Homage to the Square Book

Influential teacher, writer, painter and color theorist Josef Albers was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty. By 1933, when the Nazis forced the school to close, Albers had become one of its best-known artists and teachers. Having migrated with his wife Anni to the U.S., where he taught at Black Mountain College and at Yale, Albers began to experiment with the optical effects of simple color combinations. The experimentation blossomed into a lifelong obsession that would culminate in his best-known series of paintings, Homage to the Square, in which he painted several differently-colored squares within larger squares in order to illustrate his theory that alterations in environment, shape and light would produce changes in color. This edition contains impeccable reproductions of Albers' famous series, which beautifully illustrate the artist's primary thesis, that the discrepancy between visual information received by the retina and what the mind perceives proves that this information is not intrinsic to color itself, but is dependent on its relationship with its surroundings.Read More