Anni once tried to talk with me about Anne Frank, whom she resembled physically, and who was also born on June 12, exactly thirty years after Anni. Suddenly she could not go on. Anne Frank’s fate was one of those subjects she was incapable of discussing—as unfathomable as the construction of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, only five miles from Weimar, where the gas chambers went into operation twelve years after the Bauhaus had moved on. When she told me of her parents’ ship needing to dock in Mexico because U.S. ports were no longer open to these incursions of refugees from Nazism, she also had to stop speaking. When Anni learned, in the 1970s, that Marcel Breuer had totally concealed his Judaism at the Bauhaus, and officially had himself made un-Jewish in a government office in Weimar, she was as appalled as she was fascinated. After Josef’s death, two Bottrop city officials came to Connecticut to propose building an Albers museum in his natal city. The smiling bureaucrats had been in the house for scarcely five minutes when she told them, “Sie wissen dass ich jud-ishe bin [You know that I am Jewish].” It was possibly the only time in her life that she uttered these words with such clarity, instead of waffling by saying, “My family was, although only in the Hitler sense of the word, Jewish.” The German officials told her that they already knew; she was too smart to be surprised.
She was rarely one to gloss over the truth, and she came from a world where being Jewish was significant. However much she disparaged the idea, and reminded me and others that she had never in her life actually been inside a synagogue, even though she had executed textile commissions for two of them, Anni always acknowledged that she belonged to a Jewish family on her mother’s side—even though they had converted and their money embarrassed her. She preferred her father’s less wealthy but more stylish and aristocratic family, although their name, which was of course also hers—Fleischmann—appalled her, as much because it was a badge of Jewishness as because it meant “meat man,” or butcher, but here, too, there was denial.
What she wanted in life, however, had nothing to do with any of that. She hoped, from the moment she got to the Bauhaus, to make art and design the central issues of her life and thus obliterate the issues of background. What mattered was devotion to art; her spiritual ancestors were the artisans of ancient Peru and the anonymous builders of Gothic cathedrals, and her current family of soulmates included other advocates of modernism and good design. For Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann, even before she was Anni Albers, these were the real aristocracy of mankind. But, to her dismay, this new life she had chosen made her more, not less, aware of her background. There was no getting around it: to Gropius and Kandinsky, if not to Klee, and to the government authorities who founded the Bauhaus, and, eventually, to the bureaucrats who closed it, the distinction between being “Jewish” and being “German,” whatever one’s religious beliefs, was a pivotal issue.
For all of its idealism and emphasis on design for all of humanity, the Bauhaus, both because of the accusations that the German nation was funding “foreigners” and because of attitudes ingrained in German society, did not allow those attitudes of background to fade.
WHEN ANNI WAS in her early nineties, almost entirely bedridden, and reduced to very limited conversation, I once walked into her room and the first thing she said to me was “You’re so lucky.”
“Yes, I am, Anni, in many ways,” I responded.
She continued, “They can’t tell.”
I pretended not to understand what she was saying, and asked, “They can’t tell what?”
She explained that I did not seem obviously Jewish—either by appearance or by name. “No one would know you have that dark side.” She knew I did not consider it anything to be ashamed of, but she had been lying in bed ruminating about her own Jewishness for hours, and what had come out were thoughts that had haunted her for a lifetime, and that her life in artistic milieus had intensified rather than diminished.
5
In spite of this ingrained awareness of race, part of what joined everyone at the Bauhaus, whether they were rich and Jewish like Anni, upper class and Aryan like Gropius, noble and Russian like Kandinsky, solidly burgherish and Swiss like Klee, or working class and Catholic like Josef, was both that they were not wed to their own backgrounds and that, in Anni’s words, “We were impatient with the standards of the bourgeoisie.”
They were joined in their will to replace outmoded values for everyone, rather than to retreat to alternative lives for themselves alone. They were not revolutionaries who wanted to topple the existing framework, but pioneers who sought to transform it. The Bauhauslers respected what was best in the existing German culture; they did not unilaterally disparage all its traditions. They wanted to forge connections, to see their ways accepted and integrated. “We were not violent, or rebellious in the present-day sense,” Anni explained to me.
Gropius’s original manifesto called for building “a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” The new unified spirit was to “rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
Anni and Josef, when I knew them, loved to go shopping at Sears, Roebuck; they marveled at their Polaroid Land Camera (an SX 70, the first to develop a picture in a minute); they extolled the products of Sony. These were examples of intelligent design flourishing within the system. The Alberses were thrilled that, in certain objects, a clear-headed aesthetic sensibility had assumed global dimensions. On the other hand, the notion of an artistic elite, apart from the world, was of no interest to them. Josef and Anni disparaged artists’ colonies and places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, and East Hampton, Long Island, where people were cliquish and conspicuously bohemian. They abhorred fads and uttered the words “trend,” “fashion,” and “career” with contempt. They preferred watching Chinese acrobats on television to going to mediocre craft shows or confronting paintings they deemed sloppy or incompetent. What mattered was quality and seriousness.
