The glass workshop at the Weimar Bauhaus, ca. 1923. Having been told by the Bauhaus Masters’ Council that if he worked only in glass he would not be allowed to remain at the school, Albers showed such originality and mastery of the medium that they ended up asking him to run the glass workshop and to be one of the first students to serve as a master.
These pieces were in the vernacular of the other Bauhaus craftsmen, but Albers brought to his designs his own eye for simplicity, purpose, and scale.
Lucia Moholy-Nagy, photograph showing a table designed by Josef Albers for the reception room to Walter Gropius’s office, ca. 1923. Albers’s furniture depended upon minimal elements that were measured as precisely as the notes of a work of classical music.
His furniture was not startlingly original, but it was refined in a particular way. And in adding the dash of art to these functional objects, Albers had made a major leap forward.
Albers’s designs are distinctive in both their relative airiness and their sureness of form. The voids have a sculptural richness. Planes interlock in crisp rhythm. The way in which elemental shapes embrace and respond to one another clearly betrays the painter’s eye. The corner cupboard was wonderfully inventive in details like its concealed liquor storage, but its juxtapositions of forms and materials were equally surprising. What Albers made was practical, but it also betrayed a rare inventiveness and artistic eye, and a courageous yet seemingly effortless originality, that were among the most vital goals of the Bauhaus.
IN GRID MOUNTED, a glasswork of that period, Albers applied a principle he had discerned in Giotto’s work. He built the whole out of minimal vocabulary of form, confining himself to a single unit of construction. What necessity imposed on the Italian, Albers imposed on himself. It was the same principle by which Klee limited himself to only a few colors, or to variations of a single form. In Grid Mounted, Albers deliberately used, as his sole means, glassmakers’ samples that he filed down to small, uniform squares. He then organized these like components in a checkerboard pattern and bound them together with fine copper wire within a heavy iron grille.
Itten had used the checkerboard pattern as a teaching tool in his preliminary course, but Albers applied his own alchemy to the motif. Candid as it is in material and technique, the underlying units a tradesman’s means of showing types of glass for sale, in a range of hues and textures, Grid Mounted has a celestial radiance. The color juxtapositions create vigorous movement, and the lively interplay has a spiritual force, a sense of something miraculous occurring, as in Giotto’s Annunciation scenes. Having thrown himself into the making of this work with the enthusiasm of one who has found his way, Albers breathed life into the grid.
This was Josef Albers’s particular contribution to the Bauhaus: manifest in his glasswork, his functional objects, and his teaching. He deliberately built an orderly, well-regulated universe in which one both subscribed to rules and exercised one’s imagination. The tied-down squares of color in Grid Mounted are full of surprises, free-spirited within their very rigid boundaries. Again, an abstract artwork was uncannily like its maker. It appears grounded in the practical—the craftsman’s manipulation of color and texture—but it is jubilant. On the surface, Albers adhered to accepted standards of comportment—he had nothing to do with the Mazdaist eccentricities of the Ittenites—but in his work he dared the outrageous. Grid Mounted is euphoria within the confines of structure.
LIKE KANDINSKY THAT SAME YEAR, Albers was hoping he would have the funds for a new pair of shoes. On March 22, he wrote Perdekamp:
Dear Franz! I have not thought about the shoe purchase for a long time. I expected to get money from home, but nothing doing. And so I do not have the ready money. And then it seems to me they would be more like mountain boots. But I want to be able to wear them as “good shoes.” So I can’t make up my mind.37
He was also uncertain about what his position at the Bauhaus would be, and whether he would find his niche there. He had made strides in his own work, but it wasn’t clear which workshop he should be in, and what he should be doing. At Itten’s beckoning, he was teaching the Bauhaus foundation course, but he considered his role as an educator only a temporary gig; he preferred making things, even if he lacked the support to do so exclusively.
During that period of unanswered questions, Albers encountered the intensely determined, strong-willed Annelise Fleischmann. The twenty-two-year-old daughter of a prosperous Berlin furniture manufacturer and of a woman whose family owned the largest publishing company in the world, Fleischmann had opted to leave behind her parents’ luxurious way of life, and their notion that she should settle down to a life of domestic ease like her mother’s. When she and Josef first met, she had not yet been accepted at the Bauhaus.
