On one of his visits, Anni presented Maximilian with an exquisite painting from Josef’s Variant series—a rectangular arrangement in which five solid colors, in a geometric layout that resembled the façades of adobe architecture in the American Southwest, interacted so as to create an endless pulsating movement. Maximilian, with his usual long black cashmere scarf draped around his neck, his shock of thick graying black hair swept off his dramatically furrowed brow, looked at the painting as if he were seeing things no one else in the world saw, and Anni looked at him as if she were seeing a beauty she had never seen before either. Then Maximilian studied the back of the painting and saw its title: Light in the Dark. Josef’s name for his work succinctly summed up the effect of glowing orange and dawnlike pink surrounded by much deeper tones, a burnt umber and a brown that appear almost the same.
“How perfect this is,” Maximilian said in his “I am about to utter something amazingly profound” voice. Then he turned to Anni and said, as if it were as original as a dictum of Kant’s, “Because always in my darkness is there a little bit of light.”
Anni—who, because she was such an outsider to the things people say all the time, was surprisingly unaware of clichés—looked at him as if she were about to implode in ecstasy. “Ach, Maximilian, du bist der light in my darkness!” she exclaimed.
Maximilian Schell and Anni Albers at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, 1978
But even then, as soon as he left that day, Anni worried that her light in the darkness was not as happy and bright as she wanted him to be. The next day, when he phoned from his usual suite at the Essex House in New York and said he had an idea that would bring him great joy, she was relieved that she might be given the chance to make him as happy as he deserved to be—while at the same time helping Josef. Maximilian proposed that, in his large and relatively empty house in Munich, he could have an Albers museum. That way, the public could really see Josef’s work, while he, Maximilian, would be able to explain the art to visitors. If Anni just gave him fifty or so paintings, this beautiful idea could become a reality.
While she entertained the prospect, I phoned the Alberses’ lawyer, Lee Eastman. I explained that I thought I could get Anni to face reality and not go along with the idea, but that I was worried that she would be devastated if she realized that the man she adored was interested in her in part because she owned a gold mine of art. I well remember Lee’s voice on the phone saying, “The fox has stepped out of the den, Nicholas Fox Weber.”
It took some gentle cajoling from me, and a phone call from Lee, for Anni to consider that transferring a multimillion-dollar collection of Josef’s work to Maximilian was not so wise after all. I suggested to her that she simply tell him she would discuss it with Lee, whom he knew. She did so, and Maximilian dropped the idea.
THAT ANNI’S POSITION in the world, and her money, mattered to both Josef and Maximilian was something she knew and also denied. Artistic passion was the consuming issue for her, as was charisma, and she liked to feel that spiritual and personal issues were the sources of the attraction that underlay the two relationships that preoccupied her day and night. But Anni often said to me, “Don’t trust anyone who says money isn’t important.” On some level she recognized that both her lost fortune, the one from her family, and the one she came into unexpectedly late in her life, from Josef’s success, were pivotal elements in her existence.
Yet in this period when a movie star became her obsession, when although she continued to forge ahead with her printmaking, she lived mostly for Maximilian’s phone calls and potential visits (often planned and cancelled) or her possible trips to see him, the one thing she could not bear was the idea that he was primarily interested in Josef’s art. Not only did any consideration of that possibility raise the issue of money, but it put her, and her own work, in second place. Contradictorily, Anni knew that Maximilian’s fondness for Josef’s work went deep—he had bought a number of works at the Sidney Janis Gallery during Josef’s lifetime—and was a point in common between them, and she continued to give him a valuable work almost every time he came to visit, as it represented their spiritual connection, even if on some level she knew, and resented, that this was what got him up to Connecticut.
At one point Maximilian began to discuss her will with her. She very much liked a painting he owned by Jean Dubuffet, The Geologist. During one of her visits to him in Munich, where she had seen the Dubuffet for a second time and expressed surprise at how engrossing she found this complex canvas by someone so far outside the Bauhaus canon, Maximilian told her he would leave it to her in his will. He then explained to her that this was a wonderful thing to do: to leave art to the people you knew who loved that art, and that a will was a good way to do this. He suggested, as an example, that just as he was leaving her the Dubuffet, she might leave him some of Josef’s paintings: what could be better, in Josef’s memory, and for everybody’s happiness?
When Anni returned to Connecticut, she told me about this: Wasn’t it touching that Maximilian was leaving her the Dubuffet? Shouldn’t she do something along the same lines? He had told her that the Dubuffet might be worth half a million dollars; she should be just as generous in her own will.
Then I pointed out to Anni that, much as I hated to say it, she was ninety-one years old to his sixty-one. I explained the concept of the actuarial table, new to her, and suggested that in all likelihood she would die before he did; I hoped she would forgive my indelicacy in saying so.
An hour later, Anni told me how brilliant I had been to call this to her attention, that it had not occurred to her. She was smiling; she liked catching someone being naughty, even if the someone was Maximilian. She relished the feeling of coming to her senses and having the upper hand. It was the same sense of triumph she had when she left behind the milieu of her parents and went to the Bauhaus. But then she looked at me with a very serious expression on her face and, again alluding to Maximilian, said, “You know, I need the obsession to live.”
