As the Bauhaus professor who gave the introductory foundation course to more students than did anyone else—and later at Black Mountain, Yale, and the many other institutions where he lectured—he would emphasize experience over the accumulation of facts. He would also make himself the example of someone who learned by reacting and experimenting, not by amassing information. For Josef Albers, art was the encapsulation of morality—or of its lack. How one paints, designs, or builds testifies either to clarity and humanity or to selfishness and self-importance; art manifests generosity and intelligence or egocentrism and ignorance.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1910, Albers served briefly in the military reserves. That fall, his occupation as a teacher gave him a deferment, and he took another one-year assignment in an elementary school, this time in the town of Stadtlohn. Stadtlohn is in the Münsterland, a pleasant region of farming country and handsome villages whose center is the city of Münster, with its fine Gothic cathedral and narrow streets of half-timbered houses. Albers was delighted to be in this lovely part of the country, away from the bleak, industrial region where he had lived. His earliest extant drawing, Stadtlohn, dated 1911, depicts the view out the window of his rented room; by instinct, he enlivened an ordinary sight. This rendition of an unspectacular church pulsates with the artist’s visceral reaction to the force of right angles and architectural massing. He simultaneously animated two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, so that the viewer is moved sideways and up and down as well as into and out of the background. Albers could not possibly have anticipated his future—the Bauhaus did not yet exist even as an idea—but within a decade he would be manipulating glass and wood to similar effect in Weimar, and developing, with abstract shapes and folded paper, the approach to form that would take Bauhaus students into uncharted realms.
The young teacher was as enchanted by the possibilities of black and white as a musician is by changes in rhythm and tone. In Stadtlohn, Albers used unmodulated black lines and white paper to create a range of grays, demonstrating a point he would reiterate later in life: that in art one plus one can equal more than two. Most of the church windows have black panes and white mullions, but one is equally convincing with white panes and black mullions. The tower is white with black detail; the wall of the house in front is black with white detail. There were no factual reasons for these reversals. They reflect, rather, the spontaneous joy Albers took in transforming what was before his eyes. At the Bauhaus, he would pair photographs and sandblast refined geometric forms with a similar playfulness, exploring the unique territory opened up when one re-creates rather than reproduces.
Technique in hand, the artist was free, Albers demonstrated, to inject the visual with the quality of music. Beginning with his first drawing, he luxuriated in the opportunity that making art provided to enter the realm of imagination.
IN 1911, ALBERS RETURNED to Bottrop, where he continued to teach grade school. He was fascinated by teaching and learning in general, but became convinced that visual art was the most interesting realm. Now twenty-five, he felt that he had honored his promise to his father and earned the right to venture further. In 1913, he took a step no one in his family had ever taken before: he moved to Berlin.
In the sophisticated capital city of Germany, the housepainter’s son from an industrial backwater attended the Royal Art School in order to obtain a diploma that would enable him to teach art at the high school level. His professor, Philipp Franck, was a painter of mild-mannered impressionist-style scenes. Franck was a competent but unexciting artist; he had, however, developed a revolutionary approach to teach young people how to draw and paint. Franck had pioneered an educational method that required his pupils to be student teachers in the tough working-class neighborhood where the Royal Art School was located. In his book The Creative Child, he explained, “To be an art teacher requires a different disposition than being an artist. … Just as the artist can and must be as egocentric as possible …the art teacher must, with understanding and love, put himself in the place of his pupils whose natures are often quite different than his own.”6 Franck emphasized the need to draw from nature without attempting exact replication. The students’ task was to incorporate natural structure and growth in their work—very much the same principle Paul Klee would inculcate in his Bauhaus students a decade later.
Franck stressed that whatever the level of the student, seeing and observing were the essential prerequisites to attempting to record what one saw on paper. It was a simple enough idea, but given the way most people hurry without reflection, the idea of this Zen-like approach to contemplation was as radical as the interest in working with the poor. Albers was deeply impressed.
IN FEBRUARY 1930, when Albers was an established professor at the Bauhaus, he had a significant encounter with Philipp Franck. The occasion was Albers’s first public lecture outside of the Bauhaus, in Berlin in a large lecture hall at a library that specialized in the applied arts. Albers’s subject was “creative formation.” He had anticipated a small turnout and was pleased to find the hall nearly packed. The audience surprised him with their enthusiasm. He was particularly happy when his former professor was among those to come up to him afterward. Franck told Albers something he had never known: that Max Lieberman, probably the best-known contemporary painter in Berlin at the time, had chosen a colored paper “Montage und [sic] has today the much weaker name Collage” made by Albers7—the subject was a bottle of Benedictine—as the best in the class. Fifteen years later, he was delighted not only by Lieberman’s approval, but by the generosity of his own admired teacher in telling him this story.
Most of the paintings Albers did in Berlin, however, were, while spirited, rather coarse. Deny as he might the influence of other artists, the evidence makes clear the profound impact on him of Van Gogh’s work. Albers admitted to having a passion for Van Gogh, and at the early stage of his own painting, he could not help but imitate what he admired. Yet while his Berlin oils and watercolors have Van Gogh’s boldness in their charged brushstrokes and vibrant colors, they lacked the Dutchman’s refinement. Albers was still grappling with new styles in a new world, and had not yet developed a fine touch; it’s as if he was so excited by the possibilities of raw paint, applied directly from the tube, that he could not control his exuberance. The results are energetic, but short on subtlety.