Josef was blond and outgoing; Annelise was dark-haired and brooding. She was smarting because Oskar Kokoschka had turned her down when she went to Dresden, her portfolio under her arm, to study art with him. “Why don’t you go home and become a housewife?” Alma Mahler Gropius’s lover had asked. Determined nonetheless to devote her life to art, she then enrolled in the School for Applied Arts in Hamburg, but left after deciding it was nothing more than “needlepoint for ladies.”38 Having persuaded her parents to let her go to the Bauhaus, she was turned down in her first attempt for admission. By then, she and Josef had met, and she was in no hurry to return to Berlin.
Josef offered to guide Annelise with some of the basic exercises in folding paper so that she might have a better chance on her second go-around. This time she was admitted. The heiress still was not certain, however, of where she stood with the man whom she described as “a lean, half-starved West-phalian with irresistible blond bangs.”39
There was a Bauhaus Christmas party at the end of 1922. Annelise attended dutifully, sat in the back of the room, and girded herself to get through an event where no one would notice her presence. Not only was she a newcomer; she was, in her own view, a perpetual outsider. She was certain that Father Christmas—Walter Gropius dressed as Santa Claus—would have nothing for her as he called out the names on the cards attached to his pile of gifts. Annelise was so surprised to hear her own name that she thought it was a mistake. But people were staring in her direction, waiting for her to get up, and she realized she should step forward to receive her gift. It was a print, rolled up, with a gold ribbon around it, of Giotto’s Flight into Egypt. Attached to that image from Giotto’s fresco cycle in Padua was a card with Josef Albers’s name on it.
The scene of the Virgin Mary on a donkey, the infant Jesus in her arms, with the triangulated mountain behind them perfectly echoing the form of the figures on the animal, embodied the harmony and beauty for which Annelise was longing. Josef knew the effect his gift would have. Besides, Friedel Karsch had, in August 1922, married Franz Perdekamp—to whom Albers had introduced her in Munich.
Josef had no shortage of women in his life—the ones who periodically made him swear off other members of the opposite sex—but Annelise Fleischmann was different. She had his consuming dedication to art, and a rare strength and intelligence. She had striking looks; while she wasn’t pretty, she had an utterly fascinating face. She was pensive and observant; little escaped her. She also offered access to another stratum of German society, although her background made her intensely uncomfortable. Josef’s attraction to a Jewish woman who wanted to devote her life to art and was eager to abandon the expected female role further distinguished him from almost everybody with whom he had grown up. Yet again he was making an extraordinary choice.
WHEN JOHANNES ITTEN LEFT the Bauhaus at the start of 1923, Albers was relieved. He thought that the teaching he had been doing at Itten’s request would come to an end, enabling him to concentrate his energies on his own work. But after Itten’s departure, Gropius came into the glass workshop at a moment when it was full of students and, in front of all of them, said to Albers, “‘You are going to teach the basic course.’” Albers later recalled the dialogue precisely: “I said, ‘Wh
at? I’m glad to have teaching behind me; I don’t want to do it any more.’ …He put me in his arms and said, ‘Do me the favor, you are the man to do it.’ He persuaded me. He wanted me to teach handicraft, because coming from a handicraft background on my mother’s side and also on my father’s side, I was always very interested in producing practical things. Gropius said ‘You take the newcomers and introduce them to handicraft.’ “40 He felt he had no choice.
Albers had found Itten’s preliminary course “at first quite stimulating,” but he came to dislike the teacher’s “emphasis on personality.” It bothered Albers that Itten’s presence was “terribly dominant.”41 Albers abhorred anything he considered disorderly or self-indulgent. He felt that character quirks should be concealed; a clear sense of purpose, and the appearance of harmony and balance, were essential in personal comportment and in art. He could hardly be expected to like the blatant eccentric who taught in a burgundy red clown’s costume and practiced Mazdaist rites.
