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Lot Essay
One of the twentieth-century’s most immediately recognisable and iconic abstract signifiers, Josef Albers’ painted squares are fascinating optical investigations into the possibilities of colour. The current work from the Homage to the Square series, Cool Rising, is a formidable mid-point example of the series that Albers started in 1949 and executed up until his death in 1976. Three quasi-concentric squares vibrate warmly against a support of masonite. The deep forest green area, the largest of the trio, reaching to all edges and corners of the board, embeds a shimmering aquatic blue square. Contained inside this second form is an even smaller square of a dim, muted bluey-grey. Like a matryoshka doll in diminution, the series of squares act as vessels for their miniature siblings, whilst offsetting them in colour and hue, so that perceptual expectations are challenged and confounded.
Albers’ squares are the ultimate leitmotif of his oeuvre, but each painting radiates with its own distinctive character. Cool Rising, for example, is a unique and soothing blend of green and blues, unchallenged and unmatched in personality and colour by any other Homage, as no two paintings by Albers are identical. With these tripartite or quadripartite compositions, Albers sought to survey the interaction of complementary and dissonant colours, experimenting with temperament, hue and tone to conjure evocative chromatic fields. In his appraising poem, On My Homage to the Square, penned the year after Cool Rising’s execution, Albers professed that ‘all [my squares] are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction – influencing and changing each other forth and back.’ (J. Albers, ‘On My Homage to the Square’ reproduced in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012, p. 132).
By marrying ensembles of colours, Albers championed their collective abilities to rouse subjective feelings within the mind of the viewer. Whilst pictorially operating on a purely abstract plane, there is scope for immense emotive depth and psychological association. This impetus is comparable to Mark Rothko’s exposition of emotion, his monumental quadrilateral organisms of colour and form manifested by, and thus manifesting, deep expressive intensity. Similarly, like Rothko’s rectangles, the shapes in Cool Rising seem to pulsate or vibrate in communication. Whilst Albers did not possess Rothko’s cavernous sense of spirituality and took a negative attitude towards the titanic work of the American Abstract Expressionist, formal and emotional comparisons are prevalent. Writing about Albers’ work in a 2005 exhibition catalogue, Gillo Dorfles, the Italian critic and painter, claimed that ‘anyone who looks at the majority of his works with true participation, with ‘empathy’, will realize how dynamically expressive they still are, so much so that we could view them as anticipators of the mysterious chromatic aura emanating from Rothko’s large canvases’ (G. Dorfles, ‘Josef Albers in Italy’, in Josef Albers: Omaggio al Quadrato: Una Retrospettiva, exh. cat., Museo Morandi, Bologna, 2005, p. 163). Whether Rothko appreciated the work of Albers is uncertain, but the powerful stylistic and expressive influences that the Homages had on successive abstraction is undeniable.
Whilst many abstractionists used a variety of methods – Pollock’s drip technique, Rothko’s scrubbing, Newman’s zips – as a means of painting with feeling, Albers was far more direct. Taking a tube of paint, he spread its unadulterated contents straight onto the board, rejecting any form of mixing, before smoothing out the liquid with a palette knife. This application seems grounded in a form of empiricism, as though Albers attempted to keep his experiments away from any unnecessarily expressive interventions made by the human hand. Ultimately, the artist’s methods were grounded in an aspiration to investigate the very nature and substance of colour. Albers’ crucial text, Interaction of Color, produced the same year as Cool Rising before becoming one of the most seminal pieces of twentieth-century art theory, summarises these intentions on the first page: ‘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’ (J. Albers, ‘Introduction’, in Interaction of Color, Yale, 1963, p. 1).
Albers’ squares are the ultimate leitmotif of his oeuvre, but each painting radiates with its own distinctive character. Cool Rising, for example, is a unique and soothing blend of green and blues, unchallenged and unmatched in personality and colour by any other Homage, as no two paintings by Albers are identical. With these tripartite or quadripartite compositions, Albers sought to survey the interaction of complementary and dissonant colours, experimenting with temperament, hue and tone to conjure evocative chromatic fields. In his appraising poem, On My Homage to the Square, penned the year after Cool Rising’s execution, Albers professed that ‘all [my squares] are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction – influencing and changing each other forth and back.’ (J. Albers, ‘On My Homage to the Square’ reproduced in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012, p. 132).
By marrying ensembles of colours, Albers championed their collective abilities to rouse subjective feelings within the mind of the viewer. Whilst pictorially operating on a purely abstract plane, there is scope for immense emotive depth and psychological association. This impetus is comparable to Mark Rothko’s exposition of emotion, his monumental quadrilateral organisms of colour and form manifested by, and thus manifesting, deep expressive intensity. Similarly, like Rothko’s rectangles, the shapes in Cool Rising seem to pulsate or vibrate in communication. Whilst Albers did not possess Rothko’s cavernous sense of spirituality and took a negative attitude towards the titanic work of the American Abstract Expressionist, formal and emotional comparisons are prevalent. Writing about Albers’ work in a 2005 exhibition catalogue, Gillo Dorfles, the Italian critic and painter, claimed that ‘anyone who looks at the majority of his works with true participation, with ‘empathy’, will realize how dynamically expressive they still are, so much so that we could view them as anticipators of the mysterious chromatic aura emanating from Rothko’s large canvases’ (G. Dorfles, ‘Josef Albers in Italy’, in Josef Albers: Omaggio al Quadrato: Una Retrospettiva, exh. cat., Museo Morandi, Bologna, 2005, p. 163). Whether Rothko appreciated the work of Albers is uncertain, but the powerful stylistic and expressive influences that the Homages had on successive abstraction is undeniable.
Whilst many abstractionists used a variety of methods – Pollock’s drip technique, Rothko’s scrubbing, Newman’s zips – as a means of painting with feeling, Albers was far more direct. Taking a tube of paint, he spread its unadulterated contents straight onto the board, rejecting any form of mixing, before smoothing out the liquid with a palette knife. This application seems grounded in a form of empiricism, as though Albers attempted to keep his experiments away from any unnecessarily expressive interventions made by the human hand. Ultimately, the artist’s methods were grounded in an aspiration to investigate the very nature and substance of colour. Albers’ crucial text, Interaction of Color, produced the same year as Cool Rising before becoming one of the most seminal pieces of twentieth-century art theory, summarises these intentions on the first page: ‘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’ (J. Albers, ‘Introduction’, in Interaction of Color, Yale, 1963, p. 1).