The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Every morning we go skiing, although the snow here sometimes fails us. We have to trek ½ an hour and only find crusted snow, falling on which (and that is what we are best at so far) can be quite painful, but afterward one is out of breath, tired and hungry so that it is wonderful to lie down again.

  How are your children? How many will there shortly be? I have heard nothing from Andres. Give him my regards if you see him and also the Hunkemöllers. I have indirectly heard that Alois Bürger had blood poisoning and lost a finger. Natz Becker has died.

  My sister Lisbeth has got married. I not only hear very little about how things end up, but almost nothing from the West. But I have made a note to send you some photos soon, so that you can see that it only seems that way.

  So have a happy 28th and all our best wishes from your Alberses61

  This was the dash with which Albers was proceeding in life. As was true for Klee, his marriage provided a stable base that enabled him to put the greater part of his prodigious energy into making art, designing, and teaching.

  Albers’s wish to transform the world visually, to modernize it intelligently, consumed him. In February, he sent Perdekamp a postcard:

  Dear Franz. There are certainly reservations about flat roofs. Namely for the reason that our builders do not want to do a high-quality job. There are different methods of constructing a flat roof. But the most important thing is that it is done conscientiously and thoroughly. Here in our area it works well if it has been properly constructed. The cleverest method seems to me to be the one Le Corbusier used in Stuttgart. He says that too much movement of the reinforced concrete due to heat and cold can cause cracks, he covers the waterproof membrane with a rain-dampened layer of sand which he covers with concrete slabs. Grass grows in the gaps (c. 5 cm). He has flower beds with direct connection to the layer of sand. So it always has the same humidity. The contractors: Durumfix-Roofing Ed Klar and Co Ltd, Stuttgart, Ulmer Str 147.62

  Albers continued on the back of the card:

  A steel house built according to your own plans would probably come much more expensive. Or you would have to adopt ready made plans, and they are unlikely to have several stories. Exterior and interior plastering? That doesn’t seem right to me. It must be the most significant thing about steel houses, that plastering is not necessary: dry assembly.

  “Experiments” are really thankless unless the contractors are trained and interested. So I advise you not to try things with the walls that are not well-known in the area. The flat roof will also cost more, but it adds space. With a house the interior is the most important thing. Use plain standardized doors without panels. Plain fittings and handles. The Planning Department in Frankfurt has good used ones. Plain walls, sharp corners, no molding on the ceilings. A large surface is the most beautiful thing about a room, as the ancients knew from the Egyptians to Pompeii and up till Schinkel, then it went wrong.

  Simple, simple, simple. Empty space is the most beautiful thing !!!!!!!!!!! Best wishes, the children must soon be well, Jupp63

  Albers was as adamant about these points half a century later as when he wrote Perdekamp. He was outraged by the flat roofs his old colleague Breuer had put on houses in Connecticut, because they were not engineered to withstand the snow and ice of New England winters. The emphasis on “design” rather than effectiveness was, Albers remarked, “the problem with architects,” which was why he “preferred engineers.” And the need for standardization was essential. Breuer had designed a school with seventeen different sizes of windowpane, many of which had to be custom-cut. Albers was appalled. Especially at a school, where “children playing ball can be expected to break windows,” it was imperative, he felt, to have only one or two sizes of windowpane, even if they were multiplied in different configurations, “so the janitor can keep them in stock and easily replace them.”64

  It wasn’t just that he had opinions; he was passionate about these issues of right and wrong. Albers, who often described himself as “a frustrated architect,” felt that illogical design choices that made people’s lives unnecessarily difficult were immoral. He found the falseness of postmodernist fagades, just coming into vogue at the end of his lifetime, an inexcusable lie.

  A chair that Albers designed in 1929, which could be broken down for easy shipping, was featured in an exhibition of the latest Bauhaus products.

  Albers himself never lied. He just became silent if Anni asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.

