Josef Albers series Homage to The Square is the pinnacle of abstraction. If you believe in abstraction. A closer look at this extraordinary art may cause you to question that belief.
If there was an artist that I thought least likely to have been influenced by the art and architecture of México, until recently Josef Albers would probably be close to the top off my list. I think of the joyful, ebullient, whimsical colors and decorative designs of much of the folk-art of Mexico, or the more somber, brooding, emotionally charged palette of the massive post-revolution murals, and my first thought is that they seem to be in direct conflict with the analytical, intellectual, precise discipline that governs the paintings of Josef Albers. But of course the arts of México are much more than this.
Albers contemporaries at Die Brücker School as well as the other German Expressionists at the time created art that nearly accosted its viewers. Albers pieces elicit a calmer response. His paintings draw you into their complex subtleties, demanding a more nuanced, thoughtful interaction. But the austerity of Josef Albers' signature paintings, their stark simplicity, and their presumed lack of subject have caused more than one critic to refer to Albers’ work as cold, austere, intellectual, dispassionate. But with a little probing, those willing to look beneath the surface will find that his reserved exterior belies not only a passionate curiosity for art and design, but an affinity for the ancient, non-representational aesthetics that he and his wife, Anni encountered all over México and Latin America.
"Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art, and here, it is thousands of years old." Josef Albers wrote to his friend and colleague at the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky in the spring of 1936.
One might even argue that his arrangements of nested squares and rectangles seem to share the very DNA of the economy of means and purity of geometric forms of pre-Columbian architecture and the simple yet powerful presence of the clay figures he obsessively collected. México was a validation of all he held to be true about art.
Between 1935 and 1967, Josef Albers and his wife, Anni made over 13 trips to México, visiting major archeological sites including Teotihuacán, Chichén Itzá, and Monte Albán. Their ideas about modern art were profoundly shaped by México as they encountered art and artifacts that changed the way they thought about material, color, abstraction, and art itself. “Monte Albán is one of the greatest experiences of my life,” he records in a letter during one of his first outings to the Zapotec ruins.
For the Albers, pre-Columbian art and architecture offered reassuring proof of the enduring vitality of artistic abstraction, a convincing justification of the burgeoning Bauhaus movement. And within the scale and monumentality of the ancient stone architecture, as well as the stark simplicity of the adobe homes, Josef also found here a reflection of his own geometry, the repetition and the subtle nuances of the interplay of light that so fascinated him.
Josef viewed pre-Columbian craftsmen as his spiritual comrades and México as a point of origin for the kind of truthful aesthetic experience modern abstract artists had been searching for.
"I cannot agree with some historians who insist on calling this art primitive", he once said, “In my opinion such work shows not only a highly developed psychological understanding of human nature, it also shows besides an extremely strong visionary power, a very cultivated artistic discipline.”
Josef Albers' was a photographer as well as an artist, but his photography was personal, a method of documentation rather than an art in its own right.
His photos of the pre-Columbian architecture of Mexico served as his archive of thoughts and ideas, a source of inspiration. Although they had a great influence on his artwork, they were never exhibited together until the recent retrospect at the Guggenheim last year.
He would paste sections of contact sheets together creating a montage of images capable of showing pre-Columbian architecture in what he referred to as "active volumes". For him, “active volume” was the capacity of matter to be animated from within. He struggled to find words for evoking the half-physical, half-spiritual quality and vivaciousness of the architecture and art he encountered in Mexico. His photomontages depict objects and architecture captured from different angles, at different times of the day, under subtle shifting light, that provide a sequence of perspectives that seem animated, creating an almost cinematic volume - like a time-lapse sequence rendered in a single image. It's as if he were trying to photograph it in the same way that he experienced it - walking around it, scanning left and right, climbing the stairs, looking up and looking down, focusing on the detail and then backing away to view how it defined the surrounding landscape and how it was in turn defined by it.
