Knowing that the Alberses did not negotiate steps easily, Ruth had rung the bell and then opened the door on her own so that they did not have to come down the half flight of stairs between the main floor of the house and the entrance. As we stood in the entranceway and looked up over the scuffed white risers and worn wooden treads, Josef materialized first, from a corridor, with Anni following him. As soon as they were standing side by side, it was apparent that the immaculately dressed pair were almost the same height, about five-foot-seven. They could have been brother and sister—or a priest and a nun at a church parish house.
Josef greeted Ruth warmly. Not only did she collect his work and have the impressive cleavage that he found irresistible, but she was exotic in a Gauguin-like way, and he lit up at the sight of her. Resembling Spencer Tracy with his shock of straight white hair, he then took a moment to study me. He was polite, his speaking manner carefully modulated, but there was something slightly Teutonic in the way he immediately asked, “What do you do, boy?”
“I’m studying art history at Yale, sir.”
“Do you like it, boy?”
What should I do with this question? Albers had asked it with an edge to his voice, as if he were trying to penetrate to the truth.
I had just started my second year of graduate school, benefiting from a full fellowship that I would have hated to lose in an era when everything seemed up for grabs because of the Vietnam War. Albers had been chairman of the Department of Design at Yale through most of the 1950s. I feared that, with someone so high up in the university power structure (or so I falsely assumed, having no idea that Albers considered himself a renegade who had been victimized by power-hungry inferior faculty members and their hidebound backers in the upper ranks of precisely the sort of institution he had spent his whole life challenging), I risked losing my foothold. But my interlocutor’s direct manner invited an equally candid response.
“No, sir, I really don’t.”
“Why not, boy?” I explained that I was being forced to research the minutiae of iconography, that for a course on Seurat I was consigned to a library basement to learn about gas lighting fixtures in nineteenth-century France, and that when I asked my professor about the color relationships in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, or about how Seurat applied his pencil to the textured paper on which he often drew, I had been reprimanded for the irrelevance of those questions to the subject matter of the course, which was exclusively socioeconomic. I told Albers I was afraid that my passion for art was being eroded. The effect of this sort of education was that when I now went into museums, rather than having the direct visual responses that had until now made me want to devote my life to art, I was tending merely to process information.
“This I like, boy. Which of those bastards in art history don’t you like?” We discussed a couple of well-known names in the department at Yale, and then Albers asked me the key question: “What does your father do?”
I wanted to tell him what my mother did. My mother was a painter—I had grown up with a studio in the house, redolent with the smell of oil paint—which I thought would be of greater relevance than Dad’s profession. But I sensed that my questioner cared far more about my male lineage.
“My father’s a printer, sir.”
“Good, boy, then you know something about something. You’re not just an art historian.” I suddenly had the feeling that the grease stains on my corduroys, making me resemble a car mechanic more than a graduate student, had not done me any harm in Albers’s eyes.
I WAS SO TRANSFIXED that I cannot remember at which moment in the conversation we had walked up the stairs to where Josef was standing, the statuesque Anni silent but beaming at his side. I had never before encountered someone so visibly possessed by his beliefs, and who gave of himself so totally. Both he and Anni—she was commanding and radiant even while saying little—appeared to be partaking of the richness of life to an extent I had not previously witnessed.
I felt that if I remained receptive, I might be taken into their world. Josef clearly had absolute opinions, but what was equally apparent was that, while issues like the craft of printing and the irrelevance of much art history obsessed him, and he knew he was set apart from most people, he was open and receptive, and eager for connection. He engaged with the totality of someone who was interested in giving. He thought of himself as a vessel of ideas, not an eminence; being privy to the miracle of art and of visual experience, he was determined that others have similar pleasures. He and Anni were the real thing.
THE MAN I ENCOUNTERED that day in 1970 was in many respects unchanged from the person who had started giving the Bauhaus foundation course in 1923. Albers followed a teaching method and approach he had developed even before Moholy-Nagy joined the staff, and which he considered superior to Moholy’s ideas. He deemed Moholy’s teaching, like the man himself, confused and unpleasant. His own teaching was, in contrast, an extension of the training he had received from his father, and therefore eminently sensible. He determined that the physical properties of the components of one’s work should be the starting point. While he believed that Itten went no further than texture—Albers often compared himself favorably to his contemporaries, stressing not just that they were second-rate, but also that they were morally corrupt—he was determined to investigate the real properties of materials. He would recall telling his students, “Let’s try what we can do new with wire. Give it a new shape, what can we do with matches, what can we do with matchboxes in a project. And then later I introduced the study of paper, what [sic] was at that time considered a wrapping material.” He exposed the students, he explained, to “the most important craft materials, such as wood, metal, glass, stone, textiles, and paint, and to an understanding of their relationships as well as the difference between them. In this way we tried …to develop an understanding of the fundamental properties of materials and of the principles of construction.”43
Albers had the students work with their hands with materials ranging from paper to steel, with rock that was resistant to cutting and rock that quickly crumbled, and with a diversity of artistic media. He also arranged for them to observe professionals using various techniques. “We visited the workshops of box, chair, and basket makers, of carpenters and cabinetmakers, of coopers and cartwrights, in order to learn the different possibilities of using, treating, and joining wood.”44 The students were then assigned to make objects, among them storage containers and toys and toy furniture, first from a single material and then from various materials combined. Once they had achieved the necessary mastery, he encouraged inventiveness, but the know-how came first.
