Diederich found Kandinsky “altogether very attractive.” There was something “impersonal” about him, but this added to his aura. He certainly did not flirt with the female students, or engage with them directly, which made him and his task seem more noble to her. Kandinsky was in his own world, intensely dedicated to the act of painting with what Diederich termed “his relentlessness, his consistency, his love of truth in art.” Above all, Kandinsky was “drunk with the pleasure of exploring free use of color and form.”120
HE WAS ALSO extremely courtly, playfully so, when he chose to be. In June 1932, Kandinsky wrote Galka Scheyer a letter in which he addressed her as “Dearest Excellence, Minister President and Authorized Ambassador.” He continued, “In light of your deeds, efforts, and especially your successes, these titles are far from sufficient!”121 For Scheyer was now so successful with the exhibitions she organized of his, Klee’s, and their colleagues’ work that she was having to fend off requests from museums. Only a few years earlier she had been desperately seeking venues; now she did not have enough work with which to supply them.
Kandinsky wrote her, “I want to wish you the most lovely transformation from flea to human being.” This Kalkaesque image was typical of the quirky twist of his imagination, a way of thinking and speaking that was his alone. Scheyer had sent him a photo with one of his paintings in the background; he wrote, “I have the impression that you are just waking up and we could have a nice chat. It’s amazing how powerfully such a small picture with an impression of a head can transplant one across the ocean into an unknown land.”122 Again his words have the sense of otherworldly happenings, of the shifts between the consciousness of the waking state and the fascinating unconsciousness of sleep. In his mind as in his art, Kandinsky perpetually inhabited foreign and unvisited territories.
Yet the horrendous realities of the time penetrated the bubble provided by his imagination. Kandinsky wrote Scheyer that sales of art had almost come to a halt in Europe, “and things are getting steadily worse.”123 At least Ida Bienert, a collector in Dresden—whom Anni Albers described as one of the unsung heroes of the Bauhaus—had bought two paintings, for which she was paying in installments, but the National Socialists were now in the majority in the Dessau government, and he knew that the Bauhaus might possibly be forced to close.
That year, in September, once the Nazis had gained a majority in the Anhalt government, the Dessau Bauhaus did close. Once the school moved, under Mies van der Rohe’s directorship, to the derelict telephone factory in Berlin that would be its last home, the Kandinskys decided to move with it. Even as the Klees stayed behind in the house the two families shared, on December 10, 1932, Wassily and Nina left their paradise with its black wall and gold-leaf ceiling and again took modest digs in Berlin.
In April 1933, Wassily Kandinsky was among the seven remaining faculty members who voted to close the Bauhaus forever. Three months later, he wrote Galka Scheyer that his Dessau salary, which should have continued for another two years, “seems to have been permanently stopped, because …the BH functions as ‘a culturally destructive communist cell.’ Wonderful—isn’t it?” Even though he thought the closure of the school might be only temporary, Kandinsky complained that there were no exhibitions, and that any further sales were unlikely. He was considering going to America: “You know that this is an old dream of mine, to visit the ‘new land’ once.” He recognized that even if the Bauhaus were allowed to reopen, he would not be likely to remain on the faculty, for the new government, which held the view that “‘abstract art = subversive art,’” would not want him teaching.124 But he doubted that he could afford the steamship fare of nearly 1,500 marks ($360) for two people to cross the Atlantic.
Kandinsky begged Scheyer to let him know if she had any ideas about how he and Nina might make the trip to the United States. In August, she wrote him from Hollywood that they should be patient and hold on until she had sold enough of his work so that funds would await him and he would not have to deplete his savings in Europe. But at the moment, while there were some pending sales, nothing was certain, as hard as she was trying, and hopeful as she remained of some unexpected development, she could make him no promises.
Scheyer had hoped to get Solomon Guggenheim and his art adviser, the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen—whom Scheyer repeatedly referred to as “Rabbi”—to buy Kandinsky’s work, but she complained that they were devoted exclusively to the work of Rudolph Bauer, an inferior abstract artist whose style seemed a thin imitation of Kandinsky’s. “Bauer is God and you are only a painter,” Scheyer wrote, dismayed.125
America would not be the answer. On June 16, following the closing of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer wrote the weaver Gunta Stolzl that Kandinsky “still cannot believe it has happened.”126 He and Nina soon had no choice but to recognize that reality, however. For Christmas of 1933 they went to Paris to decide whether to move there. The French capital was where the artist lived until his death in 1944. Eventually he attained some of the creature comforts that Nina craved. But he never again painted with the force and bravura, the profound texture, that made his art at the Bauhaus such a vibrant and rare universe.
Josef Albers
1
A young female student at the Dessau Bauhaus claimed to be pregnant with Josef Albers’s baby without having had sex with him. For his entire life, there were people who thought Albers was invested with godlike power. Students worshipped him, even as they feared him. His partisans revered him as a seer; his detractors recoiled at his absolute faith in his own convictions and deemed him a tyrant.
