Josef Albers was a passionate teacher. Co-director with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus school for 13 years, then teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and finally at Yale University from 1950, he always cultivated in parallel his artistic practice, particularly photography and painting, on glass at first. It was the year he arrived at Yale in 1950 that Albers painted the first "Homage to the Square". He worked on the series tirelessly for twenty-six years, until his death in 1976. Through his teaching and his works, he left a deep imprint on the history of art.

Albers apprehends color from the perspective of its sensory appearance and brings out its own materiality. For each of the Homage to the Square works within his series, Albers showcased precisely composed squares of color, balanced one inside the other, on square masonite panels. This type of composition and format allowed the artist to examine color relationships, and their emotive and psychological impact, in a structured and stable capacity.

Albers goes beyond composition and format, which had previously seemed fundamental to painting. It allows him to devote his practice to the real subject of his work: color. He uses the square as a mean to explore it: how they relate to each other and, more precisely, how their juxtaposition affects the perception of the human eye.

The series "Homage to the square" is both a demonstration of the interaction of colors and a lesson, but also an object of pure aesthetic contemplation.