Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming (1963) belongs to a large series of over 2,000 square paintings and prints that Josef Albers produced from 1949 and until he died in 1976. The series, titled Homage to the Square is based on a compositional scheme of squares in different colors and arrangements. In the multiple versions of these paintings, Albers examined how colors interact when placed next to one another. He explained: “If one says ‘red’ and there are 50 listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.”

In chronological terms, Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming approximately falls to the middle period of the square painting series. Painted in the artist’s home in New Haven, Connecticut, Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming depicts three squares set inside one another in different shades of blue: the largest bright blue square contains a smaller square in darker tone of blue, and that one contains a much smaller blue-green square. These isolated flat squares of color create the illusion of receding or advancing. Sometimes, these isolated color planes appear to fuse, generating new colors that seem to hover in front of the picture surface giving the effect of an after-image.

In Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming, Albers applied paint with a palette knife directly from the tube, having each area painted in a single color. Through such paintings, the artist explored the interaction between different colors, and by adjusting the hues and tones he studied the different optical effects. His experimentation in Homage to the Square series corresponded with his writings in the book Interaction of Color (1963). The book provided a complex explanation of principles of color theory and emphasized that practical exploration and experimentation with color outweighed theoretical considerations. The practical experiments, like Study for Homage to the Square: Beaming allowed him to explore the optical effects on the viewer. Correspondingly, his writings examined the psychological effects produced by these optical experiences.

Albers explained that in the Homage to the Square series each work had its mechanism and operated differently in terms of color: “This means that they all are of different palettes, and therefore so to speak, of different climates… Choice of the colors used, as well as their order is aimed at an interaction – influencing and changing each other forth and back.” In this way, when presenting many of these paintings together, Albers aimed to show the autonomy of color and how it can function as a means of organization in the painting: “Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings - in proportion and placement - these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways.”