The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  TWO DAYS AFTER mailing the card that pitted manic joy against deep despair, Albers sent Perdekamp a poem, “The Mosquito Swarm.” For the rest of his life, he would periodically write poetry, but he would never recapture the candor of this first known effort, with its leitmotif of independence and leadership, and, at its conclusion, the writer’s powerful swipe at placing value on the latest fashion and his defense of the notion of real rather than superficial progress:

  All afloat (The Mosquito Swarm)

  I see many men—many paths

  Everywhere a restless to and fro

  Or up and down

  Without moving from the spot.

  Each feels his place by sensing his neighbor

  But if one wants to advance he cannot

  attend to others,

  must go differently from them—straight ahead

  Likely he will be alone

  But outside—though it be the death of him:—

  he will feel the infinity of the universe—

  Will the others ever follow?

  (That need not trouble him)

  Perhaps a later swarm will

  (unconciously, not on his account,

  maybe blown there by the wind)

  reach his solitary place or follow his path

  and perhaps then sense a new air

  I see a second one,

  who wants to tear the mass away from the spot he must not fly straight ahead.

  He would glide past the others and they would not notice him.

  Only by perpetual slow tugging forward, moving up and down or right and left

  Could he tow the others along his path

  (But the many knocks in his neighbors’ ribs and the leader’s bruises bring him down before his time.)

  And yet there was a gothic time,

  when the whole swarm moved forward

  Maybe that was the result of a conjunction

  Of many strong congenial leaders.

  Later, though we still had very strong men

  They were singular and unrelated

  And did not give their time a great purpose.

  Of the third kind who aim to achieve it smoothly,

  My brief opinion is: cunning is not leadership

  And a fashionable hairdo will not breathe new life

  into an outmoded movement

  And if we sense today

  a great common urge

  And divine and hope for

  a new gothic age

  (I just give the name Expressionism)

  That only gives us the

  involuntary unity

  of many eyes “focused on infinity”23

  These would be the values Albers would promulgate to hundreds of students every year at the Bauhaus: the need to set one’s own course, the silliness and futility of trends, the dangers of “Expressionism.”

  Eyes needed to focus not “on infinity,” but on what was near, finite, and comprehensible. Inner passions might burn, but emotionalism worn on one’s sleeve was an unpardonable indulgence, a diversion from the search for clarity. Albers craved precise articulation. He believed that the overarching goal of communication must be the recipient’s comprehension—even if what was being communicated was the inherent imprecision and mysteriousness of life. These standards would dominate Albers’s thinking as a painter and a teacher for the rest of his life, especially when he and Anni became the first émigré Bauhauslers and Josef was, through his teaching, the primary transmitter of Bauhaus ideology to the New World.

  ALBERS WAS DRINKING a lot in those days. On March 26, 1918, he wrote Perdekamp:

  It was too delightful to sense health in Lersch and to see Winkler getting steadily grayer with the “Equals” and “Knockheads” (till I lightly stroked his little beard). How I got to bed I do not know. In the morning Mostert informed me that he had taken me to room 12 (afterward I remembered a green chaise longue) but that I had got into another room and crawled into Winkler’s bed there. At 9 a.m. Lersch then recited Franz Werfel to me in his boat. All vague. Except this one thing: that Brinkman (who met me for the first time and who valued me for my ingratitude) threatened to smash my windows if I would not accept him.24

  What this was really all about—the sharing beds with other men—remains a mystery. Anni Albers was fascinated by homosexuality, male and female; Josef seemed completely uninterested.

  When I knew him, Josef Albers was a very sensuous octogenarian, and by current standards out of control. After my first visit to the Alberses’ house, Ruth Agoos, the beautiful woman who had taken me there, described a moment that afternoon when Anni and I were upstairs looking at Anni’s prints and Albers invited her to see his latest Homages to the Square. They had no sooner stepped into his basement studio than Josef, gazing into Ruth’s face, cupped both of his hands around her ample breasts, massaged them for a few seconds, and then just exclaimed, “Ach! Ja!”

  When he had to go to New York for the initial meetings about his retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the first ever given to a living American—Albers had a young driver who would take him to bars in Yorktown so that he could drink a schnapps and savor the sight of the young German waitresses. That was the extent of things, but when Josef was middle-aged, he had a series of love affairs, of which Anni was well aware. She was so insecure about herself as a woman that after Josef died she told me that one of her proudest moments in their fifty-year marriage was when Josef came to her saying he required her help to end a relationship with a mistress. Unable to shake off the woman with whom he had been involved, he needed his wife to step in; she willingly set up the necessary meeting and did so.

  Albers associated homosexuality with weak art. His student Robert Rauschenberg (the Albers-Rauschenberg relationship merits a book in itself) was, he thought, a messy, out-of-control artist whose work garnered disproportionate attention; part of the problem was that the stars in the Rauschenberg—John Cage—Merce Cunningham galaxy struck him as something less than real men. (When asked by an interviewer how he felt about Rauschenberg’s work, Albers replied, “I’ve had so many students, you can’t expect me to remember all their names.”)

