“Look! The colour orange is at the door and says to the yellow, “You go first.” But the yellow is also polite and says, “No, you go first.” They are like good friends and their conversation is very charming.”
—Josef Albers

Intimately scaled, its elegant tonal balance of luminous hues of cadmium and butter yellows, warm ochres, and gauzy taupe establishing a harmonious set of chromatic rhythms between its alternating bands, Study to Homage to the Square: Consonant is a paradigmatic example of Josef Albers' defining series. Nesting squares of differently hued colours one inside the other in a concentric arrangement, Albers developed a new format for describing chromatic relationships, focussing on both the ‘factual’ and ‘actual’ aspects of colour – that is to say colour as experienced in isolation versus colour that is contextual and interconnected. Adhering to this rigid geometric format and a strict, formulaic approach to the placement and size of alternating bands of pure colour, Alber’s created a new pictorial structure, a vehicle through which to expansively explore complex chromatic relationships and our perception of them. In their preoccupation with the optical and psychological effects of colour, rhythm, and space, The Homage to the Square works illustrate colour’s fundamental relativity, highlighting the extent to which visual experience might be both scientifically objective and deeply subjective. Appreciated today as one of the foremost colour theorists of his generation, it was in this most iconic and groundbreaking body of work that Albers cemented himself as an early pioneer of Abstract Minimalism. Introducing a set of formal restrictions through the imposition of this geometric arrangement and careful control of colour and optical effect, Albers articulated the core conceptual aims and intentions that the movement would go on to develop. 

 

Matrices of Colour

 

Albers first commenced work on the series in 1950, going on to produce some 2,200 Homage to the Square paintings until his death in 1976, meticulously recording all the colours and combinations he worked with. Keen to maintain as much consistency in the execution and presentation of these works as possible, Albers used a mathematically derived format involving the presentation of several superimposed squares which appear to sit or float one on top of one another. Rendered in unmixed oil paint, squeezed directly from the tube and expertly applied to the reverse of a Masonite board with a palette knife, Albers consciously avoided the ‘expressive’ brushstroke, striving to minimise the presence of the artist’s hand in the work. And yet, these smooth, flat planes of colour are anything but static, appearing instead to move forward or recede depending on the manner in which they interact with the surrounding hues. As the artist described, ‘Seeing several of these paintings next to each other makes it obvious that each painting is an instrumentation in its own. This means that they are all of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction,’ⁱ Dropping the central square down to the lower edge of the composition, Albers further activated the interactions between the bands of colour, encouraging the eye to register a simultaneous movement toward the centre and upward from the lower edge.
 

In its complex balance of chromatic relations and optical rhythms, Study to Homage to the Square: Consonant encapsulates what Albers conceptualised the Homage series to be - not simply artworks in their own right, but an instrument for exploring what, for the artist, was the defining aspect of painting itself – ‘colour acting.'ⁱⁱ  With an uninterrupted outer margin of gauzy ecru tones, the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to the rippling vibrancy of the canvas’ central squares, whose rhythmic interplays of gold and yellow hues create a radiating effect outward towards the edges of the painting. At their core sits a still, more aphotic square executed in warm ochre tones whose darker hue both anchors and accentuates the vibrancy of the other squares. The overall effect is compositionally and optically more complex, the cooler taupe tones of its outer band appearing to create space for the warm ochre square nestled in the centre, this gentle rhythm counterpointed by the tonal juxtaposition of the luminous band of cadmium yellow towards the outer band. In its alternating rhythms and spatial complexity Study to Homage to the Square: Consonant especially recalls Kelly Feeny’s discussion of the series whereby the ’Homages operate like doors – physically, optically, psychologically, and metaphorically. They are entrances, exists, and thresholds, beginnings and endings.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Bauhaus Legacies

 

With its elegant colouring and contrasting chromatics, this 1957 work exemplifies Albers’ lifelong engagement with the dynamic properties of colour, encapsulating both the breadth and ambition of his artistic and pedagogical pursuits. A German émigré, Albers relocated to America in 1933 following the Nazi Party’s rise to power, joining a wave of artists and intellectuals then influencing early twentieth century European modernism to the United States. Their energy and assimilation into American society in turn lent impressive impetus to America’s own burgeoning modernist movement. As a distinguished faculty member at Black Mountain College and later Yale University, Albers played a crucial role in shaping this artistic landscape, counting figures such as Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Eva Hesse among his students.

 

Although Albers began his Homage to the Square series in 1950—the year he and his wife, artist Anni Albers, moved to New Haven—the conceptual foundations of the series trace back to his earliest explorations of colour and light’s visual and psychological effects. His fascination with colour theory was first cultivated as a student and later expanded upon as a teacher at the Bauhaus school in Weimar during the 1920s. Established by architect Walter Gropius with the goal of radically rethinking conventional divisions between so-called ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts, the Bauhaus sought to dismantle the traditional hierarchies between painting and design. The study of colour was central to its curriculum, forming the core of the foundational Vorkurs (preliminary course) led by expressionist painter Johannes Itten. Just as Albers’s Homage paintings function as pedagogical tools, Itten taught colour theory using a Farbkreis (colour circle) he devised in 1921 as a reinterpretation of conventional colour wheels. By flattening a sphere to help students better comprehend the relationships between primary, secondary, and tertiary colours within a single plane, Itten’s colour circle revealed the vast possibilities of the ‘kingdom of colours,’ which, as he theorised, contained ‘multidimensional possibilities […] Each individual colour is a universe in itself.’^iv

 

As the first Bauhaus student invited to join the faculty, Albers continued to refine these ideas as both an artist and educator, first in Europe and later in the United States. His minimalist yet systematic approach influenced a generation of 1960s artists, including Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Frank Stella, whose own use of concentric squares—though conceptually distinct—emphasised the symmetrical and graphically reductive qualities that became vital to the evolution of abstract painting. The Homage series also engages in a dialogue with Mark Rothko’s emotionally charged canvases, where colour conveys expressive and affective depth. While Rothko’s works evoke a more subjective experience, Albers’s paintings offer a structured, analytical approach to colour contrasts—the culmination of a decades-long, collaborative inquiry into the essence of colour by Albers and his Bauhaus colleagues. In this way, Josef Albers’s work stands as a hallmark of the intellectual rigour of European modernism, which played a pivotal role in shaping mid-century American painting and securing abstraction’s status as the dominant expressive mode of its time.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Between 1950 and his death in 1976, Josef Albers created some 2,200 works related to his Hommage to the Square series. Immediately recognisable, works from this series are held in major collections all around the world and were first featured in a major touring exhibition organised by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964, which travelled to 22 venues in the United States and Latin America.
   

• In 1971, Albers became the first living artist to be honoured with a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2016, representation of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation passed to David Zwirner Gallery, followed by a series of global exhibitions (Zwirner; Guggenheim) and record prices for the artist at auction.
   

• Sharing its title with a sister work now held in the collection of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Tennessee, Study to Homage to the Square: Consonant exemplifies this defining series, its gentle harmonies and internal rhythms especially evoked by its title.

 

 

 

 

ⁱ Josef Albers, quoted in Josef Albers, exh. cat., The Mayor Gallery, London, 1989, p. 31.

ⁱⁱ Josef Albers, in Josef Albers: Formulation Articulation, London, 2006, p. 29.

ⁱⁱⁱ Kelly Feeney, Joseph Albers: Works on Paper, Alexandria, 1991, p. 86.

^iv Johannes Itten, The Art of Colour, New York, 1961, p. 117.