Joest Albers

Josef Albers was a german artist who studied and taught at the Bauhaus throughout the 1920s, however it wasn't until later in his career when Albers started to explore the use of colour within his work. For the last 25 years of his life, Albers’s work focused on the work that would later become Homage to the Square. Albers started this body of work with ‘Treble Clefs’ a series of paintings where he initially began to explore the use of colour and tones through a standardised composition. He created hundreds of variations of three to four squares inside each other with varying colours as he considers different pallets which spoke of different climates and also favoured a structured approach to composition. The choice of colours he used as we'll as the order in which they where used where often aimed at creating an interaction. Throughout the series of paintings making up Homage to the Square Albers explored the interaction of colour in multiple ways through the use of the square. Throughout his work Albers was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement and Constructivism and represented the transition from these styles into abstract expressionism. Consequently Albers became a heavy influences on hard edge abstract expressionists in the US during the 1950s and 1960s due to his uniques use of patterns and exploration of colour after he moved to America and become a member of faculty at Yale University in 1950 which is where he first started Homage to the Square.