Homage to the Square: Saturation

As both an artist and a teacher (first at the Bauhaus in Germany, and later at the renowned Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and Yale University, where he taught such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Eva Hesse), Josef Albers tremendously influenced the development of modern art in the 1950s and 1960s. This work forms part of Albers’ most important series, Homage to the Square, which the artist began in 1949 and continued until his death in 1976. In each of the over one thousand works that comprise the series, Albers used a single geometric shape to explore the range of perceptual effects that could be achieved solely through colour. His theories about the variability of human perception had a decisive impact on the development of Minimalism, Colour-field painting and Op art, among other important artistic movements in the twentieth century.