Lot 611 D

The artist and teacher Josef Albers is considered to be one of the most important mediators between European avant-garde and US-American painting. Thus, his influence on the creation of minimal art in a picture such as 'Warm Welcom' from the series 'Homage to the Square' is obvious. In 1950, on the basis of this series of pictures, Albers began to sound out the visual perception of colours and their interaction in various combinations - a problem that he also theoretically examined, in his book 'Interaction of Color', published in 1963, for example. The two-dimensional picture composition of this series, for which Albers defined four variants and five formats, results from the vertically centred, horizontally downward orientated, displaced layout, of differently coloured squares of various sizes. The colours - Albers recorded the colours he used for 'Warm Welcom' on the verso and on the recto in the area of the white margin under the stretcher bar - rhythmize the progressive scaling of the squares and lend them spatial impact. His serial and enquiring working methods made Jospef Albers an influential teacher in the USA, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland among others and also for John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and later at the art department of Yale University, i.e. for Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Before emigrating to the States in 1933, he had taught at Bauhaus in Weimar. Previously, following an apprenticeship as a house painter, his artistic education had brought him to Essen where he attended the arts and crafts school (later Folkwang school).