Losnummer: 11
Jeannette Redensek
Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square: Small and large dark against light Brown, 1954
Keine Zeit ist — niemals
niemals sowie überall
überall ist immer
keine Zeit ist immer
from Josef Albers: Poems and Drawings, 1958
As a poet, Albers is terse and aphoristic. Koan-like and to the point. His poems invoke nature — flowers, creatures, sunlight, rain — as metaphors for inner life and being, or offer commentaries on what art is, what it does, how it works. Albers was curiously adverse to theory. He leaned more toward direct and practical experience. But poetry gave him a way to smuggle philosophy into his art in an unpresuming manner. The lyrical and spiritual origins of his works might seem cloaked by the acute rationality of their form. And, conversely, the expressive titles he gave to many paintings could seem to be mere dressing for an absence of expressive meaning. This is a tension at the heart of Albers’s work.
The varying color climates of the Homage to the Square do conjure poetic forms and moods. He gave Homages rendered in pastoral greens titles like Sprouting, Forest Carpet, and Vernal. The bucolic mood governed titles like Homecoming, In Mellow Wood, and Desert Dusk. The famous all-red paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s are perhaps rhapsodic odes: ardent, pulsing, and insistent. They are, however, also graced with the driest and most logical of all Albers’s titles — R-I a-1, R-III — just letters and numbers designating dimensions and compositional configuration.
In this regard, the title of Study to Homage to the Square: Small and large dark against light Brown, belongs to yet another register. It prosaically describes exactly what we are looking at: a tercet of three colors, two dark grays and a raw sienna. The poetic corollary would surely be blank verse, possibly in an elegiac mode, or something more ancient and philologically remote like the bardic or runic.
When Albers made Small and large dark against light Brown in 1954, he was just four years into painting the Homage to the Square, a project that would continue for another twenty-two years and another 2,000 paintings. The work belongs, therefore, to the early period of the Homage, the years from 1950 to 1956, when he was vigorously testing the bounds of form and material. For certain admirers of Albers, including this writer, the Homages of the early 1950s are among the most interesting and beautiful of his works. The early paintings have a feeling of immediacy, sometimes even rusticity. In those years, Albers often worked with bright, discordant color combinations, with strong contrasts of light and dark, or, as in this work, with the coloristic potentials of blacks, grays, and whites. The early Homages have, moreover, luscious, painterly surfaces that distinguish them from the Homages of the 1960s and early 1970s, which were painted with thinner, more filmic layers of pigment.
Across the twenty-six years in which he painted the Homage to the Square series, Albers employed remarkably consistent painting techniques and materials. We know a great deal about those materials because Albers inscribed the names of the grounds, paints, and varnishes he used, along with the names of the manufacturers, on the backs of his paintings. This is the case for Small and large dark against light Brown, on which he also wrote the information along the edges of the front. The work is painted on a Masonite-brand wood fiber board, Albers’s preferred support for all of his paintings. The board was first prepared with several coats of a white water-soluble casein interior house paint called Luminall, produced by the National Chemical & Manufacturing Company, Chicago, and used as a ground by Albers from 1948 through the late 1950s.
To create Small and large dark against light Brown, Albers used oil paints unmixed and straight from the tube. The paints were applied to the board in a single coat with a palette knife, beginning with the center square and moving outwards. Albers painted free-hand, without the aid of masking tape or a straight edge, using just the knife to precisely tessellate the boundaries between the squares. The center square was rendered in Illustrators Permanent Gray 4, the second square in Reilly's Neutral Gray 3, and the outermost square in Raw Sienna, from the Pre-tested brand. These were all paints produced by the New York City-based Grumbacher Company.
In the present day, painters would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of manufactured gray artist oils. From the mid-1930s through the 1960s, however, Albers used about forty different manufactured gray paints. Most of the major manufacturers produced branded lines of gray artist oils, largely to serve the needs of illustrators and designers. The Grumbacher company offered the Illustrators Permanent Gray line (five colors) and the Reilly’s Neutral Gray series (nine colors). The Chicago-based Shiva Company offered five paints in the Chapin Neutral Gray line. And the Marabu Company, based in Tamm, Baden-Württemberg, produced the Optical Gray series, in five warm and five cool tones.
The word “neutral” in the names of these gray paints is deceptive. The manufactured paints were not just simple compounds of black and white pigments, but rather included chromatic pigments that made their tonalities variable — ideal for investigations of the interaction of color and, therefore, of great interest to Josef Albers. Grays with undertones of red were liable to shift toward violet when placed in proximity to greens. A cool gray, with undertones of blue, could accentuate the warmth of a yellow, while a warm gray could push perception of a very pale yellow toward green-gray.