Compared to his colleagues, Albers came from nowhere and invented himself. Kandinsky, Klee, and Gropius were raised in intensely cultured families, educated in a way that made their subsequent development natural and of a piece with their earlier lives. They were brought up in milieus where it was not a radical step to devote one’s life to art or architecture and be part of the world that would support such a profession. Albers’s wife, Anni, had a childhood where opera performances and museum visits were intrinsic to life, so an interest in art did not come as a shock to her family even if its choice as a profession did. Josef Albers, unlike most of the people around him, leapt from one world to another. And the daring and decisiveness that marked his personal actions shone in his work and teaching.
ALBERS WAS BORN on March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, a small industrial and mining city in the Ruhr region of Westphalia, its air so clogged with coal smoke that he used to say, “Even my spit was black.” His family was working class; no one had advanced education. Of the other major figures at the Bauhaus, only Mies van der Rohe came from a similar background, but Mies’s way of dealing with it was to mask his humble beginnings and embrace an aristocratic style as if it were his birthright. Albers claimed his humble origins as the key to his talents. He considered the menial skills he had been taught growing up vital to what he subsequently became, and he wore his heritage as a badge of pride.
Josef Albers, Perdekamp, 1917–18. In drawing the profile of his soulmate of his early years, Albers used a single decisive line to encapsulate a face he loved and to make the flat paper seem round.
“I came from my father, very much, and from Adam, that’s all,” Albers routinely responded when questioned about who had influenced his art. His grandfather, Lorenz Albers, was a carpenter; his father, also named Lorenz (without a “Junior”), was a housepainter whose skills went in many directions.
I came from a handicraft background, and I know lots of handicraft. … I watched as a boy how shoes were made, and how black- smiths worked, and how a painter like my father did everything. …
I worked in his workshop. … He knew the rules, the recipes, and he taught them to me too. And he was what I think you call a tinkerer.
He put all the electricity into our house. He, himself. Could do the plumbing. He could do glass etching, glass painting, he did everything …he was a very practical man. He was an artisan. He could solder. He made soap during the war from
wax which he used otherwise to etch with. He could sandblast. He had a very practical mind. I was exposed to many handlings which I learned to steal with my eyes.1
That notion of looking and visualizing as thievery was central to Albers’s way of seeing things. The inexplicable processes that occur via the eyes and their messages to the brain captivated him. He emphasized the practical, but exulted in the mysterious.
Josef Albers, Self-Portrait III, ca. 1917. After studying Cézanne’s work, Albers skilfully used small planes to create a bold yet reserved image of himself.
Albers contradicted himself in many directions, although he always resolutely maintained that the last thing he said was the unequivocal truth; if you argued with him, you would get nowhere. Having just insisted that he came only from his father, he would then speak fondly of the impact made on him by the blacksmiths on his mother’s side of the family: “To make a good nail for a horseshoe, it was necessary to have skill of hand.”2 He was also pleased that his mother, Magdalena Schumacher, had a name that indicated a worthy profession.
“When I think that I might have been born into a family of intellectuals! It would have taken me years to get rid of all their ideas and see things as they are. And I might have been awkward with my hands,” Albers announced. Manual dexterity and the understanding of tools would be fundamental to his teaching at the Bauhaus and afterward. His attitudes echo those the film director Jean Renoir described in his painter father, whose know-how Albers greatly respected: “What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side of it comes first? The idea comes afterwards, when the picture is finished.3
AMONG THE SKILLS Albers learned from his father was how to use a comb and a sponge to make imitation wood grains and marbleized surfaces. Lorenz Albers occasionally designed theater sets using those techniques. Josef would pound his fist when any art historian was ignorant enough to link him to the German expressionism that dominated the schools he attended in Berlin and Munich, but he was proud of the concern with practical effectiveness that had been passed on to him. When he arrived at the Bauhaus, he was a stranger to the urbanity and patina of sophistication that came with most of his colleagues’ privileged upbringings, but even if he was from a provincial backwater, he had in common with them a disdain for ineptitude and a belief that discipline and technical skill were absolutely essential for any artistic pursuit.
Like Klee and Kandinsky, Albers was one of those rare people for whom the visual world was laden with power. Color and line had an immense impact on him, even when he was a child. In the 1940s, Albers would tell his students at Black Mountain College—the renowned experimental school in North Carolina where Robert Rauschenberg, among others, studied with him, and Merce Cunningham and John Cage, as visitors, delighted in the magic of his words—about one of the strongest memories of his childhood. As a young boy, he had gone with his mother into a bank in Bottrop. The floor was made of black and white marble tiles in a checkerboard pattern. While his mother did her banking, the pale, blond youth contemplated the floor pattern. He felt he might sink into the black squares, as if into quicksand. He would have to climb out to be elevated on the cloudlike whites. Cigarette in hand, Albers now demonstrated the process to his students by lumbering in an exaggerated manner around the front of the classroom. His performance demonstrating the power of black and white was testimony to forces that moved Albers in the way that the veining of the marble tabletops affected the five-year-old Klee and the black of the horses’ hooves terrified kindergarten-age Kandinsky. The visual world was potent. Their responsiveness to what they saw set these individuals apart from almost everyone else they knew.
