Study to "Affectionate" (Homage to the Square)

Executed in 1954, Josef Albers’ Study to “Affectionate” (Homage to the Square) is a study for a painting of the same year now held in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. With its warm spectrum of red, orange and yellow tones, the work stems from the ground-breaking series of Homages to the Square that Albers had initiated four years earlier. These paintings would consume the artist for the rest of his life, forming a virtual laboratory for his rigorous dissection of the chromatic spectrum. The present work captures the character of Albers’ early Homages, in which bands of colour remain clearly distinct from one another, creating a rich vortex of tension and friction. It is presented in its original frame, which – like many of his early works – comprises wood painted over in grey by the artist himself. Having spent the early part of his career teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in 1950 Albers was appointed chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University, running a course that would culminate in his seminal volume Interaction of Colour in 1963. His approach was rooted in direct observation, and his classes sought to focus his students’ attention on phenomena that might otherwise have gone unobserved: the way in which the colour of tea darkened in a glass, or the spot of light that lingers on a television screen after the set is switched off. By encouraging his students to concentrate on visual minutiae, Albers strove to shed light on the diffuse, multifarious nature of human perception. ‘In the end’, he explained, ‘the study of colour again is a study of ourselves’ (J. Albers, 1968, reproduced at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-josef-albers-11847).