In 1960 Albers sent Small and large dark against light Brown from his New Haven, Connecticut, studio to his sister and brother-in-law, Elisabeth and Rudolf Marx, in Bottrop, Albers’s Westphalian hometown. The work was then given to Rudolf’s brother, Heinrich Marx, who owned it for the next two and half decades.
It was one of twelve paintings shipped to the Marxes at that time. Albers duly inscribed the number “6” on the upper right front corner of Small and large dark against light Brown. All of the paintings in the packet were given succinct, descriptive titles — Large pale gray with 2 greens, 3 light reds against aureolin, Naples yellow and light gray within 2 greens. Yes, prosaic titles; yes, like blank verse. But also titles meant to deceive. Sending art from the United States to Germany at the time was bureaucratic and expensive. To avoid the high international customs duties, Albers sent the twelve Masonite panels labeled not as fine art, not as paintings, but rather as color samples, and inscribed them accordingly on the backs of the boards and on the shipping manifest.
In the United States, Albers had allied himself with Sidney Janis, whose powerful New York gallery handled his work from 1950 to 1971. Galerie Denise René Paris represented Albers in France from 1957 to 1970. But Albers did not have steady gallery representation in Germany. While shipments of work were sent in the late 1950s from the United States to Germany for exhibition purposes, several of the sales that were initially made in Germany and in Switzerland went through the poet and critic Eugen Gomringer, who acted as a informal representative for Albers from 1958 through the early 1960s.
Albers had met Gomringer in 1955 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, where the poet was assistant to the school’s director, Max Bill. Thereafter, Gomringer was a key figure in shaping the reception of Albers’s work in Europe. Albers regularly sent him paintings on consignment, directly or through the Marxes in Bottrop. Many of these paintings found their way into interesting and important collections. Gomringer frequently wrote about Albers in newspapers and periodicals, and, in 1968 he edited the first major monograph, Josef Albers: Das Werk des Malers und Bauhausmeisters als Beitrag zur visuellen Gestaltung im 20. Jahrhundert (Josef Keller, Starnberg). And it was through Gomringer that Albers became acquainted with a younger generation of artists and designers such as Karl Gerstner, Marcel Wyss, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Daniel Spoerri.
Kunst-Sehen
Kunst vorerst
ist nicht zum ansehen
denn kunst sieht uns an
From Josef Albers: zur Verleihung des Conrad von Soest preises. Ausstellung im Landesmuseum Münster, 10. Januar – 7. Februar 1959.
The Homage to the Square’s conceptual origin, its raison d'être — the entirely subjective perception of color and the entirely deceptive effects of the interaction of colors — assumes and even demands the presence of someone who is looking. In turn, there are aspects of the paintings’ composition that can be understood to acknowledge the presence of the observer. For instance, the composition of the Homages obey the same gravitational laws that govern the world of those who look at them. The squares are not positioned concentrically, but rather sink down toward the bottom of the panel. The thin margin of white ground that Albers preserved between the frame and painted area shows the viewer, as Albers put it, “where the art begins.”
It is a matter here of what art historian Victor Stoichita has described as the self-aware image. Stoichita was concerned with genre scenes, still lifes, and portraits of the seventeenth century. Among other things, he showed how artists employed framing devices, like windows and doors, or paintings and maps on the wall, to consolidate paintings’ newly evolved status as an object of private contemplation. But Stoichita’s thesis is rich and extendable. While Albers relies on abstract modalities, Small and large dark against light Brown knows it is a painting, and it knows that you are there. It looks out, leans out, with a sober directness of address, over the very edge of the frame to say, denn Kunst sieht Sie an — art is looking at you.
Jeannette Redensek is director of the Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Josef Albers, the first volume of which will be published in spring 2027 by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Yale University Press.
Zertifikat
Die vorliegende Arbeit wird in das in Vorbereitung befindliche Josef Albers Werkverzeichnis der Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, aufgenommen.
Provenienz
Direkt aus dem Atelier des Künstlers (1960)
Elisabeth und Rudolf Marx, Bottrop (Josef Albers' Schwester und Schwager)
Heinrich Marx, Hamburg (Rudolf Marx's Bruder)
Eugen Gomringer, Erkersreuth
Kunstraum Falkenstein, Elke Dröscher, Hamburg (1984)
Privatsammlung, Baden-Württemberg
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