Josef Albers—who, along with his wife, Anni, a textile artist, studied and taught at the progressive Bauhaus school in Germany before it closed due to Nazi pressure—immigrated to the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In his new homeland, Albers turned to oil painting, a medium he had explored only rarely before. In Gate, incised white lines create twisted rectangular shapes and overlapping planes, which contradict the flatness of the support. Exploration of spatial relationships and perception of color was a leitmotif in Albers’s paintings and prints, and this work anticipates his famous Homage to the Square series that he began in 1950.