While they loathed self-conscious artiness, they were fascinated by cultures where they observed that visual pleasure and good design were embraced by the majority of the people. About Mexico—where they fell in love with folk art in marketplaces as well as with the treasures of pre-Columbian art, where serapes and earthenware all had intrinsic charm without pointing to the names of their makers—Anni declared that “art is everywhere.” This was the ideal.
This was also the case in Weimar in 1922. Once she was settled in, Anni “was deeply involved in the Bauhaus and thought there was no more interesting place on earth. … There were things I didn’t care for very much, but it was in my eyes the school at the time and the school for me.”10 Not that it was the well-organized teaching institution it appears to be in the many books that have since been published about it. The weavers were simply put in front of poorly set-up looms and left to their own devices. Anni told me about being instructed to weave a warp by combining inelastic linen with cotton, which is quite elastic. The task was impossible, an example of lack of understanding on the part of the instructor. But she was content to continue; she “expected other people to make mistakes, and took pleasure in being the one who occasionally had an answer.” And even while those mistakes were made, here was a world in which everyone lived for the idea of improving what we see and touch.
The weaving workshop at the Weimar Bauhaus. The equipment technically belonged to Helene Borner, who had taught art at the Weimar Academy.
ANNI WAS EAGER to have me realize that while the Bauhaus provided her with that exhilarating sense of possibility, the school was not a well-structured and orderly institution. People were human, which in her eyes meant mostly indifferent or selfish. Kandinsky and Klee were, of course, geniuses, as hardworking and dedicated as they were gifted, but they held themselves apart from students and younger faculty. Gropius was alluring and charismatic; although not on their level creatively, he was a capable administrator and diplomat. Mies was unquestionabl
y brilliant, but he was cold as well as too “fancy,” and she never forgave him the “rich Jewish girls” remark. Josef was, of course, a more complicated subject, but she worshipped him when she wasn’t enraged by him.
While most Bauhaus literature presents Helene Borner, the first director of the weaving workshop, as an expert, Anni described her as being better equipped to teach needlepoint than weaving, of which she lacked even basic knowledge. Beyond that, since Borner had been on the staff of Henry van de Welde’s Arts and Crafts School and therefore had provided the looms—a coup, since many of the other Bauhaus workshops lacked basic equipment—she acted as if she owned them personally, with a possessiveness that was infuriating. The impact of Georg Muche, the form master, was “zero.”
Even if this is the viewpoint of someone who needed to see herself as having triumphed against the odds, it rings true. This is in part because, however disparaging, Anni saw Borner’s and Muche’s inadequacies as inconsequential. She and those of her fellow students who became real friends thrived on the absence of methodical teaching. They were enchanted rather than frustrated by the sense of being on their own without much instruction. Anni told me:
The importance of the Bauhaus in the early years was not the teaching, was not that great men were there, was not that educational ideas were later formulated there, or anything like that. It was what I now call a “creative vacuum.” It was so unformalized, informulized, even contradictory in all its various areas, and we were so full of admiration for Klee and Kandinsky, who were experimenting on their own. You see: all of this went together; they too were finding their way. At that time they were not established as we now imagine, and they weren’t “in” internationally. They were very much on the fringes of everything—the way we all were.
It was as if one filled in the training later. At the beginning you knew nothing, and you really weren’t taught anything. We all just dabbled around until something happened.
Anni and two older students, Gunta Stolzl and Benita Otte, tried to fill their gaps in technical knowledge. Even then, it took a while to progress beyond swatches and the pillowcases that Anni remembered emerging by the dozen because their lack of tough technical requirements made them easy to do. The weavers were, after all, also there to enjoy life. Sitting on the bench of a big loom, having Josef come and position himself next to her to see what she was doing, just as the boyfriends of the other weavers did, made Anni feel more in the swing of life than she ever had before. Sometimes in the morning when they arrived at their workshop, she and the others would find flowers their young suitors had left on the looms; those moments gave her unprecedented joy, as important as the advances in design that get cited as the achievement of the Bauhaus.
On Annelise Fleischmann’s twenty-third birthday, which occurred shortly after she arrived at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers surprised her with this fine reproduction of a statue in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.
FOLLOWING THAT FIRST CHRISTMAS, when Josef gave Anni the Giotto print, the romance took off. After going home for her twenty-third birthday the following June, she opened the door to a surprising delivery: a twelve-inch-high bronze replica of a thin, graceful Egyptian figurine from Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. Only two copies of the figure existed, and the near-penniless Josef had secured this one for her. Again he had found the perfect gift to symbolize their shared love for art. The statuette epitomized equipoise and delicacy.
That gift would be at her bedside, standing on a shelf so as to be aligned with her pillows, for the rest of Anni’s life: in her bedroom at the Dessau Bauhaus, at Black Mountain College, and in the austere, hospital-like bedroom in Connecticut where she lived a further eighteen years after Josef’s death.
THOUGH SHE HAD BECOME involved with one of the most desirable and well-known men at the Bauhaus, Anni considered herself an outsider. She told me she felt most of the other people would not even remember her having been there. She and another student shared two rooms where they lived quietly, mostly separate from the other Bauhauslers, and completely apart from the very conspicuous Mazdaists. And she felt that her work was not noticed any more than she was. Today books on the Bauhaus devote pages to her textiles; when she made them, she had no sense that they were being seen.
