Through his Homage series Albers established an unresolved dialogue between the material facts of the painting (nested squares, oil paint, manufactured colors) and its expressive subjectivity—between “the physical fact” and “the psychic effect.” On our initial perception of these works, we create the conditions for an exchange in much the same way that we return a serve in a game of tennis (to borrow a metaphor from Nicolas Bourriaud). 11 The perceptual exercises in Albers’s series experiment with and complicate the relationship between artist, artwork, and audience, drawing attention to this relationality within the reduced format of strict geometry and color. Endnotes

Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved April 6, 2011. The book provides numerous strikingly self-explanatory examples on various visual effects and illusions to demonstrate the relativity of colors (assuring its readers that it's not our fault if we are so often misled and deceived by colors). Although the physical version only contains a selective set of such examples, many more can be found online. Albers is learning and teaching his students, through the medium of relentless attention and careful systematic analysis, about something he believes is very, very, highly relative. Fluid within perception and within the mind, to the extent that considering colour outside of its context, as an isolated quality, I think to him that would be utterly insane, since that is something it can never be. Josef Albers, in Josef Albers: Formulation Articulation (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2006), portfolio II: 29. Kerr, who knew Albers socially, emerged as a determined champion for “Interaction of Color,” by then in progress for years, and forged ahead with the project even when Albers’s exacting aesthetic standards and lapses of manner sometimes vexed him and other Press personnel. More than the typical author, Albers cared about — and knew about — fonts, typefaces, graphic design, line breaks, and printing techniques, and he was as deeply involved in the preparation of the book as physical object as he was with its content, Weber said. For a stretch, Kerr and Albers themselves stopped speaking.The mind is Binding and Combining the shapes of objects and dividing lines between things ("edge detection") all the time, and however it is doing this (we still don't really know), it seems to me that shapes, objects and lines are a lot less relative and debateable (both within the mind and beyond it) than the colours which always are sensed with and alongside them. Albers, Josef (1963). Interaction of Color. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300018462.

For colour is REALIVE and exists only relative to its context and therefore all that truly matters is if what you see as blue has the same relative relation to what you see as red green etc as everyone else which it probably does (though maybe not entirely). Coleman, Nancy (September 23, 2019). "Once Removed and Destroyed, a Modernist Mural Makes Its Return". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved February 16, 2022.a b "Elliott Museum presents 'Albers & Heirs: Josef Albers, Neil Welliver, and Jane Davis Doggett' ". Martin County Times. Martincountytimes.com. November 9, 2013 . Retrieved May 14, 2014. He asserted that color "is almost never seen as it really is" and that "color deceives continually", and he suggested that color is best studied via experience, underpinned by experimentation and observation. Hal Foster, “The Bauhaus Idea in America,” in Borchardt-Hume, Albers and Moholy-Nagy, 99. In this essay Foster claims that this “attention to ‘relationality’ is key to both Albers’s practice and his pedagogy; it might well qualify as his version of the Bauhaus idea.” Guggenheim Museum Presents Josef Albers in Mexico". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation . Retrieved February 16, 2022.

In 1963, Josef Albers published Interaction of Color, which is a record of an experiential way of studying and teaching color. As the viewer enters into a dialogue with Albers’s Homage paintings, these color interactions exceed the material form of the artwork. “Painting is color acting,” Albers wrote. “The act is to change character and behavior, mood and tempo.” 5 The Homage paintings engage the viewer’s process and understanding of visual perception, presenting ambivalent forms that demand from the viewer different decisions. Albers noted, “Some spectators are led to notice their preferred color or colors first. Others begin with ‘firsts’ in quality (i.e., high intensities in light and hue) or ‘firsts’ in quantity, measured either by extension or recurrence. . . . When it comes to reading advancing and receding color, there will rarely be agreement—regardless of convincing decisions offered by theories based on color temperature or wave length.” 6 Experience is the greatest teacher of color (i.e. an artist or designer exploring color in their practice is much more important than studying color theory by itself). Albers believed that practice precedes theory in the study of color. This is to say that through doing and practically experimenting with color, theories are produced: awakening, it seepedinto my understandingof Albers quite surreptitiously, in the form of an artifact, In 2019, his "colossal" mural, Manhattan, was reinstalled at the Walter Gropius-designed 200 Park Avenue (Metlife) Building, New York, following an almost two decade absence. “While we appreciate its importance in the art community, it just doesn’t work for us anymore,” a Metlife representative is quoted as saying, at the time of its removal (2000). [48] Two decades later, the piece is once again being hailed as the vibrant centerpiece of the building, with the Albers Foundation's director on hand for the rededication of the work: “This is what art was for him: something that could affect you, maybe gave a little bit of joy to the lives of those people rushing to their trains or rushing out of the station to their workday.” [49] Criticism [ edit ]

50th Anniversary Edition

The one word that to Josef Albers was absolute anathema was “self-expression.” He said you do not express yourself — you have to learn, you have to have these skills, and then you create something. People need delight,” said Nicholas Fox Weber ’72 M.A., executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, who has written extensively about Albers and is now at work on a Yale Press biography of his wife, the textile artist Anni Albers.