We cannot fathom everything at once; we feel the moment fleeting. The mood is one of expectancy and tension; the figures that join only at their hands are like the colors that touch only along shared boundaries in Albers’s later art, yet are palpably connected beyond their physical contact because of the way they interpenetrate and create mysterious shadows and illusory afterimages. Albers would deny the value of drawing nudes, yet in his own figurative work, the very stuff he would conceal forever after, he was acquiring the force and integrity that would define him at the Bauhaus.
THE WOMAN DANCING with Albers was most likely Frieda Karsch, whom he called Friedel. Two years younger than Albers, she was from a rich family; her father was a prominent architect. Born in Münster, she had been sent to Ireland as a young girl as part of her parents’ efforts to have her learn manners and become a society lady, but she returned wanting to take up a profession. Her parents would have nothing to do with the idea, so she ran away.
In Munich, Karsch sold her jewelry to have some money to live on. She arrived on the scene not long after Albers; in his first letter to Perdekamp, written a month after he arrived, he refers to a wonderful outing to the countryside with her. Karsch’s presence, however, did not mitigate his despair over his new life. It cost a lot more to live in Munich than it had at home, and the money he had to pay for his classroom replacement while he was on leave added a sting. Worse still, he was experiencing a form of painter’s block. From his cold rented room on Tuerkenstrasse, Albers wrote Perdekamp:
I must write to you of my complaints to Elenah. I would have preferred to write earlier and differently, but I cannot get free of myself, and the outside world is wearing me down. I see myself as a last [violin] string stretched to breaking point. And cannot release itself. No one can get it to sound. Nor to break. Not until the peg screeches back and it hangs loosely in space. Beside the instrument. Then an invisible spiteful finger comes and tensions it to the utmost. And so on. Changing quickly or slowly. Unpredictably.
Instead of doing something, I run around wildly. Do errands for others who put them to good use. Give the best advice, that brings rich profits. And steal myself from myself, so that I am left without time, money, or leisure.
Oh damnation, to be able to tear my bound hands painfully free, and the consciousness of having tied the bonds myself. So many obligations and considerations on all sides and such weakness.
I need to earn some money since I am so high and dry: the school office is demanding 1600 marks for a replacement for 4 months. According to that calculation I am left with 61 M[arks] for a whole year after 11 years’ service with corresponding seniority and cost-of-living increases. And I could earn good money. But I dissipate time and energy. Annoyed by silly insufficiencies I fill my palette but just sit there with my head in my hands. Paint one stroke and lie down. Work out the finest financial plans but am the most unbusinesslike person where my own interests are concerned. And am always aware that the roll of money would crumble away before the bare necessities had been purchased. So much has already gone and I hardly know where except for a glass of good wine.
While the ugly words stuff, leather, food buzz around in my head, because they have to be materialized. I am not where my efforts would pay off, carry sacks of potatoes for other people. Don’t send Merkauf the ordered pages, don’t paint the promised portrait that would bring in something, because I let myself in for silly distractions, because other people want to have company.
All the best, your ill Juppi27
The Josef Albers whom the public—and even his closest acquaintances—later came to know would have none of that vulnerability or stymied capability. If he had any sense of inadequacy, he would keep it under wraps. But for now he was contending with a self who suffered extreme low points and skepticism, and who felt as fragile as the taut violin string he depicts in his overblown analogy.
It wasn’t long, however, before life was looking up. Albers turned ebullient over the next couple of weeks, for reasons he explained to “Franz, Franz!”:
And don’t know whether I should rather be pleased or regret my last letter. For I am doing very well, since I already knew how many people were sympathetic to me. And it was nice to be able to be such a help to poor Friedel who coming from such a wealthy background now lives and eats so meagerly and has for so long been without not only ration cards but also coal and so freezes into the bargain. But doesn’t want to return home, where they want her back and always send her money so late. And she can’t come up to my room, so I carry bread and butter and baked apples out to her on the street and can only warm her with my hands. I may only carry a sack of coal just to her door. And play the flute beneath her window in the evenings. Sunday mornings we go for a walk, out to Schomenmacher. Me and my little child. And then Christmas. That will be beautiful. Bright and warm and beautiful.
Your Jupp28
ALBERS WAS DEVELOPING a specialty in wealthy young women intrepid enough to break away from their families. He was also awakening to an idea alien to his upbringing: sybaritic pleasure.
The idea that art and creativity might be one’s primary focus was revolutionary. In Bottrop, men got jobs, supported their families, and went to church; any enjoyment came mainly with schnapps. Albers was primed for something totally different. What the Bauhaus would be for him, as it was for Klee and Kandinsky, was not so much a place that pushed a particular philosophy and advocated modernism as a sanctuary in which to lead the good life and devote one’s self full-time to the unusual priority of making and thinking about and teaching art without feeling that this was an inappropriate distraction from some other, more “real” work.
At that moment in Munich, Albers did not yet know what Gropius had just started in Weimar, but he was ready to make a radical shift in his life. His plan at first was to join a trip to America organized by Backhaus, the man about whom he had written Perdekamp. Then he intended to head east and go to India, and was trying to work out the details. It was time for a life-altering change:
Easter Sunday, 1920
Franz!
