Like the image of a cathedral on the original Bauhaus brochure, Albers’s Homages to the Square have massive, sanctuary-like bodies and, simultaneously, the attributes of steeples. In buildings and paintings alike, there is a mix of solid craft with philosophical concerns. That blend of fact and spirit parallels the issues of mortality and immortality that loomed large for Albers in his later years. Determinedly anti-bohemian, in persona he was the honest craftsman, clean-shaven and well scrubbed, dressed in neat, almost uniform-like clothing (mostly permanent-press beige). In 1950, when he and Anni moved to New Haven so that he could take his teaching position at Yale, they chose a small Cape Cod—style house that looked like everyone else’s: a no-nonsense place good for living and working. Twenty years later, when they were more affluent and able to enjoy the rewards of the art boom of the 1960s, they moved to the slightly larger raised ranch where I met them. On a quiet suburban street a few miles from their former house, it was convenient to a cemetery plot they had selected so that after the first one died, the other could drive by on the way to the post office.
But as matter-of-fact as he tried to seem, Albers enjoyed the feeling that his achievement might have the immortality he knew his body lacked. Having reduced the trappings of his everyday existence, he thought often of the afterlife. The words of George Eliot describe his state of mind: “It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. … They look like fragments of heaven.”83
THE WORLD BEYOND our individual earthly existence was in Albers’s thoughts when he made a blue and green twenty-four-inch Homage in January 1976, some two months before his death. By the time he created this Homage, he was working on very few paintings—his hand was too unsteady, so he focused more on printmaking—but he did this panel as a study for an Aubusson tapestry that had been commissioned for a bank in Sydney, Australia.
I discussed the painting with Albers on several occasions. He told me that he had one problem with it. He had found a combination of his chosen colors that interacted perfectly in an Homage format when the central square was four units wide, but that did not work as well in the format with a larger (six units) central square. (All of the paintings were ten units by ten units, whatever their size.) Showing me studies of halves of these paintings (he often worked in half Homages, especially when designing prints or tapestries), he explained that in the version with the larger middle square, “downstairs” was fine, but “upstairs” was “hell.” He wanted both a spatial flow and a color “intersection.”
Albers describes this intersection in his book Interaction of Color. It is the process by which a correctly selected color lying between two other colors takes on the appearance of both. When colors properly intersect in a three-square Homage, the color of the innermost square will appear toward the outer boundary of the next square out. The color of the outermost square will also appear within the second square, toward its inner boundary. “The middle color plays the role of both mixture parents, presenting them in reversed placement.”84 This is illusory. The second square is not in fact a mixture, but is paint straight from the tube, applied flatly. But at a distance our perception tells us that it is modulated, and that some of the first and third colors are visible within it.
Albers then pointed to the version with the small central square. Here the intersection occurred, but he was not satisfied. Moving his hand over the sky blue center, and then over the more terrestrial forest green and the sealike aqua surrounding it, he explained that these colors were the earth and the cosmos, the cosmos being in the center. In the version with the smaller middle, the cosmos was too distant.
While the earlier Homages generally depend on sharp light-dark contrasts, the later ones are more subtle, with closely related hues. Here Albers’s development parallels that of Cézanne and Monet, who in their late work also moved toward hazy, atmospheric effects. In the version of this last blue-green painting with the larger middle, Albers wanted all boundaries and edges virtually to disappear. Additionally, there should be no sharp corners on the inner square. (He said that Cartier-Bresson once told him that he made “circular squares,” which delighted him.) To achieve these effects he needed to find colors with the identical light intensity. The cosmos should have neither sharp boundaries nor corners.
He said that even the supreme colorist J. M. W. Turner had never been able to match light intensities exactly. Yet by making studies with painted blotting paper, Albers found precisely the paint he needed for the middle square. With Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green, batch number 192, he could obtain both his desired intersection and the match of light intensities. At that moment, however, the only Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green available was from a newer batch, number 205. He admired the paint company for changing the code number to indicate a revision of the pigment, but he was frustrated at not being able to duplicate a paint that had been discontinued several years earlier.
I telephoned the American corporate headquarters of Winsor & Newton, an English company, in New Jersey. I managed to get the director on the phone and explained that I was trying desperately to locate some old tubes of Cobalt Green 192. He assured me that there was no perceptible difference between 192 and 205.
I then said that I was calling on behalf of Josef Albers. “Josef Albers!” the paint specialist exclaimed. Within a couple of days, a shallow box containing five tubes of Cobalt Green 192, packed tightly side by side like sardines in a tin, arrived. Josef went back to work.
The correct paint enabled him to make the painting exactly as he wanted. The Bauhaus-style insistence on the most apt material and the will to achieve his goals were crucial. The intersection he achieved is like magic. Looking at that Homage with me, Albers demonstrated the color penetration by interlocking all his fingers, and praised the ability of the outer and inner squares to span the middle color. He again spoke of the need of “the universe” (rather than “the cosmos”) to be immaterial and without boundaries. “And for me the cosmos is getting nearer, which is why I had to paint it larger,” he added. This was his last painting.
