Albers was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until his death in 1976. Albers also emphasizes that color should be considered for its value, inasmuch as for its saturation. The ease with which the book addresses color theory in art, consecutively with race and class, is nothing short of remarkable.

The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA [2] and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, [3] he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century. The very rare first edition has a limited printing of only 2,000 copies and contained 150 silk screen plates. Albers also collaborated with Yale professor and architect King-lui Wu in creating decorative designs for some of Wu's projects. This constant flux between the objective and subjective characteristics of color defines the core of Albers’s project to translate the instability of color into artistic form.The publication of the book allowed for the methodology of teaching color in this way to be transported to all these different schools, across the country, across the world,” said Faruqee, who directed a 2016 film about Albers. The essential instability of color, which Albers described as “the discrepancy between the physical fact and the psychological effect” of a work of art, was repeatedly manifested in his seminal series Homage to the Square (1950–76).

Still, for Albers, whose reputation as a gifted and captivating teacher was as great as his renown as an artist, the meticulously crafted book served to enshrine and promote his pedagogical aims. He’d also produced a vast and growing series of artworks that would land him squarely among the giants of modernism.

The example of color perception demonstrates that one sometimes fails to see what is actually there – even contrary to already knowing it better! In 1963, Albers published Interaction of Color, which is a record of an experiential way of studying and teaching color. Hard-edge" abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, [28] while Op artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception. from his text "Homage to the square"] – "For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.