Albers had not yet formulated the credo he would promulgate for the rest of his life—”minimal means for maximum effect”—but his subsequent reflections on Perdekamp’s poetry led him directly to that idea. Modernism was not, nor would it ever be, the issue; what counted for him were qualities that were universal and timeless, and could be found in various civilizations throughout history. This was the consciousness he would urge on others in Weimar and Dessau, and then when he carried the gospel of the Bauhaus to the New World:
On reading your poems I have often thought about my old theme: equilibrium in works of painting.
And I always came back to the old (or better early) Italians. The ones you can still call primitive: the group around Giotto and the Siennese. Why do they give such an immediate impression of greatness? Because their techniques were so simple. They only had tempera and fresco and a few pigments. The master had to make his own tools and so there were not many. Look at a modern catalogue of artists’ materials and ask yourself what percentage of this was available to the great old masters. They had great souls, but the limitations of their means certainly helped to prevent them dissipating themselves. With modern sophisticated materials all you ultimately need is a certain cleverness. But that needs to be searched out, and the overall result is not so outstanding. Juggling about with particularly attractive details destroys the balance. That is what the old masters had. You find the same brushstroke in the corner as on the face of the principal figure. They don’t tie themselves in knots, and although they had no theory of composition they instinctively made their works harmonious. And they did not hold back their emotions. This is what I would like modern art to value: spatial distribution. It is so much better than composition and comes much closer to the ideals of the old masters, and for me it feels much less artificial (think of the idea of composing by the golden section), much more artistic, and much freer.11
The work by Giotto that Albers knew firsthand was a single magnificent panel in Berlin: the large Death of the Virgin, a tempera from circa 1310. This tympanum in what was then the Kaiser Friedrich Museum is a complex and delicately balanced arrangement of a crowd of characters. What Albers calls the “spatial distribution” has been achieved with such eloquence that the scene perfectly accommodates the broad triangular form for which it was made. The subtle colors, and the precision and flair with which the facial expressions and postures have been rendered, give great poignancy to the scene. The end of the life of the Holy Mother is both suitably sad and exquisite.
The overlapping in a graceful sequence of golden halos testifies to the supreme artistry of the early Italian master who, by the standards of the early twentieth century, was still considered a “primitive” rather than an artist of the Renaissance. Albers had studied Giotto’s work through black-and-white reproductions, which is all that were then available, but the Berlin tympanum had been his only chance to observe the color orchestration the Italian had managed with his restricted palette. The young artist from Bottrop marveled at the way that Giotto’s adjustment to certain limitations—the obtuse angle of the top of the panel, the dictates of his medium—enhance rather than diminish the result.
That take on Giotto’s work was unusual. What Albers admired—the small number of hues, and Giotto’s great reach in spite of shortcomings inherent in tempera and fresco, the only media available to him—were not the qualities most people first discerned in the Italian. The direct connection between the impact of the artwork and the realities of the technical means was vital. Without knowing it, at the very moment when Gropius was formulating his ideas in a military tent, Albers was embracing what would be one of the fundamental principles of the Bauhaus.
4
For Albers, the calmness and grace of Giotto’s work, achieved as much through the consistency of the brushstrokes as by the composition, exemplified the overriding control fundamental to good art. Equanimity through visual means would be a lifelong search for him and his future wife. He had no wish to imitate the appearance of Giotto’s work, only to try to achieve its eloquent clarity in the language of the twentieth century.
Albers was, in the most traditional sense, a picture maker. His priority was always the creation of wonderful artworks. Like Gropius, he was a connoisseur of beauty, but for him it required a spiritual element. Much of what topped Albers’s list of humankind’s greatest creations had a deeply religious aspect. The deities varied—the Parthenon, Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, and Machu Picchu were among his chosen masterpieces—but the attitude of worship was consistently vital.