Anni Albers
1
It has the makings of a scene in an old-fashioned Hollywood movie. The rich girl from Berlin, having insisted on going to a new and experimental art school in spite of her parents’ protests that she should simply marry and run a household even if she painted on the side, brings home her impoverished artist boyfriend. He comes from a city no one had ever heard of or would want to go to, and he is significantly older than she is. She presents him to her mother and father and younger siblings in their elegant flat in the finest quarter of the cosmopolitan metropolis. In the film version, the mother and father, even the sister and brother, would be disapproving at best. His family would be delighted at their son’s ascent into money and the higher ranks of German society; hers would fight the match tooth and nail.
With Anni and Josef, that was the scenario, but Hollywood didn’t write the script. One day I was sitting at their kitchen table with the two of them when Anni recalled, “You know, when I brought Josef home for the first time, the parents liked him so much, right from the start, that they said to him, ‘Our Anke is so difficult: if you can’t deal with her, you can always come home to us.’” Annelise’s teenage brother, twenty-one years younger than Josef, instantly had a new hero; her sister approved equally of the young man she thought looked like “a beautiful Memling.”
By then Josef had been offered a teaching position, and Annelise had made great strides in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, constructing innovative wall hangings and subtle upholstery materials that established her as one of the leading textile artists at the school, where weaving was one of the most important activities. Her parents were, astonishingly, very content with the progress of the family rebel.
Annelise Fleischmann, ca. 1923. Photo by Lucia Moholy-Nagy. Taken shortly after the future Anni Albers arrived at the Bauhaus, this photo shows her dressed in the white collar and cuffs she favored at the time. When she saw this image la
ter in life, however, she compared it to Whistler’s Mother and, saying she hated her haircut in it, wanted it banished.
THE ALBERSES OFTEN REFERRED to the warmth between Anni’s family and Josef, but never alluded to Josef’s family’s take on the match. It was only when the correspondence with Perdekamp emerged that I learned about their reaction. Anni’s family was Jewish, although both sides had converted to Protestantism a generation back. As Catholics, the Albers family thought the conversion only made matters worse.
In 1925, on a summer holiday in Val Gardena, which had been in an Austrian province until 1919 but was now in Italy, Josef wrote Franz Perdekamp:
It is wonderful here.
I knew nothing. Anni made all the plans, packed everything, got the visas and the tickets and I was just taken along. And will continue to be taken along. We have been here nearly 14 days and will stay a few days more. Then its off further south, maybe a long way. I am already much restored. What with the high-altitude air and the wine and the sun and the tanned skin. Selva is 1,600m [4,800 ft.] high and once we climbed very high all on our own to the great Schierspitze—2,600m [7,800 ft.] but we had to turn back 20 m [60 ft.] below the peak, I could not drag her any further. The paths are glorious here and one can quickly get into the high country.—In Dessau all is well up to the point that Anni thinks the town is ugly. It is frequently very dusty and the many factories often spoil the air. But we hope we will succeed there, though even there our opponents are already very active.
Nevertheless, the new buildings have been unanimously approved for 1¼ million [marks] and building work has already started, though unfortunately interrupted by strikes.
I shall not come to the West in the near future. Our interracial marriage is still too fresh for me to show my face.
It is quite all right to let people know about my marriage, I have written about it to acquaintances myself. At that time I did want to keep my marriage plans quiet. It seems that at home they do not like to talk about my bad match. And my sister Lore is angry because I didn’t tell her beforehand. Well let her be, I am well and I didn’t want to hurt other people. In spite of everything, I am not angry with anyone and wish them all well. That I may not now have as many opportunities to express this wish changes nothing.
In winter I shall set up a new glass workshop in the new building. I am looking forward to the new enterprise very much. I am confident about the future and hope it is the same for you. Give my love to Friedel and the children.
And though Anni is still asleep I send her love too.
Your Jupp1
While the Alberses never mentioned to me that Josef kept their relationship and then their marriage secret from his family until well after the fact, Anni did tell me that she met Josef’s father and stepmother only once. The occasion was an awkward visit to Bottrop, during which Josef’s father drank a lot. And although they remained on polite terms with his two sisters lifelong, Anni suspected one of them of being a Nazi. That it was a “Mischehe” (the word Josef used for an “interracial” or mixed marriage), and therefore took him even further from them than had his move to the Bauhaus, was his family’s point of view to the end.
Josef’s way of handling their feelings about the match—without disputation, keeping his distance—was in character for him, given his goals of balance and temperance, studiously achieved, in human relationships as in art. Anni, however, wore her passions on her sleeve. She was totally, consumingly in love with Josef, not only with the man, but with his reverence for visual art and his priorities concerning all that he did; at the same time, she disdained his family and the world he came from, which had none of his style and placed no value on what were, for her and Josef, top priorities. She was also alternately condescending and indifferent to the world she came from. She disliked her family’s aesthetic taste—an apartment with raised paneling, ornate cornices, and Biedermeyer furniture—and, although she enjoyed her father’s companionship, she resented, right up until the end of her life, her mother. This was, and remains, strange to me, for Anni by then had achieved so much that made her unlike her mother that she could have afforded to recognize Mrs. Fleischmann’s charms at no expense to her own self-definition. Anni’s younger sister and brother found their mother amusing and warm. In addition, Toni Ullstein Fleischmann kept a personal journal describing the family’s escape from Nazism and flight to America, which shows great intelligence and depth of feeling, as well as rare humor under dire circumstances, yet all Anni ever said about her mother was that she was “not interesting with her bourgeois values” and was “fat.”
