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“…but it is not common to see natural squares around us. Thus to most of us they appear as a man-made form. Is that too poetical? To me a square has a seat. It sits” (Josef Albers in conversation with John H. Holloway and John A. Weil, Leonardo, Cambridge, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1970, p. 463).

When the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson spent time with Josef Albers, he referred to the group of works for which the artist is now most renowned as “Homages to the Square” because their central forms were unbound by true 90-degree angles and straight lines. This study for the painting Yellow Climate, that predated its final 1962 state by one year, is remarkably emblematic of Cartier-Bresson’s view, and also of Albers’s corresponding path of experimenting with color and composition. Stemming from the discourses on vision and proportion intrinsic to his Bauhaus roots, Josef Albers’s influential pedagogy at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, as well as at Yale University, stressed the importance of original visual expressions, and innovation generally. His own oeuvre following this teaching period illustrates the example he led. Concentrating on the mathematically unpredictable nature of form, he organized streamlined shapes removed from symbolism in order to reveal dynamic chromatic balances. His art that accordingly investigated “modern problems” in terms of “better forms” established his outlook on cultural progress measured directly in space and dimension.

Study for Homage to the Square: Yellow Climate is moreover a key manifestation of these topics that accompanied Albers’s almost scientific approach. More complex than the version that followed, fields of cool and ethereal golden hue here encircle a near translucent grey intermediary. The atmospheric nature of this structure emerges because of its precise yet proximate differences in tone. Instead of rigidly outlining the squares, Albers creates diffuse, disappearing borders of juxtaposition that align with the “vanishing” of distinctions defined in his celebrated discourse Interaction of Color, which was published in 1963, soon after the execution of this lot. He likewise later described his delicate push and pull phenomenon as analogous to the aesthetics of cumulus clouds. Stating that the edges between their greys and the beginnings of the sky cannot be distinguished, Albers laid the groundwork for conceptualizing his Homages. The vibrancy of the yellows applied here depends on relationships of light intensity. Optically stimulating as a result of highly subtle variations in value in addition to tint gradation, the luminosity of this piece is therefore extraordinarily rational while being architecturally unrestricted.