CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/23/2014

Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect

“Before one lays eyes on a genuine Homage to the Square painting by Josef Albers,” Jeanette Redensek writes in Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect, one of our most substantial and beautiful books this season, “it is quite possible that one has already come across his signature composition in a hundred iterations: as illustrations, prints, postcards, posters, postage stamps, note cards, refrigerator magnets, mouse pads, sofa pillows, area rugs and tote bags. It is a revelation, then, to see one of Albers’ Homage to the Square paintings in person for the first time. The surfaces of Albers’ works are velvety and animated. The visible, even strokes of the palette knife, and the variations in the densities of the pigments from the color to color, from the square to square, combine to create a shimmering transparency of color. What might have appeared as a coolly intellectual, geometrical proposition in reproduction is revealed as a luminous, painterly incandescence in real life.” Study for Homage to the Square, Now (1962) is reproduced from Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect.