Op Art That Pops!
As a professor at Yale, Josef Albers, founder of the Op Art movement, began the 1000+ piece study he titled Homage to the Square. A graduate and former Bauhaus teacher, Albers’ study was specifically focused on the contrasting effects of form, texture, and color.
Albers was intrigued by two things; first, the way that adjacent colors affect each other and second, the ability of flat planes and shapes to appear to either recede or advance on a canvas. Hence, Homage to the Square is a series of studies of a single geometric shape – the square – nestled inside itself repeatedly in varying families of color.
Your students can explore these two artistic phenomenon with our Op Art screen printing lesson! Our free Art lesson plan, including images, step-by-step directions, and a materials list, walks you through the set-up and execution process of creating colorful screen prints in the Homage to the Square style. Students will explore the effects of adjacent color and experiment with optical illusion using the same style that intrigued Albers and inspired Warhol and their finished pieces are perfect for class critiques and conversation.
View the Homage to the Square art lesson plan today.
For Grades 6-12.