Executed in 1957, Study for Homage to the Square: Golden is an outstanding early example of Josef Albers’ celebrated Homage to the Square series. Composed of three nested squares in vibrant tones of yellow and orange, the painting is the first of two works in which Albers explored the motif of golden light; the related Homage to the Square: Golden(1958) set a new auction record for the artist in May 2026. Important works from this period are held by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, and the Josef Albers Museum.

Juxtaposing three closely calibrated colours, the present work epitomises Albers’ sustained investigation into human perception of colour and space within the two-dimensional image. The composition seems to emit a warm glow, as though light were filtering outward from within the pictorial field. Meticulously measured and arranged, the squares stage seemingly irreconcilable perceptions of flatness and depth, contraction and expansion. The edges of the larger square remain insistently planar, yet the central forms appear alternately to advance and recede, generating spatial movement through colour and composition.

This perceptual instability lies at the heart of the Homage series, developed from experiments begun around 1949 and formalised from 1950 onward. By holding the composition almost constant while radically altering its colours, Albers created an extraordinarily concentrated framework for examining the interaction of colour. As Nicholas Fox Weber, art historian and director of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, has observed, “The idea is that perception and truth are not the same.”

The luminosity of the Homages also has deep roots in Albers’ earlier practice. At the Bauhaus, where he studied and taught between 1920 and 1933, glass became one of his principal materials. His earliest works incorporated salvaged fragments of coloured glass, allowing illumination to pass through them so that light itself became an active element of the composition. 

The specificity of Albers’ process in the Homages reflects his preoccupation with light and transparency throughout the series. He prepared each panel with numerous coats of white gesso, establishing a neutral, luminous ground upon which colours could reveal themselves with exceptional clarity. Each colour was then applied directly to this ground rather than layered over another, usually straight from the tube. In Golden, this method creates an almost translucent effect, as though the orange and yellow were thin veils through which an internal light continues to shine.

Yet the Homages extend beyond optical experiment. Their repetition, symmetry and concentrated geometry lend them a meditative quality, at times recalling mandalas or cosmological diagrams – images that invite reflection on the place of humanity in the natural order. The extraordinary economy of their means reflects a principle that Albers had already articulated to his students, first in Germany at the Bauhaus, and subsequently in America at Black Mountain College and Yale University: “Though my paintings and linear constructions are not connected, they stem from the same attitude, the same urge to achieve from a minimum of effort a quantitum of effect. I used to say to my students, “Do less in order to do more.”