Late from Homage to the Square: Soft Edge—Hard Edge
1965
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
color screenprint on Rives BFK wove paper
Dimensions
image: 27.94 × 27.94 cm (11 × 11 in.) sheet: 43.18 × 43.18 cm (17 × 17 in.)
Classification
Portfolio
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Charles Parkhurst in memory of William C. Seitz
Accession Number
1981.81.1.4
Art Historical Context
Josef Albers' *Plate from Homage to the: Soft Edge—Hard* (1965) is a captivating color screenprint that exemplifies the artist's lifelong fascination with color perception. A pioneer of abstract art, Albers—trained at the Bauhaus and later a influential teacher at Black Mountain College Yale—devoted over two decades to his iconic *Homage to the Square series. Through precisely nested squares, he demonstrated how colors interact, shift, and deceive the eye, creating illusions of movement and depth without representational imagery. This square-format work (11 × 11 inches image on 17 × 17 inches ...
About the Artist
Josef Albers
Josef Albers, born on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Westphalia, into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen, received early practical training from his father, Lorenzo Albers, a housepainter and carpenter, mastering skills in engraving glass, plumbing, wiring, and printmaking. After working as a schoolteacher in Bottrop from 1908 to 1913, he trained as an art teacher at the Königliche Kunstschule in B...