During the summer of 1950, when Josef Albers was teaching a summer course at Harvard University, he produced a 76.2 cm by 76.2 cm square painting. It featured 3 squares in 3 different colors (light gray, anthracite and black) suspended one in front of the other on different planes. It was titled Homage to the Square (A).

This painting constitutes the start of his most influential and his most representative series. Today, viewed as one of the most important investigations into the properties of color, the Homage to the Square series which would become his greatest legacy. With it he became part of the history of 20th century art.

Between the summer of 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers created around 2,200 paintings. He restricted himself to 4 compositional configurations and only changed the colors he used, a variation of commercially manufactured artists paints, unmixed and straight from the tube, applied with a palette knife to white primed masonite boards. Significantly, Albers did not positioned the squares concentrically. He made them sink slightly toward the bottom of the panel signaling that the painting lived in the same gravity-bound universe as the viewers themselves. That simple tweak endowed the Homage to the Square with extraordinary vitality. Now the painting had a top and bottom, a vertical orientation and a bilateral symmetry. The Homage was born already moving.