We have been in the mountains for the last three days, where it is quite glorious. Although Friedel’s shoes have no heels anymore. But yesterday she wept for joy. …
Only one word comes to mind, “glorious.” One really is lost for words in the presence of such overwhelming timelessness.—
Now something else: travel. … Do you know anybody who could make a donation of part of the money, that he will anyway soon have to pay as a unification tax, for a scientific expedition or artistic experiments. Or perhaps a loan.29
If no one would back his going to America or India, or to Constantinople and Alexandria—which he was also considering—he was open to any adventure where the bills could be paid.
IN THAT TIME PERIOD, however, the farthest Albers went was to the Bavarian Alps—with Friedel Karsch. Now he began, with a loaded brush, to draw mountain peaks and chalets. These pictures of Alpine scenery soar with vitality. Art was a vessel for confidence. On July 5, he wrote Perdekamp a quick postcard:
From a cool bower surrounded by mountains of gooseberries and currants, birds chirping, cows mooing, dogs barking and distant boom-boom of the soldiers’ homecoming dance, best wishes from your block-nosed and smoke-tongued,
Jupp30
In his euphoria over nature’s bounty and the sense of life opening up in new ways, Albers stumbled upon the four-page leaflet with Feininger’s woodcut of a cathedral and Gropius’s few paragraphs describing the Bauhaus. In a society where documents about the most minor matters could run on for pages, this concise brochure, with its single illustration and one page of text, offered everything the restless Bottrop schoolteacher was looking for: a fresh approach to existence, freedom from the shackles of tradition, a place to pursue art, the chance of financial security, and the unknown.
6
By that fall, a year after the Bauhaus had opened, Albers was there. He later wrote, “I was thirty-two, … thre
w all my old things out the window, started once more from the bottom. That was the best step I made in my life.”31 Gropius’s workshops in Weimar were a chance to put Bottrop, figurative art, and—he initially thought—the need to teach behind him. He replaced a life of isolation and borderline poverty with sympathetic companionship and, at least, rudimentary room and board.
He took the foundation course required of all students. But he was older than most of the others, and already had his own ideas. In little time, Albers had invented a new art form. Unable to afford paints or canvas, he searched for free materials with which to make art. The Weimar city dump was not far from the Bauhaus; pickax in hand and rucksack on his back, he began to hack up discarded bottles and other bits of broken glass, and filled his pack with the fragments that interested him the most.
Back at the Bauhaus, he used lead and wire to assemble the shards into vibrant compositions. Albers extracted a radical and startling beauty from the detritus. The art he made was organized yet playful. With his unerring eye and instinct for visual rhythm, he constructed assemblages that were harmonious and at the same time possessed of the unguarded exuberance of his happiest frolicking.
In that period of financial hardship and abrupt social change, many German artists were focusing on society’s woes, making human suffering their primary subject matter. Albers organized the resurrected junkyard pickings into windows that sang. He mounted three of them on light boxes and hung others so they would be penetrated by daylight; the light pouring through them intensified that spirit of sheer pleasure.
Albers’s initial exploration at the Bauhaus also included a print portfolio cover composed of oscillating horizontal rectangles, and some imaginative efforts to create wooden furniture. In the next thirteen years—he stayed at the school longer than anyone else—he would design and make tables and chairs, formulate new alphabets, plan buildings, use a camera in unprecedented ways, and progress from assembling broken bits of glass to stenciling and sandblasting flat panes of the material in compositions of mathematical rigor and great artistic power. Without the originality of Klee or the intellectual reach of Kandinsky, he would be the school’s greatest polymath, proving his versatility in many domains. He would also become a gifted writer and public speaker who helped articulate for the larger public much that was vital to the Bauhaus approach, and the teacher whom Gropius credited above all others for furthering the school’s educational mission.
WHEN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Marcel Breuer arrived at the Bauhaus in 1920, the first person he asked for was Johannes Itten. “I had to wait for a while and then he came out in the corridor. And I didn’t tell him anything, it was obvious what I wanted.”32 Breuer, as Itten knew, had come as a new student and was trying to figure out what his first moves should be, given that the Bauhaus did not yet have much structure. Breuer presented the teacher of the foundation course with a small book of drawings he had made.
He went through them this way: “Hmmm, hmmm …hmmm.”
He was a very arrogant man, you know, in the first moment I had an antipathy toward him. You know, it’s a kind of importance tactic. … He believed in himself … very much …Mrs. Mahler, who was Gropius’s wife at that time, she knew Itten and she thought this is an interesting man and he made an impression of an interesting man. And the shaved head …He was originally Swiss, Itten, and had been a painter, and had in Vienna a private art school, and then Gropius invited him to come with him to the Bauhaus.
Describing his very first day in Weimar forty years after the fact, Breuer recalled how, feeling like an outsider as a Hungarian Jew, his loneliness and uncertainty were exacerbated by Itten’s treatment of him. But Breuer did not lose hope. He decided to go into the glass workshop. There he encountered a tall man in a military cape and pointed black hat who picked up a large brush and splattered paint all over a piece of metal. This was Papp, another Hungarian.
