Homage to the Square: White Setting

Artist Josef Albers (American, 1888-1976)

Date1959

DimensionsPainting: 36 1/2 × 36 1/2 × 1 1/4 in. (92.7 × 92.7 × 3.2 cm)

MediumOil on masonite

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of the Woodward Foundation in memory of Sarah R. Woodward, wife of Stanley Woodward

Object number

1985.134

Not on View

Label TextDeceptively simple, Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square: White Setting is one of a series of hundreds of paintings of superimposed squares that the pioneer color abstractionist made from 1950 until his death in 1976. Albers wrote of the paintings in 1965, “They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colors used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction—influencing and changing each other forth and back.” To aid in achieving the purist sense of the colors, Albers applied the paint directly from the tube, spreading it thinly on the canvas with a palette knife. Each color in his Homage paintings was chosen for the way it acts upon the other colors in the painting. The paintings exploit the inherent subjectivity of color: Albers, in his book Interaction of Color (1963), explained how our experience of color can change based on its hue (saturation), its placement in relationship to other colors, light, dimension—even our personality.Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, Everything is Rhythm: Mid-Century Art & Music, April 6, 2019-February 23, 2020.