Josef Albers studied and taught at the renowned German art and design school known as the Bauhaus, where he developed theories on the relativity of color perception. After immigrating to America in the 1930s, he joined the faculty of the experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which served as an important training ground for the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 50s. There, Albers urged his students, which included Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg, to "Do less in order to do more." In 1949, Albers began what was to become his best known and most influential project: an extended series of several hundred geometric paintings and editioned prints known as Homage to the Square, in which he applied a rigorous theoretical approach to the study of how various colors and tones interacted when juxtaposed.