  He also made withering remarks to gay men. One day, a well-known textile designer and businessman who dressed and comported himself like a stand-up comic’s version of a gay interior decorator came to pay a call on Anni. In the eyes of people who really knew the field, he was above all a clever fellow who had taken Anni’s approach and made a fortune with it by creating commercially viable draperies and upholstery fabrics, then marketing them worldwide; with none of Anni’s genius or originality, he had taken her ideas and made millions of dollars with them, while she probably never garnered as much as $100,000 in royalties in her entire life. None of this bothered Anni, even as she acknowledged it, for she was beholden to the man for having enabled her to receive some major awards and for praising her at every opportunity. But the fellow was of no interest to Josef. He dressed too flamboyantly, and even if he was a cult figure to certain elements of the New York design world, to Josef he was neither an authentic human being—the man was too enchanted with gossip and big names—nor someone with creative genius. And, although Josef would not admit it, the man’s lack of masculinity was unbearable to him. When the designer walked into the house, Josef waved hello to him from the kitchen but did not offer a real greeting. He had the air of a schoolmaster looking at a student he did not take very seriously. When he noticed that the man was wearing large, pink-tinted sunglasses beneath his wide-brimmed hat, he exclaimed, after addressing the man by his last name, “You look like a rabbit!” Josef then bustled by to go to his studio, making it clear that he had important work to do.

  Once, during lunch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the openly homosexual curator Henry Geldzahler, whose father had been in the jewelry business, was wearing several rings, including a gold band with diamonds. Josef suddenly looked across the table at the moment when the diamonds caught the light a
nd said, “Hen-ahrheigh, zat ring is for a voman!” To this, Geldzahler grinned and calmly replied, “That’s right, Josef.” Both men were pleased to have made their points.

  As for his drinking: he was one of those people who could go for long stretches without alcohol, then imbibe to excess. When Josef was in his eighties, the collector Joseph Hirshhorn knew that if he arrived at the Alberses’ house with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, he could leave at the end of the visit with a group of artworks at a significantly discounted price. Anni described an occasion at Black Mountain when Josef passed out on the front porch of the small wooden house they were living in. She decided to put him into his pajamas and drag him to bed. Again, where many women would have been furious, Anni delighted in being helpful. The great manipulator of textiles removed what her husband was wearing and eased him into his pajamas. When she was done, she stood and admired him on the wooden floor, thinking he looked “beautiful and innocent, calm like a mummy.” She then realized the reason he resembled a mummy was that she had put both his legs into one pajama leg.

  What exactly happened back in 1918 with Lersch and Winkler and Brinkmann is unclear. But there is no doubt that Albers was inebriated—and that, as was always the case throughout his life, whatever occurred, he appeared completely comfortable with himself. Although she had a sense of assurance when she wove or made prints, Anni Albers never enjoyed a feeling of self-confidence in her social interactions. Josef never lacked it.

  IN THAT PERIOD just after World War I, Albers developed his draftsmanship further. He fine-tuned his ability to angle his lines and mete out their proportions so as to establish the volume of a head or the spatial configuration with nothing but a dash here and a stroke there. In his figure studies, he trained himself to present as few facts as possible—one line of one shoulder, the outline of its opposite hand—so that the viewer knows the entire pose and feels what he does not see.

  A drawing of Perdekamp on plain brown paper brings his great friend to life simply and effectively. Albers had whittled his art down to basics: volume and plastic reality. He said a lot simply, as he would in the glass constructions he made in Dessau and, much later in life, in his series of nearly three thousand paintings, each composed of only three or four squares in identical relationship but offering an infinite range of visual experiences. The steady pencil profile line of Perdekamp’s profile is masterful, and the hair and spectacles exemplify Albers’s steely articulation. His ability to make flat paper a gently rounded head is nothing short of alchemy. The effectiveness of that visual conciseness was echoed by the inscription on this drawing—”Mein freund Perdekamp!”—with its out-of-character exclamation point, and the rare, euphorically scribed signature “a.” Having achieved his objectives, Albers savored the victory.

  TOWARD THE END OF 1919, Josef Albers managed at last to escape, for a second time, the hometown that oppressed him. With the war over, he was desperate to taste the wider world again as he had in Berlin. In October, having saved up sufficient funds, he went to Munich to study at the Royal Bavarian State School of Art.

  He was following the footsteps of Klee and Kandinsky, although he did not yet know it. His painting professor at the Academy was Franz von Stuck, with whom Kandinsky and Klee had studied a decade earlier. At the Bauhaus, the three of them would agree that von Stuck’s practice of having them draw from the nude had no value. Albers would further belittle von Stuck’s method later in his life: “They teach them in front of naked girls to draw. When they called me to teach at Yale, I saved them 7,000 a year for models.”25 That absolute stance was part of how he presented himself to others, but it was as much a construction as were the geometric drawings he called “structural constellations,” for to create his identity as an abstractionist, Albers hid his own past as a figurative artist. What he had drawn “in front of naked girls” had been central to his own formation just before he went to the Bauhaus.