  ALBERS’S CHAIR OF 1929 exemplified his beliefs. It was made of units that could readily be assembled and disassembled and could fit into a tidy flat box for shipping. These pieces of bent laminated wood—veneers molded around matrixes and glued—were as thick as they were wide. This was not an original idea—knockdown chairs had been made and sold through catalogues since the nineteenth century, and other designers had worked in bent laminates—but what distinguished Albers’s work was the subtlety of its proportions and the perpetual flow of its gracefully modulated right angles. That aesthetic grace combined with functionalism was rare. Albers brought the painter’s eye to the crafts. He made objects that had the meticulousness, and the splendid sense of measure, of his glass constructions. Thus fulfilling his concept of moral form, he gave harmony to the everyday act of sitting.

  A person sitting in this chair acquires something of Albers’s own attitude toward life. Held upright, ready to read attentively or to talk alertly, the user is impressed by a quality of decisiveness. The chair is not tough or hostile—the seat is cushioned, the wood smooth—but it encourages alertness; one does not slump.

  While the supporting elements provide essential structure, a cantilever causes a slight oscillation. The result is that the chair is steady yet vibrant, grounded yet floating, so the experience of being in it is at once earthly and fanciful. And whether one simply feels that life is in order or allows one’s mind to wander, the correctness of the proportions and the logic of the material impart a sense of rightness and, therefore, well-being.

  Albers’s design was in deliberate contrast to the furniture of Mies van der Rohe, which Albers knew well. Mies’s seating and tables are emphatically elegant. His Barcelona chair of 1929 was a modern version of a throne; for all of its purported simplicity, it connotes grandeur. The materials of Mies’s tables are fine and expensive, the chrome polished and shiny, the marble the richest travertine. Albers used stovepipe and structural steel brackets. Rather than employ saddlemaker’s leather, he chose a modest, easily cleanable textile. Artistic flair was evident not in the lavish choice of expensive materials, but in the proportions, which cost nothing. That approach realized Gropius’s original ideal: design that would work for the masses.

  He honored the dictates of the wood and steel and glass he used for everyday objects, but he also manipulated them. For a fruit bowl, Albers measured and fit contrasting materials to render them ethereal. Wooden bearing balls, a sphere of glass, and a chrome frame—impeccably machined parts put to rare domestic use—create a container with a spirit and visual harmony that made the mechanical lovely.

  Albers also designed a hotel room and two kiosks for the Ullstein Publishing Company, which was owned by Anni’s family. The kiosks were never built, but the hotel room was assembled on the second floor of a house Mies van der Rohe built for an exhibition in Berlin. Anni Albers’s brother recalled that on the wall there was a map of the city of Berlin, so visitors could find their way. This bit of logic, which garnered his young brother-in-law’s admiration, was a perfect Albers touch.

  ONE AFTERNOON when I arrived at the Alberses’ house, Josef had me join him in his studio right away. He had just solved a major problem and was eager to tell me about it.

  At the Bauhaus, he explained, he had designed an alphabet in which every letter was constructed from small squares and circles or fractions thereof. These were the only components allowed.

  Having drawn the letters, he also made them out of white milk glass, cutting the geometric components out
of a sheet about a centimeter thick. This was so they could be used in relief. The arrangement was such that if these letters were applied to outdoor surfaces, neither falling snow nor dead leaves would get stuck on them. Rather, they would fall through the letters, which had vertical slits and concave, never convex, shapes at their tops. Besides having in common with Klee’s work the artist’s self-imposed restriction to a bare minimum of underlying units, the “Kombinations-schrift” adhered to these inviolable rules. Thus Albers outsmarted nature.

  At the Bauhaus, however, Josef had never been able to resolve the letter Z. He had tried reversing the S, but deemed the mirror image of the S’s right-angled triangles and semicircles not quite fluid. Now, after all these years, he had figured it out, and designed a Z that satisfied him. He had drawn it in pencil on top of a photograph of the original glass alphabet he cut at the Bauhaus. Looking triumphant, he showed me the new Z, and then handed me the photograph. “Here, Nick. You are the keeper of the Z.”

