Details of appearance mattered both for their visual impact and their narrative significance. The alteration of the cuff on a jacket sleeve by half an inch is the difference between having the right amount of shirt material extending beyond it—adding an essential visual element, an accent of welcome lightness—or depriving others of that optical relief; it is also a mark of class. If a jacket looks like a hand-me-down from a larger person, never altered, or like something one has outgrown, it is essentially displeasing and also tells a very different story than if it has been correctly tailored. Anni Albers considered oversize sweaters on men the mark of American, as opposed to European, aristocracy, while tight sweaters not only designated a lower class but were unappealing to look at. Josef put a tint into wall paint that no one could possibly discern but that to him made all the difference, both optically and for the mood it transmitted.
He also regulated the lighting under which he painted his Homages to the Square. The fluorescent bulbs over one worktable were arranged warm, cold, warm, cold, and over another, warm, cold, cold, warm; he examined every painting under both types of illumination. What others might consider the subtle nuances of visual experience were to him the essentials. Seeing was too sacred an act to be compromised.
A letter Albers wrote the Perdekamps in December 1928 on Bauhaus Dessau stationery shows that same concern for every aspect of household design that I encountered with the Alberses. When I came to know them in the 1970s, Anni spoke of their battle for simplicity. Since no such thing existed as a perfectly plain, unadorned light fixture, and she and Josef were insistent on having a pure glass cylinder over their entrance hall, she had solved the problem by buying a lantern meant to be mounted on a post outdoors, then removing the garland of metal flowers that was its main appeal to most people, leaving only the functional glass substructure that surrounded the bulb. What the lantern’s designer had deliberately concealed was precisely what she and Josef wanted to look at all the time.
Josef wrote:
Dear friends,
Attached you will find our lamp designs. They are very simple and not expensive. If I knew your rooms I could give specific advice.
I recommend Me W 94/a for the living room. The sphere has clear glass above and white glass below. That gives semi-indirect lighting. If your ceilings are low we can shorten the tube, but the light should come down to 2.40 [m]. So let us know your ceiling height. For smaller spaces, alcoves or work spaces Me 107 l, not so bright because the upper glass is not clear. The spheres are hung on chains inside the mounting and are thus easy to open and close.
Over my worktable I have a small reflector 14 [cm] diameter, 17 [cm] height, hanging at eye level, does not dazzle because it has an aluminium shade. It gives very good light, precisely calculated. The thing looks very good to me. … Our lamps are very sober. If you want to avoid using metal altogether, on the stairs, in the lavatory, next to the bathroom mirror, in the hall, use the china lamps by Palzer, Frankfurt am Main, Weserstr. 47. Perhaps a local decorator can get you a catalogue.
Take the simplest shade for pearl bulbs. I use them a lot in my place. Over the dining table I have a PH lamp, a Danish invention, but expensive.
[There is a drawing of the lamp alongside the text.]
I have the red painted one. I can get 15% or 20% discount on this for you, but then the order has to come from me. Anyway, I hope that you will finish your place more quickly than I have finished mine. Since the end of the holdays we have been living in a masters’ house, much too big and too expensive, in particular because of the insane heating. Only borrowed tables. Too few chairs. But empty rooms are the most beautiful. Keep your rooms as light as possible, put as little into them as you can, that gives freedom. …67
Possessions were not meant to oppress the individual but to facilitate freedom. For that essential liberty, it was vital to live economically, and to be able to leave home behind on occasion.
The prices of the Bauhaus lamps are those for members of the Bauhaus. If necessary order them through me. Outside they are more expensive. I have to get to the mountains and snow for Christmas, otherwise I shall become bad-tempered. We have 3 weeks holidays—thank goodness.
Good-bye for now, make your house smart, light, empty. Most old things are unnecessary and they make you heavy.
With best wishes from our house to yours,
Juppi and Anni68
The attention to the details of his friends’ house, besides being emblematic of the precision and carefulness fundamental to Albers’s teaching, was a mark of how much he valued their relationship. And light was a subject whose importance to him could not be overstated. A component of color, a transmitter of mood, an essential in every task, it required utmost attention. In January 1929, Albers wrote Perdekamp:
I ordered your lamps yesterday. I ordered a cheaper china shade for the WC instead of Me 93b you chose. I am sure you will prefer it. I would switch the lights for the bay and the study, so that you have better light where you work.
I have written to the Berlin distributor about the PH lamp and asked them to suggest something for you. I’m afraid I no longer have my receipt to give the correct order number. I will ask them to give you the same architect’s discount as they give me.69
Money, too, was an undeniable reality.