The morning sun splayed across the stark geometry of adobe walls in the morning was as intriguing in its nuance as the long shadows of evening moving slowly across those same walls. The sun cascading down the side of an ancient pyramid cast each step in a subtly different light, and Albers rigorously explored the notion that color is perceived only in relationship to other colors, and that shifting color is what allows us to perceive form and volume.
Albers' sketches and studies during this time shed light on the artist's methodical approach to color and form. Each has its own inner light, scale and spatial rhythm.
Notes in the margins indicate specific colors and their changing interaction when placed next to one another, aspect ratios, even specific brands of paint.
México provided distance, physically and intellectually from Josef's years of teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar. It allowed him to approach Modernism from a very different perspective, to rethink his approach to art, and to attempt to inculcate the essence of what he had discovered into his teaching. "Regarding the modern art problem", Albers once told his students, "I would like to give you to consider a series of formulations that occurred to me in México:
Albers' focus on Méxican architecture included not only the monumental but also the vernacular, the mundane. The simple adobe homes with their thick walls, deeply inset doors, flat roofs, and shuttered windows could be visually reduced to a series of intersecting planes and geometric volumes, interplays of light and shadow, and held great appeal to the Bauhaus aesthetic that "Less is More".
He produced a series he called "Variant/Adobe", clearly following the dictate of modernism to reduce the complex to its most simple form. Under Josef Albers eye and hand, this becomes practical application in near-perfect synchronization with modernist theory. Here, the three dimensional structures are unfolded and laid flat, the doors or windows consistently placed, but alternately colored light or dark, day or night, almost like the product of a positive or negative photograph, or the same house viewed under the ever shifting light as the sun arced across the sky. Viewed as a series these images shimmer as if a mirage, creating an almost hallucinatory wavering of form that evokes the "truthfulness of art", and the spirit and vitality that so drew him to México.
The steep pyramid steps and intersecting planes that so appealed to Albers in his photographs also seemed to translate into angled planes and diagonal lines in many of his paintings during this time, as did the concept of "accordion pleated" space; the concept that a three dimensional object could also be folded flat and thus reveal all sides of itself in a single image. The study below could be a deconstructed modernist house plan from the drawing boards of the Bauhaus, or an image derived from a one of his photographs of a coiled serpent at Tenayuca.
Albers produced a remarkable pen and ink drawing that would seem to presage much of his art that would follow and influence many of the artists of the twentieth century. It's called "Study for Sanctuary" (1941-42). It is both volumetric, flat, and something in between at the same time. It is both descending and ascending, both platformed pyramid and windows on an adobe house, both monumental Mayan architecture, and homage to the square. There is astonishing movement that almost breaks free of its rectangular composition, and yet anchor's itself solidly on the page, and an implication that suggests a monumental pyramid viewed simultaneously from many different angles. One might suggest that in the following years "The Sanctuary" was slowly deconstructed, simplified, reduced to its essence and gradually morphed into "Homage to The Square", but with the same ambiguity of dimension, both pushing toward and pulling away from the observer, receding and protruding, the colors flickering, almost vibrating one against the other.
To speculate on a specific path from inspiration to creation would be a precarious journey, but the colors and patterns of life in México are to be found everywhere in Albers' artwork from the brilliant embroidery of the huipal, jorongo, and rebozos of the indigenous people, to the deep earth tones of the sun drenched and mud splattered adobe homes, to the monumental architecture covered in the dust of millennia.
Alber's series "Homage to The Square" is often thought of as the penultimate example of abstract art, a pure, intellectual study of the interplay and impermanence of color.
But as Roberta Smith of the NYTimes notes in a review of Josef Albers' Guggenheim retrospect in 2018, perhaps a more accurate title may have been "Homage to México".
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"Peregrinos y Pasajeros"
This is the second in a series that highlights "Pilgrims and PassersBy"; artists and how their travels through México have influenced their work.
See also
Sean Scully; The Years in Mexico
Threads: Anni Albers, Modernism and the Ancient Arts of México