Forced to emigrate to the US in 1933, following the closure of the Bauhaus (the Bauhaus faculty, Josef among them, elected to close the school rather than comply with the Third Reich), Josef went on to head the art departments at Black Mountain College and Yale.

There, he influenced a generation of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Eva Hesse. His teaching methods and theoretical work, particularly his exploration of colour, continue to shape art education today. Josef’s seminal book 'Interaction of Color' (1963) revolutionised the way colour is understood and applied in both art and design, and remains a cornerstone of art education more than sixty years after its publication.

His celebrated Homage to the Square series, begun in 1950 and consisting of over two thousand paintings, represents his most influential artistic achievement. Each work consists of three or four concentric squares of different chromatic hues. Through these geometric paintings, he explored the optical effects of colour interactions, creating a body of work that has had a lasting impact on modern art.

In 1971, Josef became the first living artist to have a solo retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Paintings from his iconic Homage to the Square series hang in many prestigious institutions, including Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, to name a few.