THE WAY THAT OBSESSION sustained Anni was evidence that, much as she would make the case for art as a constant in her life and would claim textiles as her source of fulfillment and meaning, the love of another person, and the strength of a connection with a man who was independent and powerful, was essential. Indeed, it had been so ever since she met Josef.
In 1980, I took Anni to the blockbuster Picasso exhibition that filled almost the entire Museum of Modern Art in New York. I wasn’t sure whether she would like it or not, but I felt that she had to see it. Anni was by then totally dependent on a wheelchair. As I wheeled her through the show, she was totally riveted. She connected viscerally to the early work from Barcelona, the Blue and Rose Period figure paintings, the cubist portraits. When we reached the monumental, neoclassical figures Picasso painted in the early 1920s, she turned to me and said, “You know, we were wrong at the Bauhaus. He was the genius. Finally, nothing is more important, or exciting, than man.”
3
That Anni had been uniquely attuned to the visual had been clear from the start. Born on June 12, 1899, her earliest childhood memory was of waking up on her third birthday to a garland of flowers strung around the bedposts; she never forgot the joy of the brightly colored assortment of shapes suspended above her. She would remember for the rest of her life how as a child, whenever she went to the family box at the Berlin opera, she and her younger sister wore black velvet dresses with white Irish lace collars and cuffs made by the dressmaker who came to the house. That crisp counterpoint of black and white and the play of textures retained their charm for her forever.
What Anni considered most telling in her recall of those opera performances was that her favorite moment had always been when the orchestra was tuning up. Later in life she recognized this as a sign of her fascination with process, with how components join to achieve the end results, even more than with the finished product. Anni would become as intrigued by thread and its interlacing, and by the processes of prin
tmaking, as she had been by the sound of the violinists tightening their strings and testing the results with their bows.
Transformation and the working of components were Anni’s nectar. When her parents gave costume parties in their Berlin apartment, she was riveted to the sight of the usual furniture being taken away and the painted scenery brought in, just as she was fascinated by the return to the norm after the party. For the family’s formal flat to become the Grunewald, the vast area of parks on the outskirts of Berlin, large canvases of landscapes were installed. The idea was to make the cushy interior a relaxed setting for a picnic. Guests entering the verdant paradise were met by a simulated boat, constructed on a bed frame on wheels, which ferried them a few feet through the entryway, as if they were crossing one of the lakes of the Grunewald. For another party, with a railroad station motif, Anni’s parents installed murals of sausage stands, ticket booths, and information desks. Young Anni was mesmerized by the possibilities of the imagination and the way these fantasies heightened human spirits. She also had a feeling for the bizarre, such as her mother’s behavior at the make-believe train station; Mrs. Fleischmann arrived at her own party screaming because she had lost her child, and then ran out the door pretending to be a child looking desperately for her mother.
When Anni told me this, I had the impression that she had never discussed these memories with another soul—except possibly Josef, who would not have shared her amusement. She did not consider her personal history noteworthy. On some level, she must have recognized that the events of her childhood and the nature of her memories were of a piece with her extraordinary life as an artist, that there was a consistency to her passion for imagination and her fondness for metamorphosis and change, in whatever guise, but until we met, she had not encountered anyone who was quite so fascinated with her or her life story—or who loved her the particular way I did. At last she felt secure—with good reason.
ANNI WAS COMPLETELY unusual as a child in bourgeois, early-twentieth-century Berlin. She disliked the paintings her parents had at home, almost as much as she disapproved of the Biedermeyer furniture. She scowled when she told me this. It was not simply that her parents’ style was counter to her taste; in her eyes it represented wastefulness.
Josef, who was present at the time, explained to me what Biedermeyer was, since I clearly had no idea. He, unlike Anni, had a certain fond nostalgia for the heavy and ornate nineteenth-century style, because at least the construction of the pieces had required considerable skill. But Anni would have nothing of his enthusiasm. While he described Biedermeyer, she grimaced, not even waiting for him to finish his brief summary before she said, “No, no, you’re wrong, Juppi.”
She did, however, like what she saw when her father took her to the Secession shows. This was not, she realized later in life, because the art had great merit; rather, it was because she was the only child at the exhibition, and her instinctive reaction to the shocked crowds turning their heads disapprovingly was to think, “Why not?” Remembering this at age seventy-five, she said that for the rest of her life she generally considered herself the youngest person in the room. It was only when my children became teenagers and had their friends around that I understood what she meant; she was correct that she was more open-minded, and adventurous, even than most adolescents, and she was more receptive to visual beauty, and to the quirks of human behavior. This openness and longing for the extremes of existence is why she had gone to the Bauhaus and embraced its opportunities, and half a century later embodied its legacy.
