Joseph Albers began working on his celebrated Homage to the Square series in the 1950s and devoted himself to exploring this pared-down compositional format until his death in 1973. Employing the repetitive forms of several nested squares in a variety of colors, Albers achieved an enormous range of expressive effects through a carefully nuanced combination of hues. Due to their tonal relationships, the amber-hued squares in Homage to the Square: In Accord alternately push and pull one another, expanding and contracting to give the austere geometric composition a sense of vitality.

The Homage to the Square series is the culmination of Albers’s rigorous experiments in color and form, which he had first explored as a student at the famed Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s. In his writings, such as The Interaction of Color (1963), Albers analyzed the visual dynamics of color and explored how colors are always perceived in relation to one another. Through his writings and his career as a teacher in both Germany and the United States, Albers affected generations of students. Albers had a significant impact on a wide range of artists in the late 20th century for whom color played a central role, including Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Mangold.