Only nine of us were present for the funeral rites, held three days after Josef’s death. In addition to Anni and me, they were her sister and brother and sister-in-law, the architect King-lui Wu and his wife, Vivian, Josef’s lawyer Lee Eastman, and Lee’s wife, Monique. While the other eight stood at the graveside for the Catholic service, conducted by the priest from the Holy Infant Church, I ceded to Anni’s request that I guard the house, since she had read about burglaries committed during funerals. This was the first time I played a watchman role, which would eventually assume many forms.
At lunch after the service, Lee Eastman asked if I would help Anni with everything that had to be done concerning Josef’s estate. We were in the Alberses’ living room, eating Josef’s favorite foods, including Westphalian ham and black bread, and vinegary as opposed to mayonnaisy potato salad—Anni had specified this—all of which I had picked up at the family-owned German store where I had often gone during the previous couple of years to satisfy Josef’s culinary nostalgia. He was sentimental about little else, but words like rheinische appfelkraut (a sweet apple butter) and certain “wursts” made him light up with pleasure.
17. ANNELISE ALBERS, design for Smyrna rug, ca. 1925. As her work developed, the artist broke away from symmetry to create exceptionally dynamic compositions.
18. JOSEF ALBERS, Mephisto Self-Portrait, 1918. Josef enjoyed comparing himself to Mephistopheles, but Anni was so bothered by this image that she denied he could have painted it.
19. JOSEF ALBERS, Untitled, 1921. When he could not afford traditional art supplies, Albers went to the town dump in Weimar and hacked up bottle bottoms and other glass fragments, which he then assembled into luminous and vibrant windows.
20. JOSEF ALBERS, Bundled, 1925. Once Albers began to use sandblasting, he made glass compositions that took geometric abstraction into completely new territory.
21. JOSEF ALBERS, Red and White Window, ca. 1923. Albers’s window for Gropius’s reception room at the Weimar Bauhaus gave visitors a sense of the warm optimism that pervaded the school at its best.
22. ANNI ALBERS, design for a rug for a child’s room, 1928. Albers designed a rug that gave children spaces for their toy soldiers or dolls or checker pieces. The concept of play was vital to her.
23. The Alberses’ house at 808 Birchwood Drive, Orange, Connecticut. The house where Anni and Josef ended up at the conclusion of their lives was startling in its starkness and ordinariness, yet it served their needs perfectly and honored their values.
24. ANNELISE FLEISCHMANN, wall hanging, ca. 1923. Fleischmann’s first wall hanging was an astonishingly bold and simple abstract composition.
25. ANNELISE ALBERS, wall hanging, 1926. Albers avoided repetition in her compositions, yet maintained a clear number system and limited her elements and colors. Considering this her finest work to date, she gave it to her parents. They put it on the grand piano, where it was damaged by a damp vase of flowers that left a permanent circular stain halfway down on the right-hand side.
26. ANNI ALBERS, Bauhaus diploma fabric, 1929. At the request of the director of the Bauhaus, architect Hannes Meyer, Albers developed a wall covering for an auditorium that absorbed sound, because of qualities on the back, and reflected light on its visible side. Its shimmering materials and careful composition, candidly revealed, lend visual beauty at the same time as they perform their functions. Albers was awarded her Bauhaus diploma on the basis of this piece.
27. ANNI ALBERS, Fox II, 1972. This image came out of the process of printmaking and was the accidental result of the way a photographic negative fell on top of a Velox. Albers relished the idea that she could never have anticipated or made studies for these rich results.
28. ANNI ALBERS, Fox I, 1972. Fascinated by the technology of photo-offset, which she had never before tried, Albers enjoyed reversing an image and reproducing her hand-drawn pencil strokes in juxtaposition with the opaque red ink.
29. ANNI ALBERS, Six Prayers, 1966–67. Albers’s memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust is among her most moving works, evocative of intimate human lives, full of palpable connections, and seemingly audible.
THE NEXT WEEK, at Anni’s suggestion, I began to use the desk Josef had in the basement of their house, in a little office off his studio. The design of the desk was the same as that of the cherry version upstairs, but the materials could not have cost more than fifty dollars. The eight-foot-long top was constructed from the same Masonite Josef used for his Homage to the Square paintings—while he painted on the rough side, here he had the smooth side faceup—with the bottom a second piece of Masonite, on stovepipe legs. Josef had shoved everything from writing paper to train schedules into the four-inch-high space between the top and bottom. For many years, I continued that practice.
In about 1985, I was looking for a list I had made long before of some of Josef’s paintings. I ended up emptying out the space that held a mélange of his and my paperwork. Way in the back, I found a carbon copy of a typed letter composed in German on a manual typewriter. The paper was a fragile onionskin, but it had survived.
It read:
Minutes of the conference of July 20, 1933.
Present: Albers, Hilberseimer, Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Peterhans, Reich, and Walther.
Mies van der Rohe reports on the last visit with the county board of teachers and on the accounts which the investigating committee gave in Dessau newspapers. In addition, Herr Mies van der Rohe informed the meeting that it was possible to terminate the lease effective July 1, 1933, but that despite this the economic situation of the Institute, because it had to be shut down, was in such poor condition that it was impossible to think of rebuilding the Bauhaus.
