Josef Albers - Homage to the Square - image-1

Lot 505 D

Josef Albers - Homage to the Square

Auction 1091 - overview Cologne
01.06.2017, 14:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 250.000 € - 350.000 €
Result: 616.000 € (incl. premium)

Josef Albers

Homage to the Square
1961

Oil on aluminium. 50.5 x 50.5 cm. Framed. Monogrammed and dated 'A 61'. Signed and dated 'Albers 1961' verso on aluminium and with multiline information on the work. - Minor traces of age.

This work from 1961 pertains to the significant series Homage to the Square and originally comes from the collection of the Swiss author and founder of concrete poetry, Eugen Gomringer. The strictly geometric arrangement forms the basis of his iconic paintings with which Josef Albers studied the impact of colour. In the present exhibit of four squares boxed into one another, the luminous colour range extends from yellow via ochre to orange.
'The Homages can not be assigned to a specific school but are rather an individual and uncommon expression of fundamental human needs. Gombrich sees them as an “unparalleled manifestation of a centuries-old basic motif of artistic creativity, that is to say the search for an economy of means”. In his view, some of Albers' objectives were only brought into focus at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century when the Beuron art school began to value monumentality and proportion, and when Hodler first took interest in parallelism and formal organisation. Despite all this, he postulates the thesis that the driving force behind the Homages to the Square and Albers' other series are timeless and universal. In his opinion, these works arise from “the wish to impose restrictions on oneself in order to then overcome them. One has to concentrate so as to ascertain how much can be achieved with a single or with multiple elements”. This tradition exists in music as well as in fine arts, and there are “also similarities to poetry”. Gombrich compares Albers to a Mongolian Emperor who spent his whole life arranging two lines. Both of their concern was to “discover how much can be achieved with the simplest of means; they produced variations of every description in order to prove their inexhaustibility”.' (Nicholas Fox Weber, Der Künstler als Alchimist, in: Josef Albers, Retrospektive, exhib.cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York i.a. Cologne 1988, p. 44).

Certificate

The present work is to be included in the Josef Albers catalogue raisonné of the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut.

Provenance

Eugen Gomringer collection, Switzerland; private collection, South Germany