Accession Code: wu0071 Title: Day and Night V Date completed: 1963 Medium: Prints Material: Lithograph Height (mm): 478 Width (mm): 520 Depth (mm): n/a Inscription: Signed and dated. Inscribed with title and numbered Location Name: Senate House Location Description: Chemistry Location Floor: 2

© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / DACS, 2021

The most celebrated and widely referenced of Albers’ oeuvre was his series of paintings he called ‘Homage to the Square’. Between 1950 and 1976 he produced hundreds of paintings with a common format of three or four superimposed squares of solid pigment which explored the relationships between different colours, their effects on each other and on the perceived sensations experienced by the viewer’s eye and brain.

He began the series painting directly from the tube with a palette knife on a Masonite base; he also used screen printing which produced clear unmodulated areas of colour. Works from this series are now widely available in versions printed by the off-set lithography technique, as in the case of the two examples here.