IN SPITE OF MARRIAGE and his elevated position at the Bauhaus, Albers had an abiding wish for simplicity in his home. At the end of his life, this desire became even more extreme, and he lived like a monk. His bedroom had nothing whatsoever on its white walls. There were two cheap 1950s side chairs that were intended for a kitchen table. The bed was a single mattress on a box spring, supported by short, screw-on legs. Only the desk, the top of which Albers had crafted out of a plane of cherry wood at Black Mountain, had style. The top rests on one-by-fours, narrow side up, spaced at intervals and sitting on a bottom plank supported by tapered rectangular legs. The two expanses of wood are positioned like the pieces of toast in a sandwich with a void in between. That inner space, divided by the one-by-fours that run from front to back, serves perfectly for storing paper and stationery supplies. The hard and firm work surface, which has a beautiful grain and rich auburn color, is excellent for writing, while it is irregular enough, and sufficiently treelike, to suggest the power of nature. The place for work, as opposed to relaxation, was the sole beautiful object in the room.
His taste was much as it had been at the time he wrote Perdekamp:
My rooms are still very empty. I would really prefer to leave them that way, but you have to be a bachelor to do that. I am feeling wistful about my old studio flat. No washing tub or stairs. No cupboards and no worries about windows, stairs or WC. You get older and there’s no changing that. So I try to stay happy in spite of too many obligations. Otherwise you become grumpy in the bargain. And once you are 40 you should not encourage that. Particularly if as a workshop director you have to act like a businessman. Sometimes the Bauhaus gets to be too much for me and then my old longing for Berlin returns. That has now become more American than America, but you see fresh faces. And the speed is exhilarating. … How is your literary work going? Art is in a bad way. All that’s left is photography.70
That Albers was discouraged by so many issues was known by few people. But he was contending with brutal circumstances. In February 1930, a newspaper in Essen, the city adjacent to Bottrop, characterized him as a Bolshevik.71 In June, he informed Perdekamp, “Here there’s trouble in the air. The Haus has become politicized. It can’t go on that way much longer. We live in lovely surroundings but our work is poisoned.”72
By the spring of 1932, things had only gotten worse:
The Bauhaus devours men. Demands and workloads rise while resources are steadily cut. It would still be glorious if politics did not destroy our young people. Away from my duties, I have lots of meetings, I am on the Council of Masters and on various commissions and also vice principal, I withdraw into privacy. I don’t like company, would prefer lots of natur
e. I enjoy the nighttime walks with Mies. And with the director of our Gallery and County Art Director Grote. Otherwise I am painting pictures again and considering a new exhibition.
Anni has done some weaving and now has her own enterprise. She had a very handsome stand at the Leipzig Fair and had a lot of praise. Unfortunately an expansion of the business is out of the question.73
IN HIS SANDBLASTED GLASS from this period in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when so much in his life was uncertain, Albers revealed a particular fascination with impossibility. He developed forms with multiple, contradictory readings. Two-dimensional imagery offered possibilities unknown in three-dimensional reality.
He titled a pair of ambiguous cylinders, which we seem to see from the outside and the inside at the same time, Rolled Wrongly. Steps, of 1931, has a large flight of steps that clearly moves upward and to the right; alongside it, smaller steps appear to recede upward to the left, or, contradictorily, upward to the right. These smaller steps then flip-flop back and forth between the two readings. When we continue to gaze at them, they seem to go up halfway in one direction only to reverse on the middle riser; this impossible shift occurs in both directions. Multiple readings of a single form fascinated Albers, just as in his later Homages to the Square he could present the identical color in two different situations so that it appears one way in the first and another in the second.
Again, his art was a reflection of his life. The first glass assemblages Albers had ever made at the Bauhaus soared with faith and optimism. These later pieces suggest, above all, how much in life is unexpected and surprising. The only reality was art itself, and that art testified to the uncertainty of everything.
13
In 1932, after the city legislature of Dessau voted to dissolve the Bauhaus and the school moved to Berlin, the city of Dessau was still obliged to pay faculty salaries—once the courts had determined that the contract with the masters had been terminated prematurely. So, for a while, Albers and Kandinsky and the others were able to manage, even if the school was now located in a derelict telephone factory rather than in the splendid headquarters Gropius had built for it only six years earlier.
Albers fared better than the others, since Anni’s family got them a nice apartment in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin. Besides paying the rent, the Fleischmanns covered the cost of refurbishing. While the few of his colleagues who had remained were living in reduced circumstances compared to what they had had in Dessau, because he had married a rich woman, Josef was helping her select new flooring (white linoleum, a revolutionary choice in 1932) and other details of their appealing, if smaller, nest.
They spent about a year there. On June 15, 1933, the Oberstadtinspektor of the Dessau City Council wrote Josef Albers a letter:
Since you were a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, you have to be regarded as an outspoken exponent of the Bauhaus approach. Your espousing of the causes and your active support of the Bauhaus, which was a germ-cell of bolshevism, has been defined as “political activity” according to part 4 of the law concerning the reorganization of the civil service of April 7, 1933, even though you were not involved in partisan political activity. Cultural disintegration is the particular political objective of bolshevism and is its most dangerous task. Consequently, as a former teacher of the Bauhaus you did not and do not offer any guarantees that you will at all times and without reserve stand up for the National States.74
A similar document was sent to the other masters.
