The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Her father was against the idea. “What are you talking about—a new style?” Siegfried Fleischmann asked after she described the Bauhaus to him. As a furniture manufacturer, he felt he knew what all the possibilities were. “There has been the Renaissance, there has been the Baroque—it has all been done already.” At least this was how she often cited his response, which was the canned recollection of her pre-Bauhaus life that she gave, always with a laugh, in interviews. Siegfried Fleischmann was probably too enlightened and sophisticated to have made the remark, unless he did so as a joking quip. But to Anni, later in life, it served a purpose by portraying both her own temerity and the mentality she was bucking with her exceptional willpower.

  SINCE THE BAUHAUS provided no housing for its students, Anni rented a room in Weimar. For Josef, the move there had meant swapping hardship for relative comfort; for her, it was the reverse. Instead of the luxurious surroundings of her parents’ Berlin flat, she had willingly opted for a place where, when she wished to bathe, she had to go to the downtown bathhouse, where the hot water was so limited that she needed to make an appointment in advance. She was, however, gleeful to relinquish bourgeois norms; Anni relished the pride and superiority that came with voluntarily submitting herself to arduous conditions. With me, she was deliberately matter-of-fact about it: “Since there was no way of comparing it to any other situation, this was the way it was.”

  Anni attended sessions of the Vorkurs under Itten before seeking full admission to the school with her entrance project. “Alone and shy and somewhat unsure”—for all her willingness to seek a new life—she felt herself to be very much of an outsider, full of doubts about her own worth. A sympathetic fellow student, somewhat older, Ise Bienert, whose background was similar to her own, reassured her that the new venture was worthwhile and that she was not completely alone. Ise’s mother, Ida Bienert, was a major art collector who lived in Dresden and was sufficiently avant-garde to buy work by Klee and Kandinsky. It was Ise, whose family gave her rare access to the more established Bauhauslers, who introduced Anni to Josef Albers. The “thin and ascetic-looking”—how Anni relished saying those words decades later as she remembered the first sight of him—hero of the glass workshop instantly exerted a strong magnetic force on her.

  Besides being one of the oldest students, Josef was already greatly admired at the school, both by the faculty and by the other pupils, not just for his glass assemblages, but also for his success in a range of other disciplines. When Anni was among the eleven of sixteen newcomers to Weimar to be rejected for the upcoming Bauhaus semester, she was disappointed mainly because she “had had a second look at Josef Albers and was interested in possibly seeing a little more of him.” Anni’s understatement in telling me this, as she did while Josef was still alive, was deliberate, and she made this remark about the love of her life in a carefully modulated, soft voice, but she had a mischievous smile and a spark in her eyes when she said it.

  Anni registered for a further six months of preparatory courses, with Josef now proffering advice on her entrance project. This project, which was constructed from interiors of thermos bottles, broken bits of glass, and metal, had a clear allegiance to his notion of utilizing detritus. Anni also made a highly naturalistic drawing of a piece of wood, and a color scale that went from black to white with a progression of grays in between. The three projects secured her acceptance at the Bauhaus on her second attempt.

  In 1947, twenty-five years later, Anni Albers wrote—in the English she had begun to develop under the guidance of an Irish governess in her childhood and in which she had since become so eloquent at Black Mountain College, where she and Josef had by then been living for fourteen years:

  I came to the Bauhaus at “its period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances.

  Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energies, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no helplessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own kind of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim or distant purposes … [for] realizing sense and meaning in a world confused.2

  Beyond that, there was Gropius. Anni always responded viscerally to confident, handsome men. When she was starting at the Bauhaus, she was in a state of uncertainty, with “a purpose I could not yet see and which I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me. Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead.”3

  A quarter of a century after Gropius gave his talk, Anni could not recall the specifics, but she could vividly evoke the feeling inspired by the Bauhaus’s founder. “What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation.” She moved from her state of “hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective.” Following the hour in which Gropius explained the objectives of the Bauhaus, its emphasis on design based on function and the need to develop new materials, and the aim of spreading the new vision to all economic strata worldwide, Anni felt “purpose and direction from there on.” It was, she concluded, “the experience of finding one’s bearing.”4

  ANNI’S NEXT STEP, after hearing Gropius, was to choose a workshop. She wanted stained glass, but the Bauhaus masters said no. Gropius explained that one person was enough in this field; as it was, he and the other faculty members had questioned the value of glass as an independent discipline until Josef had, only recently, convinced them otherwise. Anni then tried for carpentry, then wall painting, and finally metalwork. For all three workshops, she was refused on the basis that the work was too strenuous.

  Feminist revisionist history has, in recent years, maintained that the reason Anni finally went into weaving was that nothing else was open to women.5 In fact, the other workshops had female students; the real issue is that Annelise Fleischmann was too frail for everything else. She never discussed her health issues, but the disability that had made it necessary for Josef to drag her up the mountaintop was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, an incurable genetic illness that causes muscular atrophy. Her difficulties, characteristic of the disease, were manifest primarily in her feet; she had unusually high arches as well as hammer toes, and diminished muscle function.

