In Hamburg, Albers had met a Mrs. Monkeborg, who lectured at Hamburg University and who “reinforced my belief that young Catholics are the best basis for our new efforts. I would like to meet with them in the West. Who is the director of the ‘Weißer Reiter’? Are there any other major groups and any individual big guns?”50 The Weißer Reiter—White Rider—was an organization in Bavaria that focused on Jesus as the prophet. Albers believed that this religious group might support Bauhaus modernism, and he also shared their faith.
Neither Albers’s family nor the regional teaching system in Westphalia approved of his self-imposed exile, but he was increasingly sure it was the right decision.
At home they seem to be very disappointed that I am not coming back. I am only sorry that I may have to disappoint them further. Life is after all terribly hard and yet wonderful. Recently I have been a little down. But otherwise I feel very confident. And I am enjoying the mutual education in my preparatory course enormously. Write soon and tell me all about you and Friedel and the children. Long live life.
Your Jupp 51
BY DECEMBER, life at the Weimar Bauhaus no longer seemed tenable. Josef and Anni and Marcel Breuer were considering starting off on their own.
He wrote the Perdekamps:
My dear chums,
It is really nice of you to send me something again. I feel myself strongly in your debt and I know that you do not have all that much yourselves. It has become terribly difficult to stay here. My relations with Gropius and the Bauhaus ideal have shifted so far that I shall have to roll out the heavy artillery. It emerged in a meeting today that I am financially the worst off of all and that there seems to be no possibility of an improvement. For me it is now critical to think of leaving and finding something better elsewhere. Anke [Anni], Lajko [Breuer], and I are thinking of trying to set up on our own in Berlin or somewhere else. …
I don’t think anyone believed in the Bauhaus ideal as much as I did. But I see the inifinite possibilities that are available here draining away because nobody believes in a financial change for the better. I can’t give you all the details. Perhaps the start of the letter does not indicate clearly enough [that] it is not just one thing that is causing me to leave. For a long time all efforts here have been expended on wasting all our resources polishing the façade and it is impossible to combat the internal tuberculosis.
As I said, it cannot go on like this. What would be needed is a thorough reform, starting in particular with improving personal relations. But nobody sees this as a possibility.
Perhaps it may be possible to get more people together somewhere else, and find better ways of cooperating without harmful centralization, based on individual independence.52
Albers’s next communication to his friends was from the small island of Sylt, in the North Sea off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. He was in high spirits, had gained weight, and now knew that the Bauhaus would relocate to Dessau, where he would have a real teaching position and a large workshop in which to make glassworks. Yet again the Bauhaus was a source of hope.
9
On May 12, 1925, Albers sent the Perdekamps a postcard that showed the lobby of the luxurious Hotel Bellevue in Dresden. He wrote, “My dear friends, now I have entered it, namely the haven of marital bliss. And on the reverse side our ‘Lucky Ship.’ Wedding on Saturday we have to be back in Dessau today—Tuesday—because the term starts tomorrow. Best Jupp.”53 Underneath the signature was written “the wife.”
When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Albers had been officially appointed to the Bauhaus faculty. The guarantee of a respectable position and a regular salary enabled him to ask Anni’s father for her hand in marriage. His life and his work were soaring.
In the provisional headquarters in the Bauhaus’s new location, and then in the spectacular new building, Albers would teach basic design. Gropius would later recall his impact as an educator:
In Dessau, Albers had the very rare quality of a teacher who treated every student in a different way. When the student was unsure of himself and he couldn’t swim yet so to speak, he pushed him into the water and when he started drowning, then he rescued him and he was open to give advice. … He was the very best teacher I could imagine as he brought the student to himself. Imitation was taboo and he brought him down to earth and developed him out of his own qualities. We recognized at the Bauhaus that every human being is completely different from the other, so the aim of the whole system which he used was to provide an education which is individualistic as possible: Getting everything out of that single individual which is given him by nature.
We developed really quite an understanding with anything we do—whether it’s a painting, a building, or a chair or anything we have to study the human being using that. That is the starting point. Not this or that aesthetic idea. This is the true functionalism.54
For Gropius, it was Albers who most successfully convinced the students that this was so.
FOR HIS OWN ART, Albers now invented a technique in which layers of opaque glass were fused or flashed together and an abstract geometric design was then sandblasted out of the top layer. The actual fabrication was done by professional artisans, but under his direction. Albers started by coating a sheet of pure white milk glass with a hair-thin layer of glass in a second color: red, yellow, black, blue, or gray. The front color was melted on by blowing the glass a second time. On top of it, the artist placed a stencil cut from paper. He did the sandblasting with a compressed air blower that resembled a water pistol; it released, at high force, a spray of many fine particles of sand. That treatment removed all those areas of the surface that the stencil left exposed. Then Albers took off the stencil and added another color with paint (often a glass painter’s black iron oxide). Finally, he baked the entire piece in a kiln to make the paint permanent. He varied the method, sometimes blasting a shiny black front to achieve a dull dark gray rather than allowing it to go all the way through to the white. This was no easy feat; it required going far enough but not too far, and maintaining uniformity. (See color plate 20.)
