Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is pleased to offer six works from Josef Albers's Mitered Squares portfolio. Created in 1976—the year of Albers's death at the age of eighty-eight—the portfolio was among the last major printmaking projects of his career. The deceptively simple compositions of the prints represent the culmination of more than twenty-five years of investigation into the interaction of color, while their remarkable precision reflects Albers's close collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler.
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares f (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
The twelve-print portfolio was produced at Tyler Graphics Ltd. in Bedford Village, New York. Albers and Tyler had first worked together more than a decade earlier at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where Tyler became technical director in 1963. Albers was already seventy-five years old when the two began collaborating. He presented Tyler with a drawing of four squares precisely marked in centimeters, allowing the printer to construct the printing matrices according to the artist's exact specifications. Their early collaborations included the Day and Night and the Midnight and Noon portfolios.
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares h (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
When Tyler left Tamarind in 1965, he established Gemini Ltd. (later reorganized as Gemini G.E.L.). The workshop's first published edition was Albers's White Line Squares. The pattern repeated itself when Tyler left California and established Tyler Graphics Ltd. in 1973. Once again, Albers became the workshop's first published artist with Gray Instrumentation I. Over the next two years, Tyler Graphics devoted considerable attention to three additional Albers portfolios: Gray Instrumentation II, Mitered Squares, and Never Before. By then, Albers and Tyler had developed a collaboration that became the intersection of Albers's lifelong investigation into the instability of color and Tyler's technical command of contemporary printmaking.
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares d (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
The apparent simplicity of Mitered Squares disguises an extraordinarily complex production process. Although Tyler and Albers had attempted to create a mitered square print at Gemini G.E.L., creating it proved too technically complex, and the edition was ultimately abandoned. Reprising the project three years later, it was determined that the individual fields of color should be printed beside one another rather than overlapping to preserve the purity of each carefully mixed ink while also creating a uniform surface. To accomplish this, Tyler hand-cut a master set of Rubylith films according to Albers's original drawings on graph paper. The films, screens, and sheets of paper then had to be registered with extraordinary precision. Even the expansion and contraction of the paper or stretching of the screens under pressure could require Tyler and his staff to readjust the stencils. As Paul Zelanski later observed, the resulting prints possess edges "as sharp as a hard-edge painting, with no unintentional gaps or overlapping between colors."
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares b (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
Albers's selection of color was equally exacting. He brought Tyler samples ranging from small paintings on blotting paper and fragments of colored paper to leaves and flowers he had collected. The studio translated these colors into inks before producing samples that Albers cut apart and rearranged into collages consisting of different combinations; eventually, actual proofs would be made from these mockups. Hundreds of color trials were produced during the process, many of which were subsequently destroyed; however, Tyler gifted the Metropolitan Museum of Art a small selection of these screen-printed and collaged maquettes for Mitered Squares in 1977, providing us with some insight into the production process for the portfolio. Only when Albers was satisfied with how the colors interacted could printing of the edition begin.
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares k (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
Mitered Squares developed from an investigation that Albers had pursued for decades. He began his celebrated Homage to the Square series in 1950, ultimately producing more than one thousand works consisting of squares placed within squares. In this restricted format, Albers found a controlled structure through which to investigate color. Different hues could appear lighter or darker depending upon the colors within its surroundings, and planes of color could appear to advance or recede despite the literal flatness of the printed or painted surface.
JOSEF ALBERS | Mitered Squares I (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
Diagonals extending inward from the four corners divide the composition into sections that meet along forty-five-degree seams at the corners, much like a mitered picture frame. Contrasting bands of color intensify the resulting spatial effect. Depending upon their arrangement and upon how the viewer perceives them, the central square can appear either recessed into the composition or projected outward from it. Albers creates this illusion without conventional perspective or modeled shading, as depth is produced almost entirely through the interaction of adjacent colors.
Frank Stella explored a related structure a decade earlier in paintings such as Mitered Squares (1966). Stella arranged bands of uniform width around a square format, joining them along diagonal axes so that the composition resembles four sections fitted together like a mitered frame. Changing sequences of color can make Stella's bands appear to spiral despite being constructed entirely from straight lines. Albers employs geometry toward a different end. Rather than emphasizing directional movement, his carefully calibrated colors destabilize the viewer's perception of depth. The miter became another structure through which Albers could demonstrate one of the central propositions of his career: that our perception of color depends upon its context.
FRANK STELLA | Mitered Squares, 1966. Alkyd and graphite on canvas, 69 x 69 in (175 x 175 cm). Photo courtesy Christie's.
Mitered Squares was released during the final year of Albers's long life. A Tyler Graphics advertisement published in Art in America in the March/April 1976 issue announced the portfolio, and galleries quickly began exhibiting the new prints. That March, the Palm Beach Post reported their arrival at Irving Gallery in Palm Beach, where gallery owner Irving Luntz remarked of them: "Each piece is like a gem, a pure gem." The series was first exhibited in its entirety at the gallery Graphics 1 and Graphics 2 in Boston in April 1977.
Tyler Graphics Ltd., Advertisement for Josef Albers's Mitered Squares portfolio, featured in Art in America, March-April 1976, p. 35. Courtesy www.archive.org.
Just over fifty years later, Luntz's description of Mitered Squares remains apt. The compositions are economical, their surfaces are immaculate, and their colors are intensely calibrated. Yet the labor of their creation, in their apparent simplicity, remains concealed. Created at the end of Albers's twenty-five-year investigation into the square and after more than a decade of collaboration with Tyler, Mitered Squares brings mathematical structure, visual complexity, technical precision and experimentation, absolute flatness, and the illusion of depth into singular and stunning prints. Even as Albers limits the compositional elements to squares, diagonals, and color, the images continually shift before our eyes.
Works from Josef Albers's Mitered Squares portfolio can be found in major museum collections internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Walker Art Center. For information about Albers's Mitered Squares portfolio, or to inquire about other works by Albers available through Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, please contact the gallery at info@zanebennettgallery.com.
MORE DETAILS
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares f (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares h (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares d (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares b (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares k (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
JOSEF ALBERS | (DETAIL) Mitered Squares I (from Mitered Squares), 1976. Screenprint, 19 x 19 in (48 x 48 cm)
Photography by Marylene Mey © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