Until Anni was thirteen, she and a few other children were educated together by tutors. Her first art teacher was a Miss Violet; Anni adored the name. Her watercolors of delicate autumn leaves were well received, and when Anni went on to the lyceum, her parents saw to it that she had a private art teacher, Toni Mayer. For Anni, the only problem was that Mayer had the same first name as her mother, and therefore in her mind seemed overweight and intrusive. Anni was delighted that when she added a Russian flourish to “Toni,” it took on a completely different character. Moreover, “Tonuschka” brought a nude model into the house for the fourteen-year-old girl to draw. This made her feel very professional, even if she, like Josef, later claimed that such training was pointless.
ANNI WAS BOTH star pupil and bête noir in her art studies. She attended a lyceum, where there was a competition for posters to give to children orphaned by the world war that had broken out the previous year. Fifteen-year-old Anni made as her entry a picture of short-haired little girls sitting behind each other in a row. The girls were all shown knitting, and each wore a skirt with a hem slightly above her knees. Her teacher declared the work immodest. A poster of a more acceptable subject, which Anni considered artistically inferior, received first prize. Although hers garnered an honorable mention in spite of its scandalous imagery, a sort of fury began to burn.
The Anni I knew saw her life as a series of hard challenges in which she was perpetually butting her head against disapproval. By the time she was in her seventies, she had had considerable success—major exhibitions, glowing press, attention from devoted collectors—but her memory generally dwelled on the swipes against her.
Even though she described the Bauhaus as “the place” and a form of paradise, her specific recollections of the school ranged from feeling that no one knew who she was to the pain she felt when Mies van der Rohe deprecated “rich Jewish girls” in her presence. When I asked her about the retrospective of her textile work held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, the first thing she told me was that her younger brother had asked her why it had not received more attention in the media. The reason, she explained, was that there had been a newspaper strike; the strike itself, which worked against the show, and her brother’s quips were what she recalled—not having the first solo exhibition ever given a textile artist at the Modern, or the dramatic and effective installation by Philip Johnson.
That sense of hardship inflicted on Anni was part of her self-definition. The energy required by battle fueled her, almost as much as her love for beautiful art and determination to work as she wanted. When she recalled her childhood, she showed no gratitude that her parents had been so forward-thinking compared to most of the people in their milieu that they hired tutors and art instructors for her and supported her unusual desires. Her inability to credit her mother for encouraging her interests was almost pathological.
Anni went from the lyceum to study art full-time with the post-impressionist Martin Brandenburg, who had a studio on the floor above Lovis Corinth’s. This, too, was with her parents’ support. She liked Brandenburg, and felt that she benefited from the strict discipline he imposed by having his students work on precise figure drawings, about half life-size. Especially with her father away in the war, she regarded Brandenburg “as a strong manly figure. His word had weight.” Brandenburg once told her mother that Anni had worked so hard that she should be taken as a treat to a winter resort, and Mrs. Fleischmann happily complied—although Anni remembered the trip only for the burden of being with the overweight mother whose company she did not enjoy.
What animated Anni far more than her teacher’s admiration were her conflicts with Brandenburg as an authority figure. When Anni, having seen a beautiful Lucas Cranach Eve painted against a black background, started to use black in her painting, he told her its use was forbidden. She broke down in tears, and when he said that if she continued to use black she could not return to his classes, she left.
Her mother engineered a reconciliation between her willful daughter and the tradition-bound instructor. Anni promised never again to use black, and resumed her studies. When she told me the story, she blamed herself for not having expected this reaction from a teacher of classic impressionism. This mix of self-criticism and annoyance with the forces arrayed against her was her norm.
But she had found a solution to her angst. She reported this dispute about black with the satisfaction of someone who, following that encounter, had managed continu
ously to make black—in bold, solid units—one of the major elements of her textile and graphic art.
BRANDENBURG DIED IN 1918, which was when Anni decided she would try to work with Kokoschka. She had recently bought as her first art acquisition a Kokoschka lithograph of a woman’s head—this was in the period when he was preparing images for his Alma Mahler doll—and her mother went with her to Dresden to seek him out. Again, she gave no credit to her intrepid parent, although Mrs. Fleischmann did considerable detective work to find the painter, who was deliberately elusive. Kokoschka regularly changed hotels, and Mrs. Fleischmann had done a lot of tracking down leads by the time she and her daughter finally knocked on the door—all for an encounter that lasted five minutes at most. Kokoschka glanced at the portfolio that included an oil portrait of Anni’s mother, but then, as Anni would tell Josef a few years hence, sent her on her way.
Anni went to the School for Applied Arts in Hamburg, but a two-month stint was all she could bear. In a class on wallpaper design, her drawing of a man was considered “unacceptable because it had too much expression.” Anni decided to stop wasting her time.
ANNELISE FLEISCHMANN had few personal friends, but one of the rare ones was Olga Redslob, the sister of Dr. Edwin Redslob, the liberal-minded arts commissioner of Germany who was a vital supporter of the Bauhaus. Edwin Redslob recommended to her that, given her disappointment with the teaching methods in Hamburg, she should consider the pioneering educational experiment started in Weimar three years earlier. One look at Feininger’s abstracted Gothic cathedral and a quick reading of Gropius’s manifesto, and she was determined to be on her way.
The Bauhaus Group Page 48