The connection with Anni’s parents, in spite of all of her mixed feelings about them, remained important to both Josef and Anni. For one thing, there was the simple fact of money. Without her family, in this period of tremendous inflation, when Josef was on a meager salary, there would have been no holiday in Val Gardena. That Anni had taken full responsibility for organizing it and was so good-spirited about a mountain trip was remarkable; the reason Josef had to pull her along the trail was that she had a genetic illness that affected her leg muscles and the formation of her feet. But she was one of those people determined to live to the fullest, to ignore her physical disability as best she could.
Siegfried and Toni Fleischmann were, in 1925, delighted to give the young couple a wedding at a Catholic church near their flat, with an elaborate lunch afterward at Berlin’s finest hotel, the Adlon. They saw Josef as a stabilizing force for the daughter whose passions they could hardly fathom. Their son-in-law was rare in matching her devotion to artistic modernism while, at the same time, being down-to-earth, good-humored, highly intelligent, and presentable. That he was from another stratum of German society mattered far less.
While Anni was uncomfortable about the milieu in which she had been raised, Josef was enthralled by it. The world of the Ullsteins, even more than that of Anni’s father’s family, was as new to him as the Bauhaus was. He once told me, as if he were pronouncing a miracle, that during World War I, when most people in Germany did not have milk, Anni’s maternal uncles “had crème fraiche.” Anni was palpably annoyed at his delight in her family’s extravagance, but to the poor child of Bottrop it was immensely significant, and he was unembarrassed by his fascination with Anni’s family’s wealth and prominence.
No one went to the Bauhaus to get rich, but—as was equally evident with Gropius, Klee, and Kandinsky—in the volatile financial situation of Germany in the 1920s, money was an issue to be confronted on a daily basis. Josef had greatly improved his lot. And Annelise, by marrying someone who was both indigent and strong-willed, had satisfied her desire for something different from the wastefulness and fluff of her upbringing.
Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann now became Anni Albers, replacing what was baroque and flowery with a trim reduction. On all fronts, she preferred concision and opted for the streamlined over the frilly. It was one of her ways of becoming modern, similar to what another young Berlin woman—almost her exact contemporary, although in most ways her polar opposite—did by shortening the Helene Amalie Bertha that preceded Riefenstahl to the crisply effective Leni. Both of these women now sported short bobs rather than long tresses, and favored tailored jackets over lavish dresses; clean lines and compactness were the order of the day. There was no better exemplar of the lean and trim, of concentrated thinking and a diamond-hard strength, than the man Anni had chosen to marry.
2
Anni Albers had two great love affairs in her life. The first was with Josef, and it lasted for fifty-four years, from the time they met in 1922 until he died in 1976. But not long after his death something switched inside her. She began to remember, above all, the fights, the times he was annoyed with her prolonged coughing spasms, his failure to praise her work. At times she looked at some of his artwork worshipfully, or grew sentimental and said how much she wished she could still buy him socks, but the woman whose art was uniformly serene (so that even Six Prayers, her memorial to the six million Je
ws killed by the Nazis, has an overriding beauty and grace in spite of its tragic theme) was haunted by a mix of classic grief—she desperately missed the only really close companion of her lifetime—and some form of fury.
It was not long after Josef died that Anni became obsessed with the powerfully handsome Maximilian Schell, the friend who had been there when Josef was hospitalized on his eighty-eighth birthday. The Austrian actor-director was extraordinarily seductive toward her.
In that relationship, too, she could not bear the idea that her money and power were part of her attraction. By then, she had lost almost every penny of Ullstein and Fleischmann wealth—both families had had all of their property taken by the Nazis—but had, late in her life, become newly affluent once Josef’s paintings began to sell in the art boom of the 1960s. After Josef’s death, she inherited a collection of his artwork that was worth many millions of dollars, and some of the most important art dealers in the world were eager to represent it, just as museums wanted gifts; Anni lived modestly, and seemed loath to acknowledge her fortune and consequent position, but they were no secret.
For many years, Schell would phone or visit her periodically, and invite her to come see him play Jedermann in the summers at the Salzburg Festival, a trip she loved to make, and which would be followed by time with him on his farm in the Austrian Alps. The most that he received in return, materially, was, every year or so, an important painting by Josef, at the time worth as much as two hundred thousand dollars. Anni would labor over the selection, giving him a spectacular Homage to the Square for his fiftieth birthday, picking out just the right oil on paper for his stepson, but she always ended up feeling that he was slightly disappointed. He, meanwhile, often complained to her about his need for “pennies,” saying that in spite of an Academy Award (in 1962 for Judgment at Nuremberg) and the success of his films, he never had enough money, especially because he liked to produce and direct his own work, which was far less commercial than the blockbusters in which he took roles.
The Bauhaus Group Page 47