Albers accepted an offer to lead the art program at Black Mountain College after immigrating to the United States with his wife, Anni, in 1933. Upon meeting Albers at Black Mountain in 1948, Cage recognized an affinity between the artist’s disciplined union of form and function and his own quest to engage: “Both the mind and structure delight in precision, clarity and the observance of rules. Whereas, form wants only freedom to be; it belongs to the heart.”

Following a 16-year absence from printmaking, Albers again embraced the medium, creating woodcuts that more strongly relied upon chance and free association than the precise abstractions for which he is best known. Throughout the mid-1940s Albers experimented with printing surfaces—wood, linoleum, and cork—developing relief prints in which the natural grains of his chosen materials became key elements of the composition.