The technique warranted the time and patience involved because it enabled Albers to achieve his desired results. Sandblasting through a stencil created sharp contours. Those perfectly straight lines gave crispness to Albers’s lively abstract compositions, in which right angles and parallel stripes were arranged to create nonstop rhythm. The method also facilitated a subtle textural play: some surfaces could be matte and grainy, others smooth and glistening, with both types perfectly uniform within themselves.
The lessons Albers had gleaned from Giotto could be seen in his work. Thriving on limitations—as he would, later in his life, with the Homages to the Square—he achieved the rich reduction to essentials about which he had written in his essay. Of his new method, he declared: “The color and form possibilities are very limited. But the unusual color intensity, the purest white and deepest black and the necessary preciseness as well as the flatness of the design elements offer an unusual and particular material and form effect.”55
Applying himself with the rigor befitting a member of a medieval guild, Albers began a sort of serial work that would in time influence the next generation of artists. He made closely related constructions, sometimes with only a single element varying between them, so that the sole difference between two pieces might be that one had a short line the other lacked. He also made works that were identical in form, with only their colors being different. Producing two glass constructions that were completely the same except that what was blue in one was red in another, he demonstrated that the variation in color, and in nothing else, causes surprising differences in the viewer’s perception of the works. The pieces have totally different rhythms when they are seen side by side. The identical square appears larger when it is red than when it is blue. What appears in front and what appears behind it is totally contrary in the two works; so is the pace of movement.
What a luxury it was to indulge himself with the subtleties of fin
e art and refine his vision. The pursuit of these nuances, profound in their effect, became his obsession.
THE MATERIAL OF GLASS and the method of sandblasting enabled Albers to achieve the detachment and control he considered requisite for the optimal functioning of color and form. Hue and line had their own independent voices; Albers’s own hand was not evident. Even if a few brush marks showed in the parts he painted in black and baked, those strokes were no more revealing than housepaint, and the mechanical method removed “personal handwriting”—as Albers called the undesirable imposition of the individual self. This deliberate avoidance of certain truths of human existence permitted visual performance not unlike the perfect playing of a Mozart symphony, with the orchestra working in tandem, the instruments perfectly tuned, the conductor’s baton unifying the whole.
Albers’s right angles and carefully measured rectangles are triumphant. He explained, “Abiding equilibrium is achieved through opposition and is expressed by the straight line (limit of the plastic means) in its principal opposition, i.e., the right angle.”56 The encapsulation of this premeditated man-made harmony uplifts the viewer.
Sometimes Albers did not even execute the pieces himself. Rather, he designed them in his studio and had them made in a commercial workshop in Leipzig. The resultant works are like cut jewels: simultaneously pristine and radiant. With their intense sheen, they do not belong to the realm of everyday textures and substances.
The most traditionally religious of the Bauhaus masters, still a practicing Catholic, Albers had used the medium of church windows in an unprecedented way. He applied a relatively modern technique (sandblasting had been around for a while but had not been put to this exact use) and the completely new visual vocabulary of geometric abstraction to a material traditionally representative of miracles. The passage of light through glass and the consequent creation of glowing color is analogous to the immaculate conception. This was the metaphoric role of glass as made clear by a medieval hymn:
As the sunbeam, through the glass
Passeth but not breaketh
So the Virgin, as she was,
Virgin still remaineth.57
Glass evoked the light and brightness born of Christianity; more specifically, it symbolized the birth of Christ. Albers was attuned to that sacredness: his sense of the cosmic was vital to him. Light and color, their radiance, and the magic of their effects were intensely spiritual.
Having made a window for Saint Michael’s church in Bottrop shortly after he got out of the sanatorium in 1916, Albers had long been aware of the medium. With his radical use of multilayered glass, he fixed abstraction into confident materiality, and gave interlocking lines and solids a holy force. The abstract, the spiritual, and the physical were all aligned, rather than seen in their usual opposition.
More than Klee or Kandinsky, Albers believed in careful meditation and exacting execution as elements of art. But he was on the same quest. By using such a radiant substance, he created the pulse as well as the mystery that was essential to these revelers in human experience.
10
To be concerned exclusively with relations, while creating them and seeking their equilibrium in art and in life, that is the good work of today, and that is to prepare the future,” Albers wrote.58 He had no doubt that to approach art with integrity went hand in hand with how one addressed everything else in life. Balance and temperance were vital; so was enthusiasm. If in his personal relationships, other than with Perdekamp and Anni, Albers was a shade remote, he made a conscious effort to get along not only with everyone at the Bauhaus, but even with the family members back in Bottrop with whom he shared so few interests. His goal in his human connections was consistent with that of his art and design work: to guide others to the visual pleasures to which he was privy.
