Josef Albers, one of the most influential art educators of the 20th century, pictured at work in 1962.
Alongside creating much work of his own, German-born artist Josef Albers was a respected art educator and colour theorist, and a prominent member of the Weimar Bauhaus. His emigration to America led to the dissemination of Bauhaus principles in the US, and Albers is remembered today as being profoundly influential in helping to develop modern art and shape countless generations of future artists.
Though Josef Albers is not as well-known as some of his contemporaries, his work still commands impressive prices at auction. Albers was extremely proficient in numerous different mediums, including printmaking; prints, in fact, account for 79% of his work sold at auction, and the majority of them fetch between £1,000 and £5,000.
Below is a list of Josef Albers’ six most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Josef Albers print and would like to find out more about how much it might be worth or how to sell it, contact Mark Littler today.
Free Specialist Print Valuations
Please use the form below to submit images of your print and receive a free, no-obligation valuation from a specialist auctioneer. We will also actively seek the highest offer from our network of private collectors to help you sell your print.
"*" indicates required fields
SP (Homage To The Square)
Josef Albers began his Homage to the Square series sometime between 1949 and 1951 (opinions differ as to the exact date). By the time of his death in 1976, the series encompassed over 1,000 pieces of work, all designed to be a study of colour and tone. The artist continued adding to the series until he died, claiming it could never be ‘finished’ because “there is no end with colour.”
The series is an extraordinary exploration of repetition and chromatic interaction; every one of the prints and paintings that constitute it is created from nested squares of different colours and shades, executed methodically and recorded with scientific rigour. The Homage to the Square series is the oeuvre Albers is best-known for today, and its different iterations are extremely popular in today’s market; this complete set of twelve 1967 serigraphs, for instance, was sold by Lempertz in June 2022 for £153,521, tripling its top estimate, and setting a new record for the artist.
SP (Homage to the Square) sold by Lampertz in 2022
Homage To The Square: Edition Keller La-Lk
Another example of the Homage to the Square series is this set of 10 screenprints from 1970, which was sold by Freeman’s-Hindman in April 2024 for £91,894, nearly £30,000 above the top estimate. Albers’ lifelong fascination with colour was not only visible in his own work and experiments, but also in his teaching. Upon emigrating to the United States in 1933, Albers took up a post at Black Mountain College, a newly-founded art school in North Carolina. Here, he implemented a colour course which, in his own words, was an “experimental way of studying colour and teaching colour”, and which he continued to develop for the rest of his life.
Homage to the Square: Edition Keller la-lk
Gray Instrumentation I
In his paintings for the Homage to the Square series, Albers tended to apply unmixed paint directly from the tube using a palette knife, working outwards from the centre (some sources claim this was a result of what his father – a skilled decorator – suggested to help avoid the paint dripping). Albers’ idea was to use pure, uncontaminated colour and avoid overlap, but it was hard to replicate this when it came to creating prints, so before Gray Instrumentation I, the inks were simply applied one on top of the other.
It was the master printmaker Kenneth Tyler who, much to Albers’ delight, developed a new technique which allowed the inks to be precisely applied next to each other without any need for overprinting. This was the technique used to create Gray Instrumentation I and II, both of which repurpose the same motifs and ideas of the Homage to the Square prints, but this time using a monochrome palette. Gray Instrumentation I was sold by Christie’s in September 2024 for £85,000 – an indication of quite how popular Albers’ work remains to this day.
Homage To The Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers
This set of ten screenprints was sold by Phillips in April 2023 for £60,350, more than £20,000 more than the top estimate. The prints date from 1962, just one year before Albers published his seminal book, Interaction of Color. The text was dedicated to his students, and it was designed to be a kind of handbook for teachers, artists, and students alike. It included different visual exercises which Albers used in his university courses, as well as hundreds of colour plates, and it is now widely regarded as one of the most important studies of colour that has ever been published.
Homage To The Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers sold by Phillips in 2023
Midnight And Noon
Just like Gray Instrumentation I, Midnight and Noon uses the motifs and principles of Homage to the Square, but this time to create a portfolio of prints exploring the dichotomy between dark and light, and the relationship between opposites (hence the title of the portfolio). The prints were sold by Christie’s in April 2023 for £57,936, four times more than their top estimate.
Midnight and Noon sold by Christie’s in 2023
White Line Squares, Series I
Josef Albers believed that “A white line within a colour area instead of as a contour may present a newly discovered effect—when the line is placed within a so-called ‘Middle’ colour, even when the colour is very evenly applied, it will make the one colour look like two different shades or tints of that colour.” This series of eight prints from 1966 is an illustration of his theory, and it was sold by Christie’s in November 2016 for £39,230.
White Line Squares, Series I sold by Christie’s in 2016
