Josef Albers began his “Homage to the Square” shortly after leaving his post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1949. Always one to set problems to be solved both for himself and his students, he had come to realize that the best way to investigate the mysteries of perception and mood as well as the unpredictability of the way the eye sees and the mind interprets would be to rigorously commit to the square in carefully considered color combinations. Albers always selected the colors for each unique ‘Homage’ painting by trying out various combinations in bushy sketches before carefully spreading the pigment with a palette knife. Painted in 1958, Blue Glow is the culmination of that process, a fantastic tripartite color apparition that utilizes a blue-green scheme that often-piqued Albers’ interest. It illustrates what he summarized in his crucial text, Interaction of Color: that the square has little to do with a compulsive need to project the same image again and again, but instead provides a controlled structure for his ideas and feelings about color and perception. In this case, blue, one of two progenitors of the various admixtures that constitute some manner of green is the square placed center stage; a vibrant-hued presence that hums and vibrates on a transitional, secondary square of a more subdued azure blue encased within a sea of forest green. The blue here has not the provocatory audacity of a Franz Kline monochromatic ultramarine, yet within an interactive complement of relativity, its presence is of similar strength and veracity. Donald Judd, the artist perhaps most indebted Albers’ teachings said it best, by stating that, “there is very much a simple, suitable, and natural wholeness to the arrangement of squares within squares, which is one of the best ideas in the world, one which provided enormous versatility and complexity. This arrangement is easily at one with color. It’s amazing that it so quietly produces such brilliance.” (Donald Judd, quoted in Josef Albers in America, Munich, p. 35)