  Many observers over the years would notice that Anni’s legs resembled stilts, and that she walked with difficulty. But no one at the Bauhaus—or, later, at Black Mountain—knew exactly why. There were rumors of various causes, but everything was hypothesis. I was with Anni in the 1980s when her oncologist (by then she had developed and been successfully treated for lymphoma) discussed her inherited neurological disorder with her. She seemed totally bemused, as if she had never even known the name. She acknowledged her lifelong need for custom-made shoes, her inability to dance “while Josef was a very good dancer.” She recalled that “people said I had had rickets, my legs were so thin, or that I had starved during the war, hardly the case.” By the 1980s, it was also evident in a pronounced weakness and trembling in her arms, but Anni’s response to these disabilities had been to utilize them in her art rather than to inquire about their cause or seek treatment (which would have been futile). She decided that instead of trying to draw straight lines, which she could no longer possibly do, she would let her tremor become a determining factor in the work. The inadvertent shaking caused a progression of small rises and dips in the shapes she was drawing, which were based on the typical Connecticut stone walls she saw out of her bedroom window, and the roughness of the contours was remarkably effective.

  It was Charcot-Marie-Tooth, though not identified as su
ch, that led her to weaving, as this allowed her to work seated. Although she had to operate the pedals on the looms, they did not require too much muscle. This was one of many occasions in which circumstances over which she had no control determined a major life decision for Anni, who, for all her insistence on mastering aspects of her own destiny, willingly accepted the things that were impossible to control.

  The illness probably explained why Anni and Josef did not have children. Not only were they afraid of passing the malady on. Someone may have told Anni, correctly, that pregnancy can exacerbate the illness’s symptoms; that was one risk she would not take. But Anni’s sister-in-law, her brother Hans’s wife, told me that “everyone in the family assumed that the reason Jupp and Anni did not have children was because they were too interested in other things to focus on them. We always said that if Anni had had a baby, she would have put it away in a dresser drawer and forgotten where it was.”6

  ANNI WOULD QUICKLY come to accept the idea of making textiles, although initially, regardless of the necessity, she begrudged it. “I was not at all enthusiastic about going into the weaving workshop, because I wanted to do a real man’s job and not something as sissy as working with threads.”7 She was willing, however, to be surprised. The medium she initially disdained immediately became the mainstay of her life, a source of fascination and, soon enough, of prodigious achievement.

  In both her wall hangings and the functional materials she soon began to make, Anni became a pioneer. In time, her work would change the look of upholsteries and draperies all over the world, she would invent a new form of abstract art, and she would write articulate essays that have had great impact on textile design. Once she accepted a verdict about which she had no choice, she then went as far as possible with it.

  ANNI ADMITTED THAT at that moment when she agreed to take up textile work “the freedom of painting was bewildering” to her. “There were worlds of styles and periods and cultures all open to you; I didn’t know where I was.” Her efforts with her private instructors and Brandenburg in her youth showed her that she liked the processes of making art, but she remained uncertain what direction to turn in. Necessity provided a solution. “I had to enter a workshop if I wanted to stay, and I wanted to stay. Weaving quickly became a kind of railing to me—the limitations that come with a craft, so long as you, at the same time, are concerned with breaking through it.”8

  Whether it was the possibilities as well as the frailties of thread, the reality of being Jewish in Nazi Germany, or the exigencies of a life where one could hardly afford string after having owned diamonds, this was how Anni lived: by responding to the givens and making the most of them. Once she was officially in the weaving workshop, she took filaments of jute, cotton, silk, gold leaf, and cellophane in previously unexplored directions and extracted a haunting beauty from them.

  At first she made only swatches. The largest piece was a pillowcase. But she quickly discovered that the selection of thread and its manipulation to produce materials that served their future functions and added aesthetic pleasure to life both thrilled her and afforded her an inner harmony.

  ANNI WAS SO EAGER to make the point that what is unexpected and undesirable can be beneficial that later in life she took to saying, “This Hitler business worked out rather well for us.”9 My wife eventually convinced her that the statement might offend others who had suffered more directly, but until then Anni saw it only as indicating a harmless willingness to accept the unavoidable. This was the spirit with which, in 1941, after she and everyone else in her family had been forced to sell all of their expensive jewelry or use it for bribes, Anni used paper clips, sink strainers, bobby pins, and other staples of stationery and hardware stores to make and exhibit necklaces of astonishing originality and panache.