Among his Bauhaus colleagues, Albers spent a lot of time with Kandinsky, a friendship they maintained with an intense exchange of letters after the closing of the school. They did not, however, reveal personal intimacies to each other. What Albers wanted, more than the storminess inevitable in truly close human relationships, was a quality of equilibrium, a mutual support—which suited the very private Kandinsky.
With his desire to avoid disturbances in life, Albers remained deliberately distant from politics. He avoided anything associated with Communism during Hannes Meyer’s reign in Dessau. In America, in the 1960s, he declined to join an exhibition of work by artists opposed to the Vietnam War, saying he felt a debt to the policies of the government that had offered him and Anni a safe harbor when they fled Germany. (In that instance, what he considered “respectful” antagonized many in the art world, affecting the market for his work and his overall artistic reputation in a liberal milieu that not only endorsed such protest but expected it.) Rather than argue with people, Albers would express anger and then walk away. What for him was the satisfactory resolution of a problem was a source of hurt feelings for others.
Albers ultimately had rifts with almost all of his former colleagues. In the case of Marcel Breuer, he would come to feel wronged, and while he stayed in touch with Bayer and Feininger, he never went out of his way to see them, although they maintained their connections at a distance. Albers seemed to require detachment in order to focus all his energy on his work, and he often assumed a superior position, cloaked in modesty that made his reserve come easily. He did not feud with Mies van der Rohe—they were never close enough for there to be a reason—but he claimed that, when Mies was in Chicago, his collection of Klee paintings faded because of all the cigar smoke and gin fumes in the apartment. Unlike Anni, Josef wasn’t bothered by any of the schisms, even by a dreadful feud with his last print-makers, Sewell Sillman and Norman Ives, whom he initially intended to manage his legacy. Ives had a terrible automobile accident after their split. When eighty-six-year-old Josef and seventy-five-year-old Anni learned of it, they drove to the local hospital and delivered a card to the nursing station but did not visit the patient, who was just down the hall. This was Josef’s idea of equilibrium.
Albers’s retreat to essential solitude and his well-tempered but relatively cool connections with family were, like his eschewal of his own hand in his work, a means of staying pure by avoiding anything disruptive. His art did, indeed, represent his ideal for how the individual should integrate with society—by maintaining the same independence and the well-regulated interdependence he gave to colors and forms. Mondrian wrote that “equilibrium, through a contrasting and neutralizing opposition, annihilates individuals as particular personalities.”59 That balancing act, in painting as in human interaction, was Albers’s objective.
FORTUNATELY, when he was at the Bauhaus, Albers confided more deeply in the Perdekamps than he did in most of his friends later on, so we have a record of his inner life. The recently discovered letters let us see the fire and vulnerability and humor he was intent on concealing. On New Year’s Day 1928, from the Hotel Zum Löwen, in Oberstdorf (Allgäu), a resort in the Bavarian mountains, Albers wrote to those exceptional friends who were allowed behind the façade, and who evoked the warmth he generally kept in reserve:
Dear Franz
Dear Friedel
We are so far apart that we have rarely been able to hear each other. So today I must shout more loudly. First of all our best wishes for the 28th. That you may be happy. Your children well. Your house in order. Your work satisfying.
I have the feeling that we have told each other very little since the summer holidays. There was a lot to tell. Anni had a kidney problem, which troubled her for a long time and has still not quite gone away. At the Bauhaus there have been internal and external frictions. The internal ones due to the obligatory autumn student revolt. External ones with the press. City elections in which we were the point of contention. Slurs as usual but on the other hand unexpected interest. Over 12,000 visitors in the last year. From all over the place. But the financial situation is very difficult. Everywhere lack of money, space, time. Everyone had to do their bit. Fo
r me it is relatively easier than for the other Junior Masters because I have no workshop, but if I could not frequently get to Berlin I would probably already be more rigid.
This year I shall be 40. So I must make my mark soon. I have two aims for the coming year. A pedagogical text about my teaching method, just aims and results, and an exhibition of my new glass pictures. That will be a lot of work. I must not let this book evaporate like my planned one on “Functional Formulas,” for which I still have a lot of material.
In my classes I have developed a new method of teaching design, which is generating a lot of interest and attention here. I am after all supposed to be a pedagogue.60
Albers had, he told his friend, as many as seventy students per term. He was also creating what he called “wall pictures in glass,” for which he invented a form that his friend Ludwig Grote, director of the Dessau Museum, termed the “thermometer” style—an expression the nonchalance of which Albers liked and used forever after. He had a commission for large windows at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, and had been asked to make proposals for windows in the lecture halls of the new Folkwang Museum in Essen as well as for a modern church in Berlin, all in keeping with Gropius’s wish for Bauhaus work to be broadly disseminated. Albers continued his letter:
So I have boasted enough, because business is not what I really want. I would much rather sit quietly to one side and occupy myself with my experiments and investigations into form. Not too long, and then back to business, preferably in Berlin, which is getting a fabulously modern look. We are always dreaming of erecting a shanty hut there.
As yet we are a long way from there.
For the moment we need to air ourselves here, especially Anni, who is still not fully recovered.
The Bauhaus Group Page 43