As Albers formed his taste, Cézanne increasingly became the recent artist who mattered most to him. Once he received his certificate of good health, which allowed him to leave the sanatorium and resume teaching in the second half of 1916, he looked at Cézanne’s work wherever he could. He zealously applied his discoveries to his own drawing and printmaking. There were good paintings by the Frenchman in the museum in Essen, and Albers also made return visits to Osthaus’s collection in Hagen. He later said that this was the time when “Cézanne got into my bones.”12
What he learned from Cézanne became the artistic priorities Albers would take to the Bauhaus. With his blocky forms and undisguised brushstrokes, Cézanne made human presences and physical matter more impressive and real than did the nineteenth-century academics who attempted a flawless verisimilitude of surfaces. Where the traditionalists were fussy, Cézanne was earthy. He disregarded everyone else’s dictates, painted from the heart, and carved out flatness and three-dimensionality at the same time. He also presented colors boldly. Albers spoke of Cézanne’s “unique and new articulation in painting. He was the first to develop color areas which produce both distinct and indistinct endings—areas connected and unconnected—areas with and without boundaries—as means of plastic organization. And, in order to prevent evenly painted areas from looking flat and frontal, he used emphasized borders sparingly, mainly when he needed a spatial separation from adjacent color areas.”13 The acquisition of technical knowledge, the development of one’s eye, the will to push one’s art to an extreme and to brave the unprecedented: these were the main issues.
The notion of what was German, or in vogue, was irrelevant. Albers’s priority was visual art of universal appeal and staying power. The German expressionist Max Beckmann, his countryman and contemporary, was his artistic nemesis; Albers had a physical loathing for the thick lines Beck-mann used to divide colors, and considered them a trademark of incompetence and crudeness. Such lines stopped the special flow and prevented color from creating movement as it did in Cézanne’s work; it also denied each hue the magical power to affect the tones to which it was adjacent. (Several years after Albers’s death, when I was looking up a word in the dictionary he used, a handwritten note fell out from a page in the s‘s; on it he had written “‘swindle’ like Max Beckmann, who didn’t know his colors.”) In art as in his life, the housepainter’s son was in search of harmony and subtlety. Precision, clearheadedness, and the discipline required for magic were his goals.
THEN ALBERS WITNESSED an extraordinary dance performance. The Green Flute was a three-act ballet with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal set to the music of Mozart. Max Reinhardt directed it as a sort of musical pantomime; the performers included Ernst Lubitsch as well as Isabella and Ruth Schwarzkopf.
From Bottrop, on November 19, 1916, Albers wrote Perdekamp:
Dear Franz! if you want to see something insanely crazy (in a good sense), enjoy good expressionist stage art, then you must be at the Düsseldorf City Theater tomorrow (Monday) evening at half past seven. They’re presenting The Green Flute (by the Deutsches Theater, Berlin), a complete ballet with narration. I saw it on Friday in Duisburg. The greatest thing I have ever seen, the little old fairy tale is absorbed into something hugely dramatic and deeply fantastic. I could have screamed. In short: you have to see it! But the seats are very expensive. Try to be at the box office early. First try to get something in the stalls, s
eated or standing. Not the balcony! Rather standing in the stalls (that is already 5 marks!). I shall certainly be there—cost it what it may. In frenzied anticipation, best wishes
Yours, Jupp14
His enthusiasm inspired a series of drawings and lithographs based on the performance. They have a finesse and articulateness, as well as a Mozartian animation, that make them Albers’s finest work up to that time. These artistically restrained yet emotionally exuberant graphic images utilize lean, economical form to provide a succinct picture and create a powerful mood. With only the most essential lines and dashes, the Green Flute drawings and prints flow with a rapturous, graceful movement.
Celebration emerges from this work. Their mood is completely counter to the prevailing spirit of a grim mining town not far from the action of one of the worst wars the world had ever known. All of this would be essential to Albers’s teaching at the Bauhaus and afterward: the ability of art to provide energy and joy as an antidote to a less felicitous reality, and the use of a bare minimum of elements to impart volumes of information.