Itten’s worst flaw in Albers’s eyes was that he was a bad painter. His work had a relentlessly deliberate spirituality, but to look at it was not a spiritual experience. The opportunity to make up for Itten’s weaknesses was irresistible. The mission Gropius gave Albers was “to counter the remnants of slack student attendance and mystical preoccupations in the wake of Itten’s departure” and to overcome “the reigning desultory attitudes.”42 In the fall of 1923, Albers began teaching eighteen hours a week—more than anyone else at the Bauhaus, even if he had to be off campus—mostly in the mornings. To his surprise, what he undertook reluctantly quickly became a consuming passion.
When toward the end of his first term he changed the course name from “Principles of Craft” to “Principles of Design,” it was because he was teaching a general approach to form that utterly captivated him. Emphasizing the need for visual clarity while simultaneously exalting the possibilities for visual trickery, Albers had found himself.
OFFICIALLY, HOWEVER, he was in limbo. Following Itten’s departure, László Moholy-Nagy had been appointed head of the preliminary course. For Albers to assume a position on the faculty, a second vacancy was required, but no one else was leaving. He was relegated to give his workshop in the Reithaus, a fifteen-minute walk from the main Bauhaus buildings.
The Reithaus, on the banks of the tree-lined River Ilm, had been built by the Grand Duke of Weimar. A former riding academy, it was not where students expected to go to learn about art. But if Albers felt like a second-class citizen for having been put there, at least his classroom had large windows that let in ample daylight. The windows also served to let in the students; the low-level bureaucrats who worked in the government offices above complained about the way the young people in Albers’s class would noisily climb in and out.
It irritated Albers that Moholy-Nagy, who arrived at the Bauhaus after him, had been made head of the course because of his seniority and past experience. Half a century later, Moholy’s name always elicited scorn and prompted Albers to remind people that the Bauhaus should not be glorified. The conflicts, power struggles, and hurt feelings there were the same as at any other institution, Josef and Anni both insisted; no place or organization, including the Bauhaus or Black Mountain College, where they were for sixteen years after the Bauhaus closed, was as interesting as art itself.
7
I was taken to meet the Alberses for the first time on a fall day in 1970. In my mind’s eye, the last surviving Bauhaus masters would live in a sleek, flat-roofed house, glistening white, with a band of industrial windows. I imagined them appearing on a balcony railed in stovepipe—just like the ones I had seen in photos of the Dessau headquarters of the revolutionary art school. They would eat lean, geometrically organized food—possibly in keeping with the Mazdaist rules of vegetarianism—and drink tea poured from one of Marianne Brandt’s streamlined metal teapots.
This was one of the many ways I had pictured a very different encounter from the one I had. I certainly had not anticipated that within a couple of hours I would watch Anni Albers put Kentucky Fried Chicken out on a three-tier hospital-style rolling cart, explaining, with her soft voice and German-accented English, that it was always essential to specify “extra-kahrispy”—in order to have chicken like the classic Viennese version. Nor had I imagined that the former Annelise Fleischmann would arrange that take-out chicken on her perfectly plain white Rosenthal porcelain plates in a way that created a lunch with an aesthetic harmony I had never before witnessed.
Nor had it occurred to me that in extolling the merits of Heinz ketchup and observing the charming emphasis on “fifty-seven” as the fixed number of the company’s “varieties,” making me consider the excellence of a glass bottle properly shaped to fit into the palm of one’s hand, Josef Albers would lead me to an understanding of the goals of the Bauhaus. This was my way in to an appreciation for the Bauhaus’s fundamental values: knowledge of materials, the need for an object to be designed according to its purpose and executed with a respect for human scale, the willingness of businesspeople as well as artists to devote themselves to bettering the experience of others, and the real emotional benefits of such intelligent, moral, generous thinking.
All that I knew was that the Alberses had been associated with a lot that was pioneering in twentieth-century art. Josef’s Homages to the Square had made such an impact on modern painting that he was soon to be the first living artist to be given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Shortly after the end of World War II, Anni had been the first weaver to have a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, and had subsequently become an innovative printmaker. I looked forward to encountering living history, but I did not yet grasp what the lives of serious artists were like.