Yet Anni Albers’s materials have an élan that make them unique amid all the Bauhaus textile work. They combine a soothing harmoniousness with a high charge of energy, restraint with enthusiasm. From the moment she completed her first woven wall hanging the year after she arrived, she revealed a rare ability to align dignity and verve (see color plate 24). The Bauhaus catalyzed in her, as if overnight, a pioneering and seductive vision. This first piece, a stunning essay in minimalism, shows how, from the very start, Anni was attracted by straight lines, by proportions and measures, and had the instinct to organize a surface into only a few sectors to create a work that was bold and quiet at the same time. Anni had been inspired by her passion for vitality within the rigorous rules of a well-ordered world, and by her craving for what exists only in art. Fully utilizing the possibilities of weaving, and suppressing personal concerns, she succeeded in juxtaposing serenity and order against the capriciousness of life.
Anni told me, half a century after making this piece, “Art is the one thing that keeps you in balance. You have the feeling that you are taking a part in something not parallel to creation, but something that adds in a way to a whole, that shows a wholeness that you can’t find in nature because you can’t understand nature as a whole.” In her art, she was instinctively reaching for an accessible, microcosmic totality. Concentrating on technical and aesthetic problems, letting shapes and materials do all they could, attempting to think only visually and practically, she found her way to equilibrium and a sense of completeness.
Anni never expected this student effort to resurface. Then, in 1960, twenty-seven years after she and Josef had fled Nazi Germany, she was surprised to see the piece in Munich, in the home of Ludwig Grote, the former director of the Dessau and Nuremberg museums. Unbeknownst to the artist, Grote had bought it from the Bauhaus during his Dessau years. The school owned it; the issue of whether objects made at the Bauhaus belonged to their creators, and then to their creators’ heirs, or to the institution remains unresolved to this day, as does the question of who is entitled to royalties for the designs of objects that have been mass-produced.
Looking at the wall hanging after all this time, Anni noted that in 1923 she had not yet developed her belief that asymmetry and a constant shifting of weight were necessary for movement and dynamism. But the careful placement of form showed that the seeds of the discipline and clearheadedness that have governed her entire life were already planted.
“I was really just one beginner in a group of others who were more advanced,” Anni told me. Yet even if she had not yet fully explored issues of composition, and her work was in her own eyes initially somewhat imitative or derivative, she unconsciously achieved qualities in her earliest work that distinguished it from that of anyone else at the Bauhaus. This first wall hanging is remarkable for its simplicity. It has less apparent complexity, more of a quiet, almost stoic quality, than the pieces of the better-known weavers at Weimar: Hedwig Jungnik, Ida Kerkovius, Benita Otte, and Gunta Stolzl. They shared Anni’s delight in geometric forms, but none were as committed to a strict and rigorous order. Their work shows distinct patterns and rhythms, but not the same resolution and integrity of parts.
Anni’s achievement is no accident; she divided the surface into a very few areas, minimizing form with a reductionism that for many artists is the culmination of a lengthy development, not the starting point. But as a twenty-three-year-old student struggling at the Bauhaus, dealing with a world of unknowns, having left a childhood that to others might have seemed idyllic but to her promised an unexciting future, in a Germany full of turmoil, Anni was enchanted by leanness and refinement. In this first work, she created a rich resting place, a clarity, an unanxious order—all achieved through balance, a paring
down, and a precise modulation of tones.
THE FEW ABSTRACT COMPOSITIONS of this sort that Anni wove in Weimar were closer to her heart than the industrial materials with which Gropius was more concerned. His overriding interest was in the social implications of aesthetics and the power of the Bauhaus to awaken industry to good design; Anni, like Klee and Kandinsky, wanted first and foremost to make art.
Her wall hangings of the next couple of years were brave and beautiful forays into the realm of total abstraction that revealed more sophisticated ambitions than her first piece (titled simply Wallhanging 1). She still wanted art to be the attainable whole that nature never is, but she now tried to create an image of totality and clarity in a more subtle way, without exact symmetry. Anni and her fellow students were all exploring the rhythm of asymmetry; Wallhanging 2 gives the viewer more surprises, less of an instantly readable formula, than the first hanging. With its title deliberately lacking in connotations, this second large piece has an intentional irregularity as well as balance. The dark and light bands at top and bottom are symmetrical against the horizontal middle. The white band at center is divided by a continuous black line and by two black lines that come from opposite directions and then halt at center, symmetrical along the vertical middle. The remaining sections of the hanging are unified because in both of them the top two bands are divided into the same sections of light and dark. But the other six bands are entirely different, related only by the artist’s eye and not by any system of measuring. While the watercolors of Paul Klee, which Anni was studying closely at the time, work according to systems like those in classical music—two rectangles yielding to four, four to eight—Anni eschewed such a clear pattern. Wallhanging 2 gives the viewer a complex visual exercise.
The Bauhaus Group Page 50