  Two months after Josef died, while I was helping Anni Albers organize the artwork he had left behind, I drove Anni to New Haven, Connecticut, about fifteen minutes from where she lived. She asked me to park in front of a building that had previously been the headquarters of the Yale University Press, the publisher of Josef’s great portfolio, Interaction of Color. Anni handed me a large bunch of keys and said that she thought Josef had a storage room in the basement, down a steep flight of stairs that she could not possibly manage. She asked me to go down there and see if there were any locked doors, and, if so, to determine if one of those keys could open it. She said the cellar would be so deserted that no on would even ask what I was doing. She was correct.

  Twenty minutes later, when I returned to the car, I told Anni that she was completely right, and that I had just found a treasure trove that set my knees wobbling. On walking in, I had spotted, on top of a pile of magazines, a drawing by Paul Klee that was the first page of a folded letter Klee had written Josef. I then realized there was a sizable number of Josef’s glass assemblages stored on racks, and I had happened onto a stack of photo collages; this was when I had my first glimpses of the Bauhauslers’ summertime idyll near Biarritz. I had also found some file folders labeled “my early drawings”—and realized that Josef had been drawing nudes and landscape scenes right up until he went to the Bauhaus. Like someone concealing a crime he had committed long ago, he had saved them as carefully as he had kept his students and the rest of the public from knowing of their existence.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, I returned regularly to that basement. Because Albers had dated a handful of the several hundred figurative drawings he had kept, it was possible to group them according to style and establish an approximate chronology for the work. It became clear that once he got to Munich, Albers drew more fluidly than ever before.

  Von Stuck might be considered Munich’s Bouguereau: a highly sentimental painter, stylized and embodying the latest short-lived chic. It is difficult to imagine what he could have taught Albers, who already knew basic technique, any more than one can see an impact of von Stuck on Klee or Kandinsky. But Albers mastered a fine calligraphic style in the course of that year, applying ink with a brush in a way that echoes Chinese drawing at its most refined. He had a new assuredness, and utilized a principle he had gleaned from Van Gogh’s work: “The strokes of van Gogh, particularly in his portraits, always go with the form, the lines go down the nose, the lines follow the form. … I tried, indirectly, to do something similar. I was not copying Van Gogh; but afterwards I realized I was doing what he had done.”26

  In Munich, Albers developed the practice of tackling an identical subject in different media and of presenting a single subject from various vantage points. He drew a nude with a thick brush and ink, and then did the same pose, with the same black ink, but applying it with a fine-pointed pen. The first drawing has a deep, basso voice; the second is a light soprano. While having his model remain absolutely still, Albers also shifted his position from her right for a first drawing, to her left for a second one, and then presented her squarely from behind in a third. The first image emphasizes the interior musculature of her back and torso, the next reveals more of her breasts, and the last of the three, in its descent farther down her bare buttocks, is, more than the other two, undeniably sensuous. Albers was realizing to what extent the issues of art were a matter of choice—not merely of the subject, but of the way we perceive it and the means with which we present it. The subject is incidental to the selection of medium and vantage point, and to the nuances of the artist’s own attitude.

  AMONG THOSE DRAWINGS that Josef Albers had concealed for more than fifty years were two that show a pair of nude figures. In one, the two naked people are dancing in an orgiastic frenzy; in the other, they embrace with their bodies pressed together. It’s unfortunate that these drawings and photos were not known by the larger public during the artist’s lifetime, because that knowledge would have prevented the clichéd thinking that has led viewers to miss the sensuality and fire that underlie all of
Albers’s work.

  Albers certainly did not see either pose in von Stuck’s class. The naked man in the dancing couple is a self-portrait; even though this may not seem obvious since he is seen from behind, he has Albers’s identical head shape and haircut, the same thick neck, the same stocky build. Albers, who liked to dance, renders himself as perfectly in control. His posture and pose are confident and graceful. Doing what appears to be a tango, he is sturdy and dominating while at the same time calm and patient: an unbrutal master. He has his massive arms precisely where he wants them, and his bulging muscles function well. His feet are perfectly placed. This impressive specimen is a good dancer under whose steady guidance the woman is gyrating with pleasure. In the other drawing, a naked woman is being embraced by a second naked person we see from the rear and whose gender is indeterminate, although the hips and build suggest that it is a second female—an impression furthered by the hair, although not decisively. The two press their bodies against each other with tremendous physical and emotional force.

  Loathing artists like Klimt and Schiele for their unconcealed eroticism, and even more for the excesses of their visual style, Albers was not going to risk the comparison, as he would have if he let the world see these images (and, we might imagine, many similar ones that have not survived). But, subject matter aside, they are, at heart, consistent with everything he would do once he arrived at the Bauhaus. They reveal a high level of concentration and a sure hand. They make clear how much Albers liked to tease and manipulate, to force our imagination. We picture the passionate looks on the dancers’ faces all the more forcefully because we cannot see them. Albers has us keyed up and stimulated rather than satiated. These deliberately enigmatic drawings anticipated the taste for unresolved mysteries that would underlie his teaching and his abstract work in Weimar and Dessau.