Not only would there be no pay in the future, but there was now a hitch concerning the overdue salary to which Albers was entitled. The nasty missive went on to explain, in a series of circumlocutions that even a person used to German bureaucratic gibberish would find difficult to understand, that what he had received for remuneration through the second week of April—his most recent salary payment—would be his last. This was justifiable, according to Oberstadtinspektor Irmscher Sander, “especially since recoverable salary payments with consideration of the fact that the private contract of employment was concluded according to #1, chapter 1, section 4 of the economy regulations of Anhalt of September 24, 1931 (statute book of Anhalt p. 63, of September 30, 1932) had been dissolved and that after the dissolution obligation for further payment of salaries no longer existed.”75
FRANZ PERDEKAMP, who had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf that spring, advised Albers to leave Germany if he possibly could. On June 10,1933, on a letterhead that read “Professor Josef Albers, Berlin.-Chbg. 9 Sensburger Allee 28” (with no mention of the Bauhaus), Albers wrote Perdekamp:
Dear Franz,
This is how it stands with us: shortly before Easter the B.H. was surrounded by police, the building and people were searched, many taken away and released after producing their papers. The house was closed, according to the press: because much incriminating evidence and illegal pamplets had been found. …
Three weeks ago, after much effort in many places, it was accepted that there was no incriminating evidence. They promised to remove the police seals, but did not do so. In mid-May we should have got our May compensation payments from Dessau. After a complaint at the end of May we received a notice: stopped by reason of the Law for the Renewal of the Civil Service. A few days ago the return of furnishings lent by Dessau to the Bauhaus and its workshops was required by 1st July. So the BH. is closed, no money and no furnishings. The staff has been cut. One had to show a family tree, one was politically suspect, one stays in Dessau—he had been part-time, now he is in full employment there.
So we are correspondingly happy.
Additionally the internal atmosphere—among colleagues—is no longer all right. Waiting for the end. What we worked for was in vain, now no money. No prospects. We make little plans.
During these weeks off I have retired to my little room and “ora et labora” alone.
As never before. And as making glass pictures has become too expensive since the summer, I have been making woodcuts, which I think are very good, one or two really clever. The other blocks are waiting. But a few days ago I found someone who will print them for me for nothing. I still have to get hold of paper and have some debts. I can’t pay the rent. But we still have some food from my parents-in-law, who are also not very well off.
My exhibition has been canceled.
I am prepared for anything.
Spiritual development continues in spite of everything, each individual has to decide how to hold out.
Art has always been a special occupation with special values.
“Art from the people” or “for the people,” as it is now said, are misconstructions.
Bach will never be played on the streets. It will always be “Baby, you are the star of my eyes” or something similar. Even if they dictated Wagner every day.
But thank goodness there’s still Whitsun and that will stay. But then the masses go on outings.
We send our best wishes from our work and beautiful nature.
Your Jupp76
In November 1933, Josef and Anni Albers left Germany forever.
ON MARCH 19, 1976, Josef’s eighty-eighth birthday, Anni had just finished making whipped cream to put onto a store-bought cake for a modest celebration with the actor Maximilian Schell and Schell’s tall and glamorous girlfriend, Dagmar Hirtz, when Josef complained of chest pains. Anni phoned the doctor, who advised her to drive him to Yale—New Haven Hospital.
Once he was in the hospital, however, Josef felt quite well. Schell had recently become a collector of paintings from the Homage to the Square series and had proposed enlarging two black and gray ones as a stage set for a performance of Hamlet, which he intended to direct and star in. When he and Hirtz visited the patient, they found him robust and cheerful. But the doctors advised that Josef remain in the cardiology unit under observation. The story put forward that day, which Anni had no reason to question, was that this was the first time he had ever been hospitalized.
On March 25, just as Anni was about to leave the
house to pick up Josef and bring him home, she received a phone call: he had suddenly died—as cleanly and rapidly as he would have liked, with no pain or dread.
Within a couple of hours, once her brother was on his way to help with the practicalities, Anni telephoned me at my father’s company, where I was then working. “Anni Albers,” she announced, as she always did at the start of every phone call, in her soft but strong voice. Then came two more words: “Josef died.”
I commiserated, and she went on to ask me to go to Tyler Graphics, about an hour from where she and Josef lived, with a proof that Josef had approved in the hospital and would have wanted them to have so that his latest print series could still go into production. We made the necessary plans. When I hung up the phone, I realized, as I never had before, that everyone dies. Josef, by being as physically robust as a boy until the end (he still took brisk daily walks, rain or shine, at age eighty-seven), by creating art that belonged to all times, and by never showing any sign of waning energies, had enabled me to hold on to the hope that, even if ordinary people had to die, immortality might be possible. Now I knew that this could never be the case.
Anni and Josef Albers in the garden of their home at 8 North Forest Circle, New Haven, Connecticut, ca. 1967. The Alberses were like a two-person religious sect. They considered visual experience an unequaled source of stability and joy.
The Bauhaus Group Page 45