Breuer saw a piece of paper on the door. His was one of the three names written on it. But because he knew little German, he did not understand why.
So I asked the guy who was next to me, what does that mean? I somehow stuttered it out. He understood what I meant. He said something like … “You are the man who on that week has to keep order in the classroom.”
I said, “I don’t understand.” And he had seen that I didn’t understand much, so he said, “Take a brush and a broom and sweep the floor.” “What is a broom?”
The stranger reached for a broom and handed it to Breuer. It was Albers, who had arrived at the school only shortly before Breuer. Simply by dint of being approachable and down-to-earth, the carpenter’s son from Bottrop had already assumed a unique position at the Bauhaus.
IN JANUARY 1921, Albers wrote Franz Perdekamp from Weimar, “So often or so many times I have wanted to write to you about so many things, but the way things go here, either all the liveliness here stops me writing about our young people or an upset stomach about over-rich Christmas parcels. Or cold compresses about grotesque love affairs. In short there is too little boredom, so that I had to work out that my first new year’s resolution would have to be to give up letter writing. The following idea also popped into my head: ban all women.” He told Perdekamp that he was in an “expensive but great apartment” but needed money. He had been forced to borrow money from friends “because the canteen cash in my purse had dwindled so much. So: things go wildly up and down. So much so that I need to apply the brakes. … About my old surroundings, the new people and the Bauhaus.
Probably a lot needs to be broken. And possibly it will be worse because it should have been broken long ago.”33
The detritus he was hacking up in the Weimar dump could be seen as a metaphor for the preconceptions—his own and his father’s—that he was shattering. The octogenarian Josef Albers I knew disapproved vehemently of the notion of art as autobiography; nonetheless, his work often reflected his own needs and his psychological state. The glass assemblages were analogous to what the Bauhaus facilitated: destruction and resurrection. Coaxing beauty from what to others was nothing but refuse, he demonstrated the possibility of transformation that was one of the Bauhaus’s greatest offerings. (See color plate 19.)
ALBERS’S TEACHER for the Bauhaus preliminary course was Gertrud Grunow, a musician who taught under Itten’s supervision. Albers wrote Perdekamp about the liberating effect of her educational method: “You cannot give it a name. It is about loosening up of people. …You have to walk in tones or experience them while standing, move in colors and light and form.”34 A single course sufficed, however. It was not in Albers’s nature to study under someone else. On February 7, 1921, he was one of three students who applied to be exempted from the preliminary drawing course. He was granted his wish on the basis of his work with Grunow, which was considered exceptional.
Eager as he now was to enter a workshop, Albers was not sure he could afford to remain in Weimar. He was still a student, even if he didn’t act like one, and had no money coming in beyond his regular stipend from the regional teaching system back in Bottrop, which was diminished by what he had to pay them back for his absence.
He wrote the officials in Westphalia asking for more support for his training at the Bauhaus. He claimed it would make him a better instructor when he returned to teaching in Bottrop—although he had no intention of honoring his agreement to go back. The Bauhaus masters, meanwhile, told the habitué of the junkyard that his glasswork was not an acceptable artistic medium and that he had to study wall painting. He refused, jeopardizing his future even more.
At the end of the second semester, Gropius “reminded me several times, as was his duty, that I could not stay at the Bauhaus if I persisted in ignoring the advice of my teachers to engage first of all in the wall-painting class.”35 Treating the directors threat as just another challenge, Albers continued to work only with bottle shards on flattened tin cans and wire screens. Then, at the end of his second semester, he was required to exhibit his work to date.
“I felt t
hat the show would be my swan song at the Bauhaus,” he later recalled. In fact, it was the reverse. Following the presentation of his assemblages of painted bottle bottoms and other glass fragments he had hacked up, he received a letter from the Masters’ Council not only informing him that he could continue his studies but asking him to set up a larger facility for working in glass at the school. “Thus suddenly I got my own glass workshop and it was not long before I got orders for glass windows.”36
BETWEEN 1922 AND 1924, Albers made a window for the reception room of the director’s office at the Weimar Bauhaus (see color plate 21). A mosaic of syncopating rectangles, it glowed a vibrant red, with other colors quickening the pulse. To everyone who entered that room, the mélange of forms instantly conveyed the energy and optimism of the new institution. This was not the only Albers work that greeted visitors waiting to see Gropius. He also made a large table and a shelf for magazines and catalogues, both composed of lively arrangements of contrasting light and dark woods. There was a complex storage unit, constructed from white milk glass and stainless steel, that turned a corner. Albers’s unusual glass lighting fixture depended on a recently developed clear bulb, while his row of folding seats looked like something out of an ancient monastery. All of these objects used right angles and bold planes to create a lively rhythm. At the same time they subtly provided a sense of orderliness, for their measurements were all based on the use of a single underlying unit. In the corner cabinet, the shelves were precisely two centimeters thick; the recesses in the glass doors were two centimeters wide; and every other dimension was a multiple or precise fraction of two centimeters. The result is a soothing feeling of stable underpinnings: an important message to impart, given the crosscurrents of difficulty at the Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus Group Page 40