LITERATURE BECAME another route to transport in this period when Albers was enjoying renewed physical health. On April 14, 1917, referring to a play by Reinhard Johannes Sorge, who had died the previous year at age twenty-four, he wrote Perdekamp:
Sorge’s King David has set me all aflame.
I have never cheered so continuously while reading anything. He has it: a glowing temperament and iron discipline. Oh, the glorious sun in the first act. I was so absorbed that I thought I could play the young David myself, I had to act him (in mime).15
Albers was at the same time making self-portraits in which he depicted himself as a hollow-cheeked, psychologically haunted young man. In 1916, shortly after he left the sanatorium, he vigorously gouged linoleum to make his own profile ferocious. The piercing strokes—and the harsh juxtaposition of concentrated, pitch-black ink and the white of the paper in the resultant print—evoke raw emotional force. Having mastered, as if by instinct, the ability to reconstruct and evoke his own appearance, transforming the flat sheet of paper so that the void appears contoured and rounded, authentically representing the bulges and indentations of a lean human head, while simultaneously using line and shape to create a violent energy, he invests himself with all the force of Sorge’s David. Albers would shed this persona at the Bauhaus, where he structured and polished his art and became an elegant young man in spats, but he would not subdue the vehemence.
Albers continued, in his account to Perdekamp: “I was so absorbed that I forgot my Mephisto. And that means a lot to me: as I find it so difficult to get out of myself (and for that reason) so difficult to empathize with others: here I read with more assurance and confidence than ever before.”16
“My Mephisto” was a reference to a small oil self-portrait in which he presents himself looking so grim and demonic that, when she saw the work sixty-five years later, the elderly Anni Albers refused to authenticate it (see color plate 18). Although she finally acknowledged that she suspected the painting really was by and of Josef, who had died a few years before the canvas reemerged from the collection of one of his sister’s heirs, Anni would not include it in the catalogue of his work because he looked “so unbearably tortured.”
Why Mephisto? In the German literary tradition—Albers probably knew the character through Goethe rather than Christopher Marlowe—Mephistopheles (also known as Mephisto) is the devil summoned by Faustus in the presence of Lucifer. Mephisto is so hideous that Faustus orders him to assume the appearance of a Franciscan friar. Faustus then becomes immensely proud for having gotten the devil to succumb to his will; he fails to realize that Mephisto serves only Lucifer, the prince of devils. Faustus ultimately learns from Mephisto that hell is a state of mind, not a place.
There was nothing extraordinary about a gallivanting young man playing with the idea of himself as a diabolical creature dressed as a friar. Albers was determined to break away from the moral and artistic confines of his upbringing. He wanted to eradicate the past and live differently in every way. But the direction of his rebellion was uncertain. It would take the Bauhaus to give that rebellion a purpose.
WHAT GROPIUS ESTABLISHED in Weimar would be the catalyst for Albers’s maturing. It was there that he would learn to combine his wish for self-control with his emotionalism—in his persona as in his art. New technologies and abstract form would be his means to let exuberance, somberness, tranquillity, euphoria, and other states of mind exist in single objects, fastidiously made. The psychological element, while as strong as in the letters to Perdekamp and the Mephisto self-portrait, would now be presented with balance and distance. And he would be given a new way to embrace the skills that were, in his eyes, the high point of his upbringing.
In the period before the Bauhaus opened its doors to him, however, Albers had two different, compartmentalized sides. At the same time as he was creating the harsh linoleum cuts, he was blatantly emulating Cézanne. Here he used the side of a lithographic crayon to construct a series of small adjacent planes that move us through the composition. Dexterously employing the ridges of the laid paper to enrich the gray tones, he leaves blank spaces to help build up the mass. The control and restraint are impressive. Every area reads clearly, and the picture surface and three-dimensional space interact dynamically.