IN THE EARLY 1970S, half a century after he taught this use of materials in Weimar, Josef Albers had a favorite restaurant on the Boston Post Road, in the strip mall nearest his home. It was called the Plank House; even the name appealed to him, with its straightforward reference to solid materials.
The Plank House—which Albers pronounced “zee puhlehnckhaus”—was part of a chain, a forerunner of the restaurants that have proliferated since, with a menu that consisted mainly of broiled steaks and a copious salad bar. It also featured an offering of fish sturdy enough to stand up to firing on a sizzling grill, which fascinated Albers because it showed an understanding of the chemical components and structures of the fish in relation to the way its flesh responded to heat, and also because he liked swordfish. What has since become a restaurant cliché seemed, at the time, excitingly inventive, and it was to the Plank House that Anni and Josefwould take Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lord Snowden, Henry Geldzahler, Maximilian Schell, and the other interesting visitors who came to see the master in his modest studio. The regular lunch crowd of bank tellers and car salesmen seemed impervious to the colorful art world figures who arrived with the elderly German couple in their dark green Mercedes 240 SL, while the Alberses marveled at every detail of this ordinary slice of American life.
On one of these state occasions when I was lucky enough to be invited along, the fir
st thing Josef pointed out was the laminated tables. Their heavy wood veneer tops were coated in a thick layer of shiny polyurethane. Josef liked to rub his hand across the surface, saying it was a perfect use of technology, because it was comfortable to eat on, satisfying to look at with the wood grain shining through, and, most important of all, easy to clean. With one wipe of a damp sponge after every use, it always looked brand-new, he explained with unabashed joy—the same delight with which Anni, discussing new materials, would say, “I love ‘drip-dry.’”
Josef also admired the salad bar. For this, there were many reasons. The clear plastic domed shield that served the purposes of hygiene while one looked at the produce was, again, a perfect match of a modern material with multiple goals. The array of salads and condiments thrilled him—especially the pickled beets and the various seeds, which reminded him of some of the tastes and textures of his youth. But what was best of all was the way that the serving bowls and the plates were all kept chilled. He noted particularly how the metal containers retained their coldness even longer than other vessels.
He didn’t just make casual comments about these details; he marveled at them. They reflected an intelligence, a knowledge, and a clarity of thought that had, he told me, been the very essence of what he had tried to impart at the Bauhaus.
8
In January 1924, Albers was obliged to return to teach a semester in Bottrop, in order to retain essential funding from the regional school system there. When he came back to Weimar, he devoted himself with renewed purpose to the foundation courses he gave. He was disgruntled, however, by the amount of time his students had to spend on their homework for their other courses, mostly in technical drawing. He protested in writing to Gropius, who forwarded his complaint to Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Schreyer, urging them to lighten the load so that the students could do justice to their work with Albers. Everyone agreed, and Albers’s course became central to Bauhaus education.
Albers described himself in Weimar as uninterested in decrees “from some higher direction … independent … alone.” He went his own way, educating by encouraging experimentation, and by personally exemplifying traditional skills combined with independent thinking. Albers admired that same level of artistic passion and free thinking in three of his colleagues. Years later, in a 1968 radio interview with the BBC, he explained:
Klee, Kandinsky and Schlemmer … were masters in this sense, that they didn’t give a damn for their old masters. They did not look backward or read books before they went to class. They had developed themselves and therefore they were able to develop others. … I have never taught art, I think. What I have taught is philosophy. I have never taught painting. Instead I have taught seeing.45
Not that Albers was in the same echelon as Klee, Kandinsky, or Schlemmer at the Weimar Bauhaus. They were older than he was and had already proven themselves as artists; he had not. But he was on a steep learning curve. Of all the Bauhaus students, Albers had a fire and conviction—and an originality—that put him closer to being in the same league as his heroes.
Klee’s poetry and sense of the cosmic were unique, and Kandinsky’s spirituality and ability to pair abstraction with sound made him unlike anyone else. Gropius was apart in his multidimensionality, his extreme diplomatic grace and prodigious energy combined with a sense of conviction. Schlemmer was talented not only as a painter but as a choreographer, besides being a pithy observer of the cast of characters at the Bauhaus. Josef Albers, though less formed than they were, was distinguished by his rare combination of rigor and adventurousness, and by a ceaseless energy that enabled him to achieve a lot and enjoy himself fully while never appearing to have made enormous effort.