For this reason, Mies van der Rohe moved to dissolve the Bauhaus. This motion was carried by a unanimous vote.
Following the review of the financial situation, Mies van der Rohe announced the agreement which had to be made on April 27, 1933, with the firm of Rasch Brothers. Herr Mies van der Rohe intends, however, to negotiate further with Mr. Rasch, in order to see if he can get another payment to help settle the debts.
If at a later date the financial situation should improve because of the royalties from the curtain materials, for example, Mies van der Rohe will try to pay the members of the faculty their salaries for the month of April, May, and June 1933.
(signed) Mies van der Rohe 77
14
During the period I knew Josef Albers, by which time he was an octogenarian, he was focusing on two bodies of work: a series of geometric drawings he called the Structural Constellations and his Homage to the Square paintings. Although he would rarely allow conversations, with me or anyone else, to stray to the subject of the Bauhaus or of his youth, it was clear that his early religious faith and the territory he explored in the Bauhaus glass workshop were still essential to him.
For the Structural Constellations, he made countless sketches on scraps of lined notebook paper, or even paper napkins. These led to hundreds of large, polished ink drawings, related engravings, embossings, and lithographs; machine engravings on vinylite; and several vast architectural commissions. The Constellations were the optimum vehicle by which to communicate the special ambiguity and geometric mysteries that, along with color, had fascinated him even before he began teaching in Weimar. The name “constellations” is apt: Albers drew them by connecting dots with straight lines. The points of intersection appear to fluctuate in space, like stars that seem to move because of their brightness and gaseousness. Stellar constellations are an attempt of man to organize the infinite, to pin down the eternal by creating imaginary representational forms; Albers, contrarily, wanted to evoke vast, timeless phenomena, to use his tidy images to create infinite variability.
In these images, the outlines are the result of constant refining, and their subtle interior variations—the addition or deletion or widening of lines—are the product of further deliberation and perseverance. The result is that shapes that are open and in
viting become impenetrable. Illusory paper-thin surfaces show both of their sides at once. Flat planes bend. Straight lines curve. Parallel lines appear to be at oblique angles. Parallelograms flip-flop and twist as we look at them. This action diverts us and takes us out of ourselves. We feel secure, on a course that has been precisely premeditated, and at the same time adventurous, as we perceive impossibilities. We learn to maintain our faith in the face of ever-changing situations.
These graphic images depend on selectivity and economy of activity. They result from carefully calculated decisions, with anything extraneous cleared away. They reflect Albers’s belief that, while we are constantly confronted with an infinity of impressions and possibilities, we must choose a direction and adhere to it to survive. We must trust in what we are doing. The basis of the Structural Constellations, this confidence and forging ahead, methodically but with an openness to mystery, was Albers’s view on how to live.
Compared to Albers’s Constellations, much geometric art is oddly muted and “laid back;” its elegance seems blasé, worldly, the least bit languid. Here is Albers the mad magician, telling us to go for broke. We run through city streets, in and out of neighborhoods; we move into unknown territories. The man who taught students the value of “repeating and reversing,” and of varying the spaces between parallel lines to create three-dimensional activity, used his elements, his parallels and right angles, to give us all he could, something that never existed before. The results are like marching bands with everyone playing at once. Our eyes move here and there at the same time; sounds go off in all directions simultaneously. We take many paths in a single moment.
Albers wrote:
Looking at my “Structural Constellations” demands from us repeated changing of the direction of our vision and of our reading.
Thus we follow the lines, and so look down and upward, in and outward, from the left to the right. We read along the extension of planes and volumes, but also penetrate them forward and backward.
Changing our viewpoint changes besides our standpoint also the position of the construction. It seems to tilt, to turn, to recede, to advance as a whole or in parts.
With this the 2-dimentional arrangement of lines appears as a 3-dimentional body, and also as opaque and transparent. It presents simultaneously front and back, face and profile.
And all this is to demonstrate that true mobility is not achieved by making an object move but making an object that makes us move—besides moving us.78
ALBERS’S OBJECTIVE, impersonal absorption in visual phenomena—the approach that we allow and in fact demand of doctors and scientists—is hard to accept in an artist. But this rigor and austerity led him to fertile ground. The work he produced so methodically is vibrant and mysterious; its calm is not shallow or stagnant. The late drawings impart movement that, without imitating or replacing natural phenomena, has natural complexity. Albers simplified but never put a brake on motion; the work evokes temporal progress, and has a rich structure that saves it from the emptiness that often occurs in refined, geometric art. The result of years of development and planning, the Structural Constellations are built on a solid base and describe activity and flow, not a void.
Albers’s geometric drawings parallel nature in some ways and outperform it in others. They allow north light and south light to shine simultaneously, just as certain Homages permit the darkness of midnight to coexist with the brightness of noon. They move us in opposite directions at once. Spare as they are, they are not “minimal” art. Even as they are reductions, they are all the richer for the ingredients distilled in them and the complexity of their development. Their combination of industrial meticulousness and spiritual mystery was the essence of the Bauhaus belief system.
