Josef Albers joined the Bauhaus first as a student in 1920, and later as one of its most esteemed teachers,
in 1925. The Bauhaus impressed upon him a love of abstract design in color that would inform his work
over his long and influential career as an artist and teacher. By 1933, the Bauhaus was hounded into
closure by the Nazi authorities, and shortly thereafter Albers and his wife fled to America. The couple
would become citizens in 1939, and in the following decades they would become both emissaries from
the vanished Bauhaus as well as radical innovators on their new turf.

In 1950, the Albers moved to New Haven, where Josef took a position at Yale University. This year also
marked the beginning of Albers’ mesmerizing and exhaustive series, Homage to the Square– hundreds of canvases featuring a set of superimposed squares of different colors. Although the simple geometry of the titular square is the ostensible subject of these works, the true genius of the series is in the almost
scientific relationship of three carefully chosen colors. The effects of these arrangements are both
aesthetic as well as optical, shifting perception of tone, value, scale, and depth. The series has been
influential on generations of painters, from Color Field and Minimalism to color theory ciricula
throughout the world, as well as informing the science of optics and materials technologies.