Yoga was probably far from Josef Albers’s mind when he was working on the series of color-saturated pictures he called “Homage to the Square” beginning in 1950. Yet deep meditation was built into the project, which went on for a quarter of a century, sustained by the almost reflexive focus that comes with long practice of a craft.
In Albers’s case practice really did make perfect. The hundreds of same-size paintings in the “Homage” group are about as faultless as art gets. Each is composed of three or four precisely nested squares. The color in each square is calculated to interact with and transform the colors around it. The paint surfaces look machine tooled but aren’t. They’re sensuously if minimally textured, like skin.
Albers’s overall aim was to create an impression of effortless, inevitable harmony, which, of course, demands hard work. And labor is the subject of “Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper” at the Morgan Library & Museum, a show not about finished products but about the constant hands-on research and experimentation, the hitting, missing and learning-as-you-go correcting that went into them.
Hands-on came naturally to Albers, born in Germany in 1888. One grandfather was a carpenter, another a blacksmith. His father was a joiner and wall painter who worked with stained glass. Although Albers studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form: painting done with light.
The Bauhaus spirit, with its utopian-functionalist perspective on the intersection of art and design, shaped him. It led him, as a teacher, to emphasize large ideas and the development of those ideas through the mastery of materials. It was at the Bauhaus that he decisively embraced abstraction.
In 1933, with Hitler in power, Albers took a job in the United States as director of a new experimental school, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where, with his wife, the textile artist Anni Albers, he would teach for 16 years. There he started painting again, inspired by art and architecture he saw — weavings, ceramics, ancient stepped temples, brightly painted adobe houses — on vacations in Mexico and Latin America in the 1930s and ’40s.
The earliest pieces at the Morgan are small smudgy studies, in oil paint on blotting paper, of triangular and X-shaped patterns that may have pre-Columbian sources. Pretty soon though, we see him settling on more solidly architectural forms, horizontal in orientation, made of receding planes that interlock ambiguously in space, a little like the eye-teasing structures of his Dutch contemporary M. C. Escher.
By 1947, in a series of oil studies called “Variant/Adobe,” spatial game playing has all but run its course. The once three-dimensional planes have been flattened out and packed into blocklike horizontal rectangles, their width broken by two small, widely spaced vertical rectangles. The resulting form is clearly a diagrammatic image of a low-slung Mexican house facade with windows or doors, though it also suggests a face with staring eyes. Far from being a dry-minded formalist Albers tended to attribute human traits to geometric shapes and to relate to them personally.
But the big change is the emphasis on color over geometry as a source of dynamism, and with this shift the buildup to “Homage to the Square” has begun. In the show it advances in stages. The large rectangles start to look somewhat less houselike and a little more like what they are: stacks of superimposed colored planes. And as if the memory of stained-glass has returned, Albers turns his attention to luminosity in color, paint as light.
In one “Variant/Adobe” study overlapping planes of vermilion and marigold-orange seem to radiate a mirage-inducing midday desert heat. In another a patch of pale pink against a midnight-blue ground evokes a wash of moonlight. In both cases colors glow and modulate, lighten and darken through strategic placement in the vicinity of other colors.
Generally Albers used paint straight out of the tube and applied it, unmixed with other paint, with a palette knife.
Keenly alert to subtleties of hue and value, he bought the same color paints made by different manufacturers and compared them side by side, noting the names of colors and brands in pencil in the margins of the oil-on-paper studies, a habit that persisted into the “Homage” series.
The early studies for “Homage” are curious items: blackish, brownish, mulchy things, muddied with coats of varnish. The double-windowed rectangle has been compacted into a dense, dark square, sometimes with a smaller square centered inside. Color is out of the picture for a while, except for black, white and gray. This is the palette we find in the 1950 “Homage to the Square (A),” the very first completed painting in the series of paintings and prints that would absorb Albers’s attention until his death in 1976.
That first painting is in the exhibition, which was originally assembled by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany. (Isabelle Dervaux, a Morgan curator, oversaw the installation in New York.) With its boxes-within-boxes format, it sets the geometric model for all the paintings that would follow, though it gives little hint of the wealth of color to come, the truly visionary component of Albers’s art.
I clearly remember seeing a show at the Sidney Janis Gallery nearly 20 years ago of all-red “Homage” paintings that pulsed like a heartbeat. As your eyes moved around the room, scarlet deepened into burgundy, then into magenta, with transitions between colors and tones as gradual and dramatic as if produced by stage lighting. With each repeat glance associations floated up: to blood, roses, stoplights, vigil lights, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Ethiopian icons and tantric paintings.
I’ve always thought of Albers, who was Roman Catholic, as a Christian version of a tantric artist-yogi, tantrism being a spiritual discipline based partly on the tension between sensuality and control. He has come down in many art history accounts as a theory-bound puritan, but in reality he was a besotted lover, obsessed, as lovers are, by a single object of desire, which in his case was color.
He once said that the geometry in “Homage to the Square” was “only the dish to hold my craziness about color in.” You sense this in the concluding lineup of studies in the show, with their fragrant, melting but not quite line-dissolving blocks of saffron and milky green, and margins penciled with the names of colors like mantras and lined with comparative samples of pigment as rich as harmonium chords.
A beautiful book called “Tantra Song”, published by Siglio Press in Los Angeles last year, makes a startling apt companion to the Morgan show. The abstract pictures from western India reproduced in the book may be geometrically more diverse and ritually more specific than the “Homage” studies, but both kinds of paintings share a basic function and drive.
In the Siglio book the French poet Franck André Jamme writes that the sole purpose of tantric paintings is “to open up the mind of the one who gazes at them, leading to a more acute level of consciousness, and ultimately awakening.” The catalog for the Morgan records that when Albers was asked to name his primary purpose as an artist and teacher, he replied, “I want to open eyes.”
He meant his own and ours.
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