His drawings of the period are far better. Here it became clear that Albers had an extraordinary gift, as well as the intelligence to take advantage of the chance to see, firsthand, work by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. He used his study of those northern masters to make real people emerge from his own subtle renderings in pencil.
Albers could turn a head, pull back hair, define a profile, and bring out a cheekbone. He knew how to use every line and angle to create weight or lightness. This was in part because he followed Franck’s advice of lengthy contemplation, and also because he studied the technique of some of the greatest artists of the sixteenth century. Beyond that, Albers modulated his pencil strokes to differentiate between quiet contemplation and feverish intensity. He could, when he chose to, draw in a competent, traditional style that was forthright and tender—rendering an old lady’s profile with authority and handling the graceful mass of her bun and the knotting of her scarf with skill and freedom, establishing the volume of a head as a complex sequence of curves. On these occasions, he adhered to many of the techniques of the masters. He was equally capable of sketching with lighter, faster strokes, charging his images with tense energy. At those moments, he was a mix of warrior and modernist: a product of his own invention.
But it was the Bauhaus that unleashed Albers as an artist of true originality and panache. There, the skill and knowing eye he had had from his start would be liberated; he would escape the last remaining bonds of tradition and make art that was more original and vigorous than any he had made before. Secure in a world where other open-minded individuals would marvel, rather than scoff, at art made from unexpec
ted materials, and where rhythmic lines and vibrant colors were allowed to be the raison dêtre rather than devices in the service of representation, he would leap into an entirely new realm.
ALBERS RECEIVED his diploma from the Royal Art School on June 30, 1915. No one encouraged him to take the unusual course of becoming an artist rather than working in a trade like everyone else in his family. His grades on graduation were unspectacular: “adequate” in drawing from the live model and painting; “good” in drawing after natural form, drawing of objects, and drawing on the blackboard, with his only “very good” grades in line drawing, method, and art history.
That same year, Josef’s only brother, Anton Paul, was killed, at age twenty-five, fighting in the German army in Russia. With his own deferment from the military, Josef remained in Berlin, where he taught drawing at a high school level. But in November, when his leave from the regional teaching system in Bottrop was coming to an end and he sought to renew the permission to remain in Berlin, the authorities turned him down, although his sister Magdalena had replaced him at his teaching post, in effect fulfilling his obligation. After two years in an international metropolis, with great art and lively friends, he hated the prospect of returning to the small-town atmosphere and visual heaviness of smoggy Bottrop. It was equally disconcerting to him to be back under the watchful eyes of his family. But he had no choice. The Bauhaus did not yet exist.
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In Berlin, the lean and rakish Albers had encountered beguiling women very different from the girls back in Bottrop and developed a circle of male colleagues who shared his interest in art, as well as in fine clothing and in worldly living. It was a setback to have to resume teaching at the Volkschule, and move back in with his family.
Albers’s solution was to make art as never before. He compensated for his isolation from urban pleasures by beginning to draw more, and in a freer style, than he had in Berlin. He returned to the Münsterland and sketched its picturesque life—the horse-drawn carts and barnyards full of chickens. He made vigorous drawings of the grandest houses in the towns—they suggested affluent living, and he was enchanted—and of the Münster Cathedral with its richly variegated surface. He also made multiple images of the dramatic interior spaces of the naves and side aisles, and of the towers reaching heavenward.
He became fascinated with rabbits and made vivid sketches of them. But he did not turn only to subject matter that was intrinsically charming. Albers also did many drawings of the sand mines and workers’ houses in Bottrop. There seemed to be no sight that did not fascinate him: schoolgirls with their feet slipping out of their wooden shoes underneath their desks, workers climbing electrical poles to repair power lines, the myriad aspects of ordinary everyday life—he captured them with a style less inhibited than in his earlier work.
That range of subject matter is emblematic of Josef Albers’s approach. When he began to work with color at the Bauhaus, and then when he taught and wrote about color for the rest of his life—treating it as something that should be seen on its own, independent of associations with known subjects—he stressed the need to abandon judgments that elevated one hue over another. In his eyes, every shade of the spectrum was valuable. If it could be seen, it was interesting: this is the approach that emanates from his drawings of bleak streets of humdrum architecture in Bottrop, as it would in his teaching at the Bauhaus.
In Albers’s drawings from 1915 to 1919, every stroke is loaded with significance and intensity, and with an ease that was previously missing in his work. Albers had developed a rapid shorthand that enabled him to sum up sights without a gratuitous dot. He revealed his subjects as they were, encapsulating the unique shape as well as the timidity of those rabbits, and the haughtiness of owls. He endowed dancers with suitable grace and made children sweetly awkward, all the while strictly eschewing any hint of personal commentary or evaluation. The idea was to observe and then to present.