The weightless figures of the Structural Constellations came from Albers’s mind and spirit. They have no physical mass. Albers did not like heaviness; he used thin white porcelain teacups and functional light steel furniture that was easy to move. He preferred airy, uncluttered spaces. And the spaces he invented and cultivated are not contained, like spaces in the real world, but are more mercurial and vaporous. Their forms move dramatically; their combination of black and white pulsates rhythmically. Their activity is as unflagging as the energies of the universe and as Albers’s own energy in seeking every possible variation on his chosen themes. Thus, they resurrected Klee’s and Kandinsky’s ideals after those artists’ deaths, and kept the Bauhaus spirit alive after World War II.
Albers wrote:
An element plus an element must yield at least one interesting relationship over and above the sum of these elements. The more different relationships are formed, and the more connected they are, the more the elements intensify each other and the more valuable is the result and the more rewarding is the work. This leads to a major factor in the instruction: economy, economy in the sense of being sparing of expenditure in material and labor and optical utilization for the effect aimed at.79
In the Structural Constellations there is not one line too many. Form is streamlined in them, just as color is intensified through the absence of medium in the Homages. Albers’s reductionism left punch and quality and dispelled anything peripheral.
The values were the same as the fundamental precepts of Albers’s Bauhaus teaching. He told his students:
Through works of art we are permanently reminded to be balanced within ourselves and with others; to have respect for proportions; that is, to keep relationships. It teaches us to be disciplined, and selective between quantity and quality. Art teaches the educational world that it is too little to collect only knowledge; furthermore, that economy is not a matter of statistics, but of a sufficient proportion between effort and effect.
Art problems are problems of human relationship. Note that balance, proportion, harmony, [and] coordination are tasks of our daily life, as are also activity, intensity, economy, and unity. And learn that behavior results in form—and, reciprocally, form influences behavior.80
The Homages to the Square share traits with the geometric drawings. There is a similar spatial play: simultaneously inward and outward, forward and backward, horizontal and vertical. We are near and far at the same time. Forms are at once together and apart. The mood is calm and controlled, the quiet activity constant. The means are always mechanical. The purpose resonates. These works are clearly the result of relentless, uncompromising pursuit, yet the effort is concealed, making them objects for serene contemplation.
In line as in color, proportions and relations are the key. To add or remove or thicken or lighten a single line would totally change the nature and rhythm and motion of a geometric form; similarly, to lighten or vary a single color would change the physical action and spiritual presence of any Homage.
Albers would often talk of nothing but these visual nuances and discrepancies. They were his lifeblood. He would take visitors to his studio to see his latest work—an Homage, or a drawing for a stainless steel Structural Constellation relief sculpture to go in a new skyscraper or on a city square—and would marvel yet again at the shifting movement and appearance and disappearance of form. He liked to explain the visual activity; his friends were those people who listened attentively and made the right remarks. He did not act as if he had created the miraculous phenomena, only as if he had brought them down to earth and made them accessible to us. In his late work, this devout apostle of optical mystery was as close to its wonders, and as able to make them occur, as he could be.
ALBERS STARTED OUT earthbound and then moved heavenward. This is especially true of the Homages to the Square. Having first given us implicitly weighty three-dimensional bodies, he makes them float. The transformation through which their mass is rendered weightless was his form of alchemy. In the sandblasted glassworks he had countered the heavy mass of the materials with the effect of light. In the Homages he began by methodically applying paint grounded to the panel, but he subsequently made the forms buoyant and the color ethereal. This achievement of poetry through th
e application of overtly scientific means was a Bauhaus goal.
The Homages have their feet on the earth and their heads in the cosmos. The central, or first, square is like a seed: the heart of the matter, the core from which everything emanates. The intervals underneath that first square, created by either two or three larger outlying squares, are doubled to the left and right of it and tripled above it. In the four-square format, for example, which is ten units wide and high, the middle square is four units wide, each of the outer squares is half a unit wide underneath the middle square, one unit wide at left and right, and one and a half units high above. In The Power of the Center, Rudolf Arnheim explores the ways this 1:2:3 ratio shifts the normal balance of earthly (horizontal) and heavenly (vertical) elements of a single square in favor of the heavenly. “This asymmetry produces the dynamics of the theme, a squeezing below, an expansion above. It promotes a depth effect, which should be counteracted if all the squares were grouped symmetrically around the same center.”81 The asymmetry is subtle—the squares are almost centered—so the upward thrust is gradual rather than pronounced. Thus the spiritual element is achieved with a soft voice rather than a loud shout. Albers’s spirituality transmitted in poignant, muted tones rather than with evangelical ardor.
In analyzing the ascendant quality of the Homages, Arnheim points out that if we follow the four diagonals created by the corners of the squares within squares, they converge on a point precisely one quarter of the way up the painting. The diagonals created by drawing lines through only the two bottom sets of corners and carrying those lines all the way across the panel make an X that demarcates the rectangle that is the lower half of the composition. “A solid base is thereby provided on which the sequence of squares can rise with confidence from step to step—not so different from the coffin in Piero’s Resurrection, from which the movement toward heaven takes off.”82
The Bauhaus Group Page 46