Study for Homage to the Square: “Centered” (work of art)
Artwork Info
Key Ideas
- This painting is part of the artist’s Homage to the Square series. The series includes more than 1,000 paintings of nested squares that explore how different colors interact with one other. Based on the colors Albers used, his squares appear to move toward or away from the viewer.
- Albers kept careful notes about the paint colors he used in each painting. He often wrote these notes on the backs of his paintings.
- The paint colors used in this work, from the center square to the outermost square, are Pure Cadmium Red Deep (Rhenish brand), Mars Yellow (Bocour brand), Golden Ochre (Shiva brand), and Naples Yellow (Permanent Pigments brand). Albers used a cadmium red at the center of Centered. Cadmium red became commercially available to artists in 1910. It offered an alternative to the traditional vermillion red.
- The artist was a color theorist who wrote a bestselling book about color and how to teach color theory.
- Albers taught art for 35 years. In 1933 he became the first art teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Learn More
Josef Albers created this painting as part of his Homage to the Square series. The series explores human perceptions of color and how different colors or hues interact with one another. Homage to the Square includes over 1,000 paintings of squares that appear to expand and recede. The simple shapes allow the colors to be the focus of the painting. Albers’ “optical illusion” paintings helped influence the optical, or op art, movement. Op artists used geometric shapes, abstract patterns, and contrasting colors to create artworks that trick the eye.
Every perception of colour is an illusion . . . we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.
Josef Albers
His approach to painting was careful and mathematical. Albers applied paints directly from the tube using a palette knife, and he wrote the names of the colors he used on the backs of his canvases. The paint colors used in this work, from the center square to the outermost square, are Pure Cadmium Red Deep (Rhenish brand), Mars Yellow (Bocour brand), Golden Ochre (Shiva brand), and Naples Yellow (Permanent Pigments brand). Albers used a cadmium red at the center of Centered. Cadmium red became commercially available to artists in 1910. It offered an alternative to the traditional vermillion red.
If one says ‘Red’ and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.
Joseph Albers
Albers was an influential artist and art teacher. He taught at the Bauhaus, a famous design school in Germany, until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then sought refuge in the United States and was hired as the first art teacher at Black Mountain College. This liberal arts school near Asheville, North Carolina, emphasized art as an essential part of learning. In 1963 Albers wrote a book titled Interaction of Color. It is still a bestseller that is used in teaching visual arts today.
Additional Resources
Resources for Teachers
- Explore a lesson plan for creating color collages.
- Review an enrichment activity about Black Mountain College, an art school in North Carolina where Josef Albers taught from 1933 until 1949.
- Read the artist’s biography and view more examples of his work.
Resources for Students
- Read an article about color theory and how it can be used to create optical illusions.
- Watch a video to learn how to create Albers-inspired artwork.
- Play a game to learn about color theory.
- Play a game to test your understanding of color theory.
Images
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Study for Homage to the Square: “Centered”
A painting of four nested squares. The innermost square is a deep bright red. It is surrounded by a golden brown square, which is surrounded by a dark golden-yellow square. The dark golden-yellow square is surrounded by a bright warm yellow square.