Midnight and Noon VIII

Josef Albers studied and taught at the Bauhaus, a renowned modernist German art and design school, where he developed theories on the relativity of color perception. After immigrating to America in the 1930s, he joined the faculty of the experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which served as an important training ground for the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 50s. There Albers urged his students, including future powerhouses Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg, to... Do less in order to do more. In 1949, Albers began what would become his best known and most influential project: an extended series of geometric paintings and editioned prints known collectively as Homage to the Square, in which he applied a rigorous theoretical approach to the study of how variations of color and value interacted when juxtaposed.