Beyond teaching at the Volkschule, he gave courses at the high school level, studied at the School for Applied Arts in nearby Essen, began to work in stained glass—designing and executing a rose window for the local Catholic church—and made a number of woodcuts and lithographs. In the prints of the grim neighborhoods where the local miners lived, Albers managed with just a few short, rapid strokes to put the streets and buildings solidly within our grasp. He may have labored, but the labor does not show. Every spontaneous yet controlled movement of the crayon serves a purpose and reveals a trained hand.
The making and teaching of art completely absorbed him. The exigencies of wartime didn’t allow for travel or many escapes from his father’s household, and whatever extra money he had went for art supplies and to cover his printmaking expenses, but he was doing what he wanted. Fortunately, he had a soul mate who understood his priorities. Franz Perdekamp, a poet and writer, the youngest of his father’s nineteen children (by two different wives), was both a good drinking companion and someone to whom Albers could elaborate about his artistic obsession, which no one else he knew understood. They caroused happily when they weren’t working, and emboldened each other to believe that it was possible to follow one’s passion in life.
ALBERS WAS YET another future Bauhausler whose life changed in a sanatorium. At the start of 1916, a bout of what was probably pneumonia required him to go for a cure in the mountains south of Bonn. But while the sanatorium in which Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius met was an elegant hostelry that might have appeared in a Thomas Mann novel, the one where Albers received his treatment, Hohenhonnef, was for civil servants and soldiers recovering from disabilities caused by the war. He was there for nearly six months.
Albers’s deliberate lack of interest in health problems, and his denial of anything that got in the way of making and teaching art, caused him to eliminate those six months from the meticulous chronologies he made of his life. When I met him, he was in his eighties; he told me he had never been in a hospital or suffered a health problem beyond a cold. It seems that Anni Albers, although she was married to Josef for fifty years, never knew about the sanatorium stay either, since she often said that Josef had “never once been ill, except for colds and sometimes a hangover;” when she took him to the hospital on his eighty-eighth birthday, she told the doctors he had never been hospitalized before. All of the existing literature places Albers at work at Bottrop during the time period, as does the information Albers carefully disseminated during his lifetime.
If not for the letters Albers wrote to Franz Perdekamp—which became known only in 2003, when Perdekamp’s grandchildren revealed their existence—that half-year medical leave would still be unknown. And vital insight into the artist’s nature would be lost. The correspondence is remarkable, for it unveils the real Josef Albers, the very opposite of the Josef Albers most people saw. The world encountered an Albers who was entirely resolute, didactic, and lacking in playfulness. That misconception was largely perpetuated by the artist himself. Albers concealed his lack of certainty as well as his sense of mischief. The assumption that he lacked normal foibles is equally the result of a misperception of his best-known artwork, which at first glance looks austere. Most viewers don’t initially see its humor or poetry, or recognize the romanticism behind its creation. The letters to Perdekamp, which began when Albers was taking his cure in the mountains, show someone who was emotional in the extreme, who struggled hard against his demons, and who relished forms of beauty that bowled him over: this, in fact, is entirely consistent with the character of his art, even if the burning passion is initially recognizable only to people of unusual perceptiveness.
At Hohenhonnef, Albers—whom Perdekamp addressed as “Jupp”—was feeling, even more than before, how different he was from the people around him. Jupp wrote his friend:
My neighbor here in the hall has just returned from [a visit to] his wife and child and tells me of the treasure of having one’s own hearth while upstairs I am trying to write and abuse my homeland. I feel both love and and hate inside myself. The faith
ful tales next door go on. The attic in my head is in a terrible jumble.8
Alcohol brought him some relief. Part of the prescribed cure consisted of taking long walks, and Albers would head off to a small town on the banks of the Rhine, where he snuck the occasional schnapps. To describe this to Perdekamp, he invented a verb derived from the name of the strong wheat-based liquor indigenous to the region: “I doppelkorned too much,” he wrote.9 Pleased to have gained a needed six pounds, he considered the drinking that the sanatorium authorities forbade part of his private cure.
IN THOSE SIX MONTHS, Albers had more time to reflect than he had ever had before. He further crystallized his belief that artistic and human values are the same. He considered painting and poetry, the forms of expression most on his mind, as exemplars either of humility and compassion or of pretentiousness and mendacity. He became insistent that tenderness was one of the most essential elements of painting and poetry—as it was of a person’s soul.
Albers also prized and exemplified forthrightness. A person must never dissemble about what needs to be said and is true, even if its effect is painful. When he wrote Perdekamp a frank evaluation of a recent poem, he did not hesitate to risk hurting his friend’s feelings; the need to perfect one’s art mattered far more than the possible pain of a critical word. That belief would underlie all of his teaching at the Bauhaus and afterward. The opinions Albers voiced kindly but candidly to his closest friend were the essence of the standard he would bring to the Bauhaus and try to imbue in his students: “You want it that way, namely firm and wild. And yet you have, I think, so much warmth and softness in you. Why don’t you yield to that a little more. Perhaps it speaks in other poems, particularly as the ones you sent cover only a short time span. You know I like spikiness and hardness, but it has to be organic.”10 Albers believed that artwork, while it should be done well and done carefully, failed if it was too emotionally restrained.
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