  The only circumstances she ever seemed to find really difficult were when financial wealth and artistic status came her and Josef’s way. Anni never could spend money comfortably, and prosperity troubled her. She continued to buy day-old bread and pastries at a bakery thrift shop (she considered both “Pepperidge” and “Entenmann’s” modern marvels, examples of the Bauhaus ideal of mass production yielding uniformly impressive results), even after Lee Eastman told her, “Anni, you can eat caviar every day.” She always acted as if Josef had never really had the success he merited, as if his solo show at the Met and the television documentaries and high prices his works garnered were an aberration, since there was no possibility that genius might be recognized in its own time. Suffering and limitation spurred you on; confidence, ease, or, worse yet, self-congratulation guaranteed disaster.

  GIVEN HER NEVER-DISCUSSED and possibly undiagnosed medical disorder, Anni had no need to invent difficulties. But the main issue for both her and Josef was not so much what life presented them with as what they did with it. For Josef’s sisters and most of the people with whom he grew up, working-class life in Bottrop was perfectly fine, suitable for the rest of their lives. For Anni’s sister Lotte, only a year and a half younger, the plenitude of their childhood was a wonderful thing; the family was not merely rich, but they were immensely intelligent, and the idea of remaining in the milieu in which she had been raised was a happy one. Lotte married a Jewish judge, quite a bit older than herself, and although the realities imposed by the Third Reich brought the easy existence of both families to an abrupt halt (although without a single death), Lotte thought what they had was marvelous even as Anni despaired of it all.

  The only luxury of her childhood about which I ever heard Anni enthuse was a gold cigarette holder one of her Ullstein uncles had received as a Christmas present. She liked that object because it ultimately saved her uncle’s life when he used it to bribe a border guard.

  The Bauhaus offered her a chance to grapple with reality, to replace fluff with toughness. The need to live simply and fight for a position invigorated her. How often she would say to me, “At least once in life, it’s good to start at zero.” When she had to do so for a second time, after the Bauhaus was closed, she mainly looked forward, without lament.

  4

  In her new life in Weimar, Anni was not yet among those who wore all white. She told me that then, as always, she “purposely avoided an arty look,” and sewed her own dresses, which were mostly in a kimono style, with white collar and cuffs that may have been an unconscious reference to what she and Lotte wore to the Berlin opera as little girls. Tall and thin, with a large nose and fiercely intelligent face, she had thick long brown hair usually rolled up in a comb; she was, in vintage photographs, a striking beauty, but neither girlish nor pretty, as she claimed to wish she had been. Rather, even as others admired her appearance, which was that of an Egyptian deity, she was uncomfortable with it. Her greatest issue was that she felt that her coloring and nose revealed that she was Jewish, which, while she never tried to conceal it, made her self-conscious.

  Anni called her Jewishness “that stone around my neck” and referred to other Jews as having “that dark side.” It was never clear if she disliked being Jewish because she considered her Ashkenazi origins the source of her appearance, which she disliked aesthetically, or didn’t like her nose because, in a world where antisemitism was so pervasive, it identified her as Jewish, but what is certain is that her own facial type and Jewishness were intertwined in her thoughts. And while she considered her husband a handsome man and attractive to ladies, she thought of herself as an ugly duckling.

  Until she learned about it in the 1980s, Anni seemed unaware that a century earlier her mother’s family, the Ullsteins—owners of the largest newspaper and magazine publishing firm in the world—had had a mass family baptism, in which some eighty-five of them became Protestant on the same day. Of course she knew she had been confirmed at Berlin’s fashionable Karl Wilhelm Gedenkniskirche—she often referred to this—but, as she explained, she was “in the Hitler sense Jewish.” She blamed herself for what that fact imposed on Josef in the 1930s; the Ullsteins’ attempt to be thought of as Christian had been, lik
e everything she associated with her mother, ineffectual.

  It was only when I was researching this book that I learned that a census had been taken at the Bauhaus in 1923 to determine the percentage of Jews there, and hence to refute the charge of the Weimar citizenry that the school had too many “non-Germans.” This knowledge helped me understand the discomfort Anni had felt almost from the moment she had begun her new life. She had been more comfortable as an assimilated Berlin Jew, as she was in her childhood, than she was at the Bauhaus, where she was identified as Jewish.

  Anni often told me with pride that being officially Protestant, and having produced her confirmation certificate, enabled her to secure burial plots in the oldest section of the town cemetery in Orange, Connecticut. She and Josef preferred this precinct of the cemetery, with its simple gravestones, to the newer part where Catholics were obliged to go, and where the marble monuments were too ornate. Anni had loved it when at this late stage of their lives, her background gave Josef something he wanted.

  Yet her ambivalence about her background was clear. Anni’s most magnificent artwork ever would be a memorial to the six million victims of the Nazi concentration camps. With interwoven threads, she succeeded in evoking swarms of humanity—a vast population of vibrant, connected lives—so that the mélange of black and white and gray fibers becomes audible. Six Prayers, like a Torah cover and ark curtain Anni also wove, has elements that resemble written Hebrew (see color plate 29). It is a deeply moving work, charged with life yet somber, inspiring hours of contemplation and deep emotional awareness.