The economy, and the play between flatness and depth, are of a piece with the Mephistophelian work, however different the spirit. What would make Josef Albers the first student at the Bauhaus to become a teacher there was his consistent sureness and know-how even as he presented different emotional climates. All the work looks fresh and spontaneous, yet it has the presence of a building for which there have been a hundred blueprints.
In a large self-portrait lithograph that echoes Cézanne’s work, there is a consistent rhythm, and every area has significance. Each stroke contributes to the physical solidity and the organic coherence. The mass of shoulder and chin and skull is clear and distinct. A solidity of character emerges as well. We see a believer in principles, newly capable and convinced of his own rightness. The self-doubts Albers revealed to Perdekamp and the anguish of his other images of himself are here under wraps. If this is Mephistopheles disguised as a friar, he wears his persona convincingly.
5
Like his future confreres at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers was painfully alert to his own feelings. Everything was extreme: his consciousness of himself, his awareness of the world around him, his faith that art was salvation.
Albers wrote Franz Perdekamp, “Elsewhere I know no pure or complete attention to anything but myself.” He had been inspired by The Green Flute to think of Perdekamp’s life and work. “I think that this is because of the clarity of this glorious dance. And the shining drunkenness of the dancer (R.J.S.) that gilds even the slightest Spanish footnotes.”17 R.J.S. was Ruth Schwartzkopf, who danced the part of the one of the princesses; “Spanish footnotes” was code for sensuality and exoticness. Perdekamp was the rare soul who lived in that same world of unabashed passion.
The young teacher from Bottrop felt beckoned from the emotional dead-ness of the milieu in which he had been raised. He described to his poet friend his awakening, albeit obliquely:
Now I sense how you must have felt about it. About him, who delivers so much of what I have wished for so long, and what (it seems to me) you also wish for.
Man, you have put the right thing in my hands, where everything feels so unreal to me. Where just before the Golem seemed to speak from my soul: “Night is there to be destroyed by our thoughts, only then does life begin.” Before, I could not so easily rid myself of this (and I don’t want to); however, crystalline clarity does do one good. With grateful best wishes, from your Jupp18
What Perdekamp had in common with the unidentified “him” and what Albers joined him in desiring is unknown; what is certain, though, is that it involved unbridled feeling.
AS LONG AS GERMANY was still fighting, Albers had little chance to
spread his wings to the extent he desired. He might scrounge the money for a ballet ticket, and at least he had the possibility of making art on paper, but he still craved greater change. On April 25, 1917, he wrote Perdekamp from Bottrop: “Voracious longing in me, haste right through me, stifling dark heaviness around me (screaming for a form!): it sears and shatters me with prickling unrest.”19
The way out of that restlessness and beyond “the hell of my home” continued to be literature.20 Albers was discovering the world he would soon enough be joining. He was captivated above all by two contemporary writers: Franz Werfel and Oskar Kokoschka, who was a playwright as well as a painter. Albers could not have anticipated that both of these men would be lovers of the wife of the founder of the institution he was soon to join, but he clearly felt the magnetic pull of the sophisticated, daring world they inhabited. On June 20, 1917, he wrote Perdekamp that he had read Werfel’s Wir sind [We are]—it was “magnificent” and Euripedes’ Trojan Women translation, which was to be presented in Dusseldorf. In Dresden they performed Kokoschka (directed by him). They say it had very good reviews. Man. A new age is dawning.”21
Albers, though, was still in his “dark heaviness” of depression. On the back of the postcard where he reported these performances, he added, “I’m no use any more. I don’t even enjoy a smoke. Can’t really enjoy myself or let myself go. Maybe it’s for the best.”22 Albers’s vulnerability, which he carefully concealed in public, was a driving force behind his clean and logical designs. He longed to corral his wayward emotions. His approach to teaching, and his imposition of geometric order on the inherent disorder of the human mind, would enable him to achieve his goal. But, like Kandinsky, whatever the façade, he had the fire within.
The Bauhaus Group Page 38