As I went off on that autumn day nearly forty years ago to meet the only remaining gods of the Bauhaus, I looked forward to the encounter with combined thrill and anxiety. But I did not imagine that my eyes would be opened to an entirely new way of seeing. Nor did I realize that with Anni and Josef, and the link they gave me to Klee and Kandinsky and the architects who led the Bauhaus, I would glimpse the humor and pain and the everyday realities as well as the consuming goals of the great Bauhauslers. More important still, I would discover that dedication to one’s passion, and the celebration and attenuation of what is wonderful in life, could become the fulcrum of earthly existence. The immersion in the visual world, not as something peripheral but as the central issue of one’s being, was strong enough to assure not merely one’s survival but an abiding sense of joy.
TURNING THE CORNER from a divided state road onto the Alberses’ winding residential street in the suburban Connecticut town of Orange, fifteen minutes from New Haven, I could have been anywhere in America, but I still expected to end up at a streamlined modernist villa with the style and perfection of a movie set. Instead, we turned into the driveway of an awkward, raised-ranch house, its wooden shingles stained the flat beige of Band-Aids, its slanted roof covered with the same asphalt as every other house on the block (see color plate 23). I was astonished by its ordinariness.
But the exterior of the Alberses’ house did have some startling elements. The graceless pair of standard rolling garage doors, the first thing that faced us when we stopped the car, had their windows painted out, as if to conceal something important. (I would later discover that there was a treasure trove of paintings behind them.) And the concrete foundation around the perimeter of the house was bare. Whereas most people shielded such foundations behind shrubbery, the Alberses had elected to leave exposed a rough, off-white expanse that conjured images of diggers and cement mixers and boldly acknowledged the demands of building in a climate with frost.
Perceptive visitors noticed. Joseph Hirshhorn, the collector and museum founder, went to the homes of many artists, as well as to those of his rich friends. He told me later that he could not get over the impact of that absence of foundation planting.
The barebones American idiom that sugges
ted L.L. Bean ruggedness more than the international style of Gropius and Mies was deceptive. For, as I would come to learn through the Alberses, this unusual place was more emblematic of Bauhaus values than I initially realized. Its true simplicity and the use of standardized components made this shingle-covered raised ranch the perfect extension of the values of the art school that was one of the glories of Weimar Germany. The way that house facilitated the work and creativity of its residents, and made possible a pleasant standard of everyday living, achieved a Bauhaus ideal.
The essence of the Bauhaus workshops in glass and metalwork and furniture, all of which Josef was in, and of textiles, where Anni ended up, and glass and ceramics, had nothing to do with a set style. The importance of Bauhaus ideology was in the way it addressed the connection between our surroundings and our feelings. Morality, emotion, religion, humor: all could be echoed and nourished by what we look at and touch.
The Alberses exemplified this spirit in ways that were, like this house in Connecticut, surprisingly usual and completely unusual at the same time. Josef and Anni were direct and unaffected in their manners; they bought their groceries at the large local supermarket as well as at the more upscale family-owned market nearer by; they went to nearby discount stores and knew the ins and outs of the nearest strip mall. It’s just that as they did these ordinary things they brought magic to the experience, through their astuteness and powers of observation. Moreover, when they returned to their studios from their errands in Middle America, they made art that was poetic, original, and inestimably rich.
RUTH AGOOS, the friend who had brought me to Bauhaus North, was a collector of the Alberses’ work whom I had first met because her daughter and I taught tennis together in New Hampshire during the summers when I was at Columbia College. Now studying art history at Yale Graduate School, I was intimidated by the prospect of meeting these gods of modernism who were two generations older than me. Wanting to get everything right, I had tried to dress neatly for the introduction to these artists whose work was so impeccable, but my car had failed to start, and while hammering the fuel pump with a rock, I had gotten grease all over my one respectable pair of corduroys. My nerves were jangled as we walked in.
The Bauhaus Group Page 41