Focus Works of Art | Lesson Plans

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Focus Works of Art
Study for Homage to the Square: "High Spring"

Josef Albers (American, 1888 - 1976) Study for Homage to the Square: "High Spring", 1962

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Black Mountain College and Mid-20th-Century Art in North Carolina
"High Spring" is one of more than 1,000 works by Josef Albers in which the artist explores color relationships by nesting a series of contrasting squares within each other. In this work, Albers examines how shades of blue, green and gray interact. The series goes beyond the association of colors with emotions (such as calm or melancholy with blue) to how the eye actually views color. Some combinations of colors appear to make the squares move in space. Other combinations produce a phenomenon called "after-image" that occurs when a viewer breaks a prolonged focus on an image to rest his or her eyes on a blank space and then perceives a reflection of the image with complementary colors and opposite light values. Albers published Interaction of Color in 1963 after more than a decade of teaching color at Yale University. Before Albers taught at Yale, he guided the art program at a small, experimental school in the Mountains of North Carolina called Black Mountain College.

How did Albers come to Black Mountain College in North Carolina?
In 1933, a small group of disaffected faculty members at Rollins College in Florida decided to start a new college that would place its emphasis on the arts and communal living, rather than on required courses and grades. They found land and a facility at Black Mountain outside Asheville, North Carolina, bringing avant-garde artists to a region known for traditional crafts. On the recommendation of Philip Johnson at New York's Museum of Modern Art, school organizers offered Josef Albers refuge from Nazi Germany to guide the art curriculum at Black Mountain. Josef and his wife, Anni, had both studied at the Bauhuas, a modernist art and design school in Germany, where Josef became a master teacher. The school closed under pressure from the Nazi regime in August 1933, and the Alberses came to North Carolina that fall.

Internationally renowned artists that studied with Albers include Robert Rauschenberg and Asheville native Kenneth Noland. In addition to teaching, Albers helped bring other well-known artists to Black Mountain to teach at the school's summer arts program. Albers left the school in 1949, but the program continued into the 1950s. Nationally regarded artists who taught at Black Mountain in summer include painters Lyonel Feininger (1945), Jacob Lawrence (1946), Robert Motherwell (1945 and 1951), and Franz Kline(1952).

How did Albers produce the works of art?
Albers began work on the series Homage to the Square in 1950, only a year after he left Black Mountain. Each work was painted on the rough side of a piece of Masonite, a type of fiberboard. Albers would prime the panels with at least six coats of paint. He used unmixed paint that he applied to the panels in a thin and even coat straight from the tube, using a palette knife. Albers had different types of fluorescent lighting (some that cast warm tones, and some cool tones) in his studio that allowed him to assess the color interactions in different lighting environments. He often worked at night and noted that painting from a natural light source was not necessary, since most art is not viewed with natural light. The exact paint names and tones are noted on the reverse side of each panel.

In an essay called "The Color in My Painting," introducing an exhibition of his works at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1962, Albers wrote of his colors:
They are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or oppose one another. The contacts, respectively boundaries, between them may vary from soft to hard touches, may mean pull and push besides clashes, but also embracing, intersecting, penetrating.