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Lot Essay
Concentric squares of opulent colour fold onto one another in Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Michoacan (1959). At the centre, a vibrant emerald gives way to a forest green which is in turn surrounded by a golden orange and then a halo of burnt sienna. Albers’ jewel tones pulse with an intoxicating intensity. The work forms part of Albers’s iconic Homage to the Square series, a chromatic exploration which the artist had begun in 1950 and would continue to until his death over two decades later. Employing the deceptively straightforward composition of three or four embedded squares, Albers created hundreds of variations in an array of dizzying, luminous colour. For Albers, the interest resided in the interplay between colours, and his painterly juxtapositions reveal a chromatic volatility; for colour to remain stable, its context must be fixed. As the artist himself explained, ‘When you really understand that each colour is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as about colour’ (J. Albers, Josef Albers: The American Years, Washington 1965, p. 28).
Although the Homages to the Square represent a prolonged investigation into the properties of colour, the present work is also a personal tribute to the Albers’ many journeys throughout Mexico; the title of the painting refers to the coastal state located in the southwest of the country. Fascinated by pre-Columbian sculptures and ceramics, Albers and his wife Anni first travelled to Mexico in 1935, and by the 1960s, they had returned more than thirteen times. In the stepped structures of such archaeological sites as Monte Albán, Mitla and Uxmal, Albers found himself drawn to the ‘spaces between the pyramids’ where the play of light produced new architectural forms (J. Albers, quoted in R. Smith, ‘Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstractions’, New York Times, 14 December 2017). This spatial fluctuation would form the foundation of his Homages to the Square. Indeed, the geometric dignity of Homage to the Square: Michoacan evokes the grandeur of these ancient temples and like its forebears, Albers’ work emanates a serene yet enduring strength.
Although the Homages to the Square represent a prolonged investigation into the properties of colour, the present work is also a personal tribute to the Albers’ many journeys throughout Mexico; the title of the painting refers to the coastal state located in the southwest of the country. Fascinated by pre-Columbian sculptures and ceramics, Albers and his wife Anni first travelled to Mexico in 1935, and by the 1960s, they had returned more than thirteen times. In the stepped structures of such archaeological sites as Monte Albán, Mitla and Uxmal, Albers found himself drawn to the ‘spaces between the pyramids’ where the play of light produced new architectural forms (J. Albers, quoted in R. Smith, ‘Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstractions’, New York Times, 14 December 2017). This spatial fluctuation would form the foundation of his Homages to the Square. Indeed, the geometric dignity of Homage to the Square: Michoacan evokes the grandeur of these ancient temples and like its forebears, Albers’ work emanates a serene yet enduring strength.