Homage to the Square – Insert

In 1933 Albers left Nazi Germany for the United States, where he taught generations of American painters, as he said, to "make open the eyes." While American artists in the postwar period were attacking their canvases with big gestures and gobs of paint, Albers insisted that "thinking and planning" were still important, and that "without order and control we will drown...in chaos and decay."

The artist worked on his Homage to the Square series for twenty-five years, applying pigments straight from the tube in strict rectangles. Albers wanted the viewer to concentrate on the relationships between the colors and the sense of depth and movement they created. Here, the innermost brilliant yellow square radiates out of a neutral space, where pale outlying bands faintly echo the pulses of the core color.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006