2
While it lacked the cultural richness, particularly the immersion in music, of the environments in which the others were nurtured, the household in which Josef Albers grew up was a bit like a medieval guild—a preparation for the communal living at the Bauhaus if not for its intellectual expansiveness. The apprentices of “Lorenz Albers Meistermaler” lived with the family. So it was not only from his father but from the trainees a decade or so older than he that young Josef learned the skills of carpentry, stonecutting, and housepainting. Before he thought about art, he knew the way to paint a door: “from the inside out, so that you catch the drips and don’t get your cuffs dirty,” how to control his brush for window trim, and the methods for making the large flat expanses flawless. He told me this when he was in his eighties and explaining why he always started his Homages to the Square at the center and then worked his way to the edges, never superimposing colors, deliberately avoiding the appearance of his own hand and managing to have the edges of the flat colors abut each other with perfect registration.
Within a decade of his birth, Josef’s parents had a second son and two daughters. But then the relative equilibrium enjoyed by the family on Bottrop’s Horsterstrasse took an abrupt turn. When Josef was eleven, Magdalena died. Her youngest child was only two years old.
His father remarried the following year; then, at the age of fourteen, Josef went away to school in Langenhorst. While he was there, his father and stepmother had a son who lived for only nine months; a second son would not survive a full day. After those two tragedies, the couple stopped trying. Life’s vagaries and hardships made Josef long for balm, and during his three years in Langenhorst, he developed the idea that he would become an artist. The prospect turned his melancholy into optimism about life’s richness. Lorenz Albers opposed the idea. In his view, the very thought of a life centered on art was a dangerous fantasy, and he was determined that his children have solid professions. Compliantly, Josef went to the Royal Catholic Seminary in Buren to train to be a schoolteacher. He was an unexceptional student. When he earned his diploma in 1908 his grades were a “sufficient” in musical harmony and gymnastics and a “good” in agricultural instruction and nature studies, although he achieved a “very good” in conduct, diligence, and drawing. His self-confidence had to come from within. But at least he passed his teacher’s exam, took the official oath, and was allowed to teach the full range of subjects in elementary school back in Bottrop.
Albers was, however, still magnetically drawn to visual art. As soon as he had sufficient funds and a day with no teaching obligations, he made the two-hour train journey to the city of Hagen. Having learned that there was a remarkable art collection there, he was eager to see original paintings by some of the most innovative artists of the era.
In 1902, the twenty-year-old Karl Ernst Osthaus, one of those exceptional artistic patrons who had the foresight and courage to go beyond the givens of his day and to embrace what others had not yet approved, had founded the Folkwang Museum. Osthaus was guided in part by Henry van de Velde, the architect who, more than a decade later, would beckon Gropius to Weimar. He collected work by the German expressionists—Ernst Lud-wig Kirchner and Emil Nolde among them—and also had late-nineteenth-century French paintings by the revolutionary artists who had transformed painting more subtly. Osthaus had startling canvases by Paul Cézanne and recent work by Henri Matisse.
What Albers later recalled as a simple fact—that he had taken himself to Hagen at age twenty to meet Osthaus and see the Folkwang—was exceptional. Like his brother and sisters, he had been brought up with the expectation that he would live pretty much as their parents had. But Josef responded to everything more intensely than his siblings did, and had more romantic aspirations. Hagen was at the edge of the Sauerland, a bucolic region where he managed to go, on a shoestring budget, for vacations. He adored the deep shade of its pine forest, of which he made evocative drawings, just as he succumbed, by an inexplicable instinct, to the works by Cézanne and Matisse that were total anathema to most viewers. In his receptivity to new visions of beauty, he was different from the rest of his family and most of the people he knew. He also craved universal truths, and imagined they would be disclosed through the eyes.
The revelations afforded by Osthaus�
��s pictures were startling. For the rest of his life, Albers would consider that first visit to be a pivotal event. “I had my first meaningful contact with modern art in Hagen, where I spent my time as often as I could, and where I knew and admired Osthaus and experienced Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Denis for the first time.”4
He was dazzled by the directness of these works, by the boldness and courage with which their makers animated nature and evoked the power of painting. The sight of these modern French canvases changed Albers’s life forever.
FROM NOVEMBER 1, 1909, through September 30, 1910, Albers taught in Weddern at a Bauernschaftsschule. This is an old German term, no longer in use, and is translated as either “school for farm children” or “peasant school.” The experience helped define Josef Albers as an educator. In Bottrop, he had taught a single age group in a traditional way; now he was faced with a one-room schoolhouse. “I had all age-groups ranging from 6 to 14 years, boys and girls, together in one schoolroom. To do oral and written work in all elementary subjects—from religion to gymnastics—with these different age-classes in groups of changing combination, called for more than a carefully organized plan of study and curriculum.” As a result, Albers acquired (again the words are his)
a new understanding: That learning by experience cannot be lost and therefore outlasts book knowledge. That the experience of inner growth is the mainspring of all human development, just as the example of the teacher is the most effective educational means. That education by the school must lead to self-education … Education is not only an accumulation of so-called knowledge, but first and last seeks to develop willpower. For this is what education was originally invented for and why it was recognized time after time through the centuries: The integration of the individual into the community and society—that is, beyond economic aims for moral aims.5
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