Weber, Nicholas Fox (2003). "Albers, Josef". Grove Art Online. doi:10.1093/oao/9781884446054.013.90000371193. ISBN   978-1-884446-05-4 . Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Malloy, Vanja (2015). "Introduction". Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries. Amherst College Press. pp. 1–10.
  4. 1 2 3 "Josef Albers | Homage to the Square: Apparition". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
  5. Spies, Werner (1971). Albers. Abrams. pp. 48–58. ISBN   978-0-8109-4400-8.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Garland, Patricia Sherwin (1983). "Josef Albers: His Paintings, Their Materials, Technique, and Treatment". Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. 22 (2): 62–67.
  7. 1 2 3 Danilowitz, Brenda (2015). "A Short History of Josef Albers's Interaction of Color". Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries. Amherst College Press. pp. 13–27.
  8. 1 2 Herrmann, Rolf-Dieter (1974). "Josef Albers". Journal of Aesthetic Education. 8 (2): 65–72.
  9. 1 2 3 Barry, Susan R (2015). "Josef Albers and the Science of Seeing". In Malloy, Vanja (ed.). Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries. Amherst College Press. pp. 79–91.
  10. 1 2 3 Tate. "'Study for Homage to the Square', Josef Albers, 1964". Tate. Retrieved 2024-04-09.
  11. 1 2 "Homage to the Square: "Ascending"". Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  12. 1 2 3 Holloway, John H; Weil, John A; Albers, Josef (1970). "A Conversation with Josef Albers". Leonardo. 3 (4): 459–64.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Roggenkamp, Shawn. "Albers, Homage to the Square". Khan Academy. Retrieved 14 March 2016.