By 1924, Albers’s accomplishments in glasswork and his furniture designs had made him one of the star students at the school. But above all it was the impact of his teaching, which caused him to be, even while he was not officially on the faculty, one of the most influential people at the Bauhaus. His ideas were not as original as Klee’s or Kandinsky’s, but the way in which he delivered them made him uniquely effective as a teacher. He used language succinctly, and students felt the tremendous joy that could result from the skillful manipulation of materials and the creation of artistic form. Albers had fire in his eyes. With the force of a great preacher, he made complex ideas simple, so that his intoxication with seeing became contagious. As the situation of the Bauhaus in Weimar became immensely precarious, more and more people turned to him for guidance.
At that time, however, Albers was not even sure if he wanted to stay on. That October, he wrote the Perdekamps:
Dear Franz, dear Friedel,
There’s a great rumpus here. Pro and contra louder and louder. Whether we shall pull through or not is unclear or perhaps clear. We are getting an enormous number of expressions of strong support from all over the place.
I think that if we are allowed to stay we need to find a better atmosphere. I want us to succeed again so that we can take off for some other place so much the more splendidly. I am thinking of the West. A move will cost us a year, but that may help overcome internal defects. Of which there are not a few. Perhaps only the spirit should survive. So many people are thinking of their own legs in the spring. You have probably already heard that all masters have been given notice.46
What was telling was that, even as he considered going his own way, he had become enough a part of the Bauhaus community to say “we.” And he was unusually sanguine through the ups and downs of the institution. Albers dealt with life’s events the way he adjusted to the requirements and realities of the wood he was joining into intricate shelf units, or the glass he was cutting and mounting for windows. The goal was to do one’s best with whatever the reality was, without losing sight of one’s artistic goal.
He believed that the dismissal of the masters was just temporary, and that the negotiations to keep the Bauhaus in Weimar had a fair chance of success. Nonetheless, he favored pursuing the idea of the school moving to Cologne, as Konrad Adenauer had suggested. The priority, whatever was happening, was to maintain one’s perspective and keep making art. While he was not yet officially on the faculty, in spite of his doing more active teaching than anyone else, Albers was already proving himself to be one of the most stable personalities at the Bauhaus. He was completely alert to the conflicts within the school as well as the challenges from the outside to Gropius, yet he soldiered on cheerfully, assuring the Perdekamps, “We have a lot of work ahead of us and feel secure.”
For a special Bauhaus issue of the magazine Young People, published that November, Albers became a spokesman for the school. There was, as he described it to the Perdekamps, “a revolutionary essay written by me: ‘Historical or Present,’ in which school and youth movement and Bauhaus are projected in one line.” In that essay, he further articulated his credo of respectful independence. “If we adopt the corrective action of freeing ourselves from history, to be able to walk on our own two feet, and to speak with our own mouths, we need not fear disrupting organized development.” He advocated “freeing ourselves from the conceit of individuality and from received knowledge.” Albers believed that such an approach would lead to “becoming united.”47
Similarities of human dwellings, clothing, and household objects produced by machines would, Albers wrote, lead to a better way of life. That was one of the objectives of the Bauhaus; the growth of each human being was another: “Schools should allow much learning to occur, i.e., teach little. May each individual be given the widest latitude to explore his options, so that he finds the place that suits him best in working life. The Bauhaus is pursuing a path toward this goal.”48
In this early essay, Albers expressed his desire for everything to lead toward “construction as synthesis. … Our desire for the simplest, clearest form will make people more united, life more real, and therefore more essential.”49 Albers’s embrace of rational thought and the belief in the removal of excess were always in service of those higher purposes
. He sought to use arts education as the means to achieve greater harmony among individuals and a deeper understanding of the inherent wonder of life. He had the charisma to convince others that this was possible. The schoolteacher from Bottrop became the Bauhaus’s first homegrown deity.
MOST OF THE MAJOR BAUHAUSLERS had their angels in the outside world. For Kandinsky, it was Galka Scheyer; for Klee it was, above all, his dealer Goltz, in combination with his devoted sister Mathilde. Albers’s ambassador and source of financial support, Franz Perdekamp, had far less importance in the art world, but he still provided the emotional and practical sustenance that enabled Albers to go on. In that period of the early 1920s when inflation was most dire, Perdekamp sent him small amounts of money. Like Kandinsky with Scheyer, Albers wanted to make sure it represented an exchange and was not just a gift. He wrote his friend, saying he hoped Perdekamp had “subtracted the necessary bottles for the art dealers. This is most important to me. If you did not, please catch up on this.” (“Bottles” was Albers’s way of discussing commission money, which could be used to buy doppelkörn, or other libations.) At the same time, he was eager not just to sell his own work, but to help the Bauhaus in general: “If you know somebody who wants to build a house, please get him interested in us. We will organize everything.”
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