  I tried not to overread the moment, but I took the responsibility seriously.

  IN ALBERS’S TEA GLASSES, two ebony handles, each half of a flat disk, one vertical and one horizontal, are attached to a curved stainless steel band that holds the glass cup under its slightly flared lip. Here Albers was accommodating the way in which human beings instinctively pass or receive small objects. He explained to me, with considerable satisfaction, that for the person handing over the tea glass, it made sense to hold the horizontal handle, while the recipient did better with the vertical one. To deduce this, he had studied the way people cocked their wrists and used their fingers. That attentiveness to everyday experience, with its implicit reverence for human capability, was fundamental to Bauhaus thought. This was Josef Albers’s vital message: “Observe! Celebrate! Apply your intelligence to every act! Make the most of things. Relish the moment.”

  YEARS AFTER GOING to America, Albers wrote, in English, about a conversation he had with Kandinsky in the time period when he was making these objects and advancing his work in glass:

  Kandinsky

  in one of our talks

  we had on our way home

  from the classes at the Bauhaus

  to the Meisterhduser on the Stresemann-Allee—

  he told me about his belief about great art.

  That he believed that no real work of art

  had been lost.

  Because: First they are done so well that they will last

  Second, they have been appreciated to such

  an extent that every care was taken to

  preserve them.

  This truly is the philosophy of a true artist.

  It throws shadows on those who declare:

  I don’t care whether my work lasts or not!

  It answers also the question

  who is a sincere artist.

  In this connection

  I remember also

  that he always painted in full suit

  without smock or apron

  and I believe that he never

  spoiled a canvas.65

  By the time Albers wrote this, he had fled Germany; he had also had the devastating experience of finding that a number of his own glass constructions had been broken by U.S. Customs authorities, resulting from sloppiness in removing them from their meticulous packing, when these fragile objects arrived in America a few months after he and Anni did. But he still kept and repaired them, and believed he could order his life no matter what. Doing things well, staying neat and orderly, and maintaining optimism were essential.

  11

  On April 22,1928, from the Dessau Bauhaus, Albers gave the Perdekamps an insider’s view of the uncertainties there:

  Dear Franz. Dear Friedel

  Today I want to write from under a blue sky. Because we got into the rain while cycling today and had to sit outside a long time.

  The holidays are over and the return here from Berlin was not easy for me. Dessau is too small.

  You have probably heard that all sorts of changes have been made here. Gropius left, because he wants some peace after all the quarrels and perhaps also because he sees more opportunities in Berlin. For now he is on an exchange visit to America. His successor is Hannes Meyer, who has already been here a year. He is an architect and will deal with the administration. The whole trend is such that there is not much scope for reform. Breuer, Bayer and Moholy have also left. I am staying. Though I hesitated for a long time. According to plan I will get a house in the masters’ settlement, when Moholy has moved to his new flat. We are looking forward to that.66

  With Breuer leaving, Albers was to manage the furniture workshop. He was also exhibiting his glasswork and preparing an exhibition for the international art teaching congress in Prague, which would be held with the support of the Czech president, Tomás Masaryk, a great proponent of the Bauhaus.

  Having just turned forty, he was dealing with age: “I am turning a bit gray and wear glasses when I read.” That emphasis on the ordinary and everyday comes through in his photography. When I went through the storage room for which Anni had given me the key after Josef’s death, I found piles of photographs and photo collages, as well as contact sheets and tins of film. As with the early drawings, Albers had essentially concealed this early figurative art—as if his obsession with the representation of the human body and various landscapes and buildings would later detract from the emphasis on pure line and undiluted color. While a handful of Albers’s photographs were known during his lifetime, the size and richness of the collection that he had squirreled away in a basement was extraordinary.

  Umbo, Josef Albers 28, 1928. Albers took these two portraits by the photographer Umbo and pasted them side by side, making clear the possibilities of the different approaches one could take to a single subject.

