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Lot Essay
"(Albers) was deeply fascinated by the phenomenality of color and this resulted in a new artistic language. Once he had found the Adobe form, he no longer had to worry about a graphic composition. The fixed basic pattern unburdened Albers and allowed him to re-focus, again and again, on the effect of color in a vast array of constellations. As a result, he regarded each individual painting as a "Variation on a central theme," analogous to a musical composition, and he chose the musicological concept of the Variation or Variant as a second title for this painting series"
(H. Liesbrock, Painting on Paper: Josef Albers in America, exh. cat., Ostfildern, 2011, pp. 33-34).
"With the Adobe works, Albers created an experimental arrangement that allowed him to investigate the effect of pure, unmixed colors, when several of them come into contact with one another. In the process, he came to the realization that determined his own artistic idiom from this point on, and also constituted his outstanding contribution to the understanding of color in the twentieth century: namely that colors do not have fixed identities, but change with some regularity in the exchange with their surroundings, that is, with reference to other colors and their respective spreading qualities. In a letter to his German friend Franz Perdekamp from September 1947, Albers goes into more detail about his interest as it is pursued in the Adobe works: 'Since January (I have painted) only one theme in about seventy studies. What interests me most now is how colors change one another according to 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. And what is amazing about all this is that I use colors exactly as they come out of the tube. I mix only pink and purple which don't exist in the tube. Those are the only colors in which I use white. It's an extremely restricted and certainly very one-sided method of working. But terribly exciting. Opaque colors appear transparent only as a result of the way they are combined. Light (colors) heavy and the other way around, shiny (colors) matt, etc. I would love to work more on this without disturbance" (Ibid, pp. 32-33).
(H. Liesbrock, Painting on Paper: Josef Albers in America, exh. cat., Ostfildern, 2011, pp. 33-34).
"With the Adobe works, Albers created an experimental arrangement that allowed him to investigate the effect of pure, unmixed colors, when several of them come into contact with one another. In the process, he came to the realization that determined his own artistic idiom from this point on, and also constituted his outstanding contribution to the understanding of color in the twentieth century: namely that colors do not have fixed identities, but change with some regularity in the exchange with their surroundings, that is, with reference to other colors and their respective spreading qualities. In a letter to his German friend Franz Perdekamp from September 1947, Albers goes into more detail about his interest as it is pursued in the Adobe works: 'Since January (I have painted) only one theme in about seventy studies. What interests me most now is how colors change one another according to 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. And what is amazing about all this is that I use colors exactly as they come out of the tube. I mix only pink and purple which don't exist in the tube. Those are the only colors in which I use white. It's an extremely restricted and certainly very one-sided method of working. But terribly exciting. Opaque colors appear transparent only as a result of the way they are combined. Light (colors) heavy and the other way around, shiny (colors) matt, etc. I would love to work more on this without disturbance" (Ibid, pp. 32-33).