In 1920, the young artist Josef Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus, the recently founded school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany. Accomplished in many fields - design,  photography, typography, painting printmaking and poetry, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. With its strong utilitarian emphasis, the Bauhaus placed equal importance on technical,  artistic skills and - most importantly for Albers - colour. He favoured a highly disciplined approach to composition. Around the time that he joined the Yale faculty in 1950, Albers began to work on his celebrated Homage to the Square series.

The entire series was based on a

mathematically determined format of three of four squares, which appear to be overlapping or nested within one another. This would become a body of more than a thousand works executed over a period of twenty-five years, including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. This geometric abstraction was Albers' template for exploring the subjective experience of color—the effects that adjacent colors have on one another, for example, and the illusion of flat planes of colour advancing or receding in space.