  In addition to their exploration of the chromatic possibilities of black, white, and gray, the photographs further reveal Albers’s preoccupation with taking different approaches to the same theme. In the collages he carefully positioned, and pasted on cardboard, large prints alongside dozens of postage-stamp-size contact prints, so that the work vividly presents multiple responses to a single subject, and invites consideration of quality judgment, selection, and scale. He made these collages of his close-up photo portraits of the pensive Paul Klee, with Klee’s astonishing eyes, one pair after another, looking off into space as if to connect the artist directly with distant planets. He also made a collage from multiple images of Gropius frolicking on the beach at Ascona in 1930 with a woman named Shifra Carnesi. In each image, the former Bauhaus director—bare-chested as if just in from a swim, except that his hair is perfectly parted and combed—has a different way of embracing Shifra, who looks as if she is desperate to get into bed with him as quickly as possible. There is a sensuous collage of Anni relaxing in one of Josef’s jackets. Another, of her handsome brother Hans, is composed of large and small snapshots that present him as a rakish playboy with the world at his beck and call—as it was for this carefree young man in Berlin until the Nazis brought his life of sailing and opera-going and cavorting to an end he could not have imagined when these photos were taken. A decade after these images were shot of the dapper Hans leading the high life, he would leave Germany as a refugee, grateful to be saved by his rebellious sister and the brother-in-law he had admired from the start, however difficult his new circumstances were.

  Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer IV, ‘29; im Meisterrat ‘28; [Hans] Wittner, [Ernst] Kallai, Marianne Brandt, Vorkursausstellung ‘27/’28; Oskar & Tut Sommer ‘28, 1927–29. Albers made this collage of his photos of Oskar Schlemmer and other Bauhauslers, taken over a two-year period. It captures the animation and style with which these inventive geniuses lived.

  Josef Albers’s collage of photos of Gropius with Shifra Carnesi, taken in Ascona, 1930. Even in troubled times, life for the Bauhauslers contained more pleasure than most people realized.

  Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Porto Ronco VIII, 1930. Bayer was an in
ventive graphic designer and a man who proved irresistible to many women at the Bauhaus, among them Ise Gropius.

  Much of Albers’s photographic work concentrated on ordinary sights. Exalting the rhythm of parallel lines, he put close-up images of railroad tracks side by side. With his characteristic visual gamesmanship, he juxtaposed a photo of the view from the window of his new house, the bare trees black against the whiteness of the snow covering the ground, with one in which trees coated in fresh damp snow are white against the darkness of the earth on which the snow has melted.

  His excitement as a child when he saw the black tiles as one world and the white squares as another never failed him. In these paired photos, the whites are a source of space and lightness and energy. These airy voids provide the oxygen essential for us to see all the depth within the blacks. These photo compositions all have the energy the little boy felt. At the same time, they are sophisticated, rational artworks in which the artist used juxtapositions of tone, line, and scale to create unexpected relationships.

  As a photographer, Albers took the same approach evident in his early drawings, glass constructions, and furniture. His goal was to have the artist function only as a presenter of phenomena and server of possibilities he deemed far greater than himself. In his camera work, the subject emerges in fullest force. The marvelous construction of the Eiffel Tower, Kandinsky’s intelligent face made mysterious by clouds of cigarette smoke, the funny imperiousness and mystery of mannequins in a shop window: each is its essential self. With mechanical means, Albers animated these images that celebrate both what exists in reality and what exists only in the imagination.

  12

  One could not be too attentive to detail in the Alberses’ world. Their house in Dessau was organized meticulously. Josef’s sandblasted glass constructions—all pure abstractions, some of them lean and minimal exercises in black and white, others jazzy syncopations of vibrant color—were lined up in a row on the living room wall. Wassily chairs—designed by Breuer and named for Kandinsky—were positioned against a wall in a pose more sculptural than friendly, so that their users looked at space rather than at one another. The arrangement was strident, a brave declaration of work and serious purpose, with a deliberate eschewal of prettiness.