Looking at it, we share with the artist the satisfaction of inventing order and then of letting go. We participate in the joyful manipulation of form and the careful relating of spatial areas, while never following a predictable path.
The texture of the piece is as cool and clear as the thinking behind it. Anni told me she had become intrigued by glazed Persian pottery in a Berlin museum, and developed the mixture of wool and silk to achieve the same subtly shimmering luster as those ancient ceramics. She used the identical material that appears at the top and bottom of the wall hanging to make two skirts, one short and one long, which could be worn with a single top that she also created. The crossover between art and everyday objects delighted her.
Some of the compositional elements of Wallhanging 2 could apply to paintings, but other effects were possible only in weaving. The narrow black stripes appear to have been freshly peeled off to reveal a white layer behind them. This move, which seems to have happened only moments ago, excites the tactile sense. It reminds us that the stuff of the world is at times to do with what we will. Having had no wish to enter the domain of textiles, Anni now used it to evoke action and competence.
6
Anni made necklaces out of little beads and sold them in Weimar in order to earn some money beyond her modest allowance. She used her earnings to take Josef to a good tailor to have a conventional suit made. His typical outfit was a khaki corduroy jacket, with a hint of white scarf showing beneath it. She adored it, but observed that, in combination with his bangs, it made him look so bohemian that the waiters in Weimar restaurants invariably served him more slowly than other customers. The new suit was essential if she was to present the young man from Bottrop to her parents in such a way that they would not be put off. It was a success. This was the occasion they both loved recalling, when Anni’s mother told Josef that the house would always be open to him.
LUXURIOUS AS THE ALBERSES’ wedding lunch at the Adlon was, the only people there besides the bride and groom were Anni’s parents and siblings and her sister’s husband. Anni explained to me that big celebrations were for “people who do things like that”—not individuals like her and Josef, who had other priorities.
She had enjoyed her involvement in Klee’s fiftieth birthday celebration, and often referred to the large parties at the Bauhaus, but she and Josef never wanted to expend energy on events; any distraction from work was a waste. After they moved to America, they never attended celebrations given by family or friends, much to the annoyance of some of their relatives and acquaintances. They streamlined their existences to conserve their time and strength for making and writing about art, and getting their message and their creations out into the world.
The Alberses were extreme in their lack of sociability, but the Klees and the Kandinskys were certainly similar in the priority they accorded to work, such that any socializing they did was with colleagues whose goals were the same as theirs, or with museum curators or publishers or gallery owners; they had few friends with ordinary jobs, and they had no interest in “bourgeois” social life.
In the years I knew the Alberses, they never once left home in the evening; nothing justified the unnecessary disruption to their schedules. Nonetheless, in spring of 1975, when I became aware that their fiftieth wedding anniversary was approaching, I suggested to Anni that some of their relatives and work associates would like to celebrate. Perhaps she would let me organize a lunch?
“Out of the question,” she said. She and Josef had not even acknowledged the upcoming date to each other. They did, however, agree—without saying why—that on the ninth of May they would drive to Litchfield, Connecticut, a colonial town where the grand wooden houses and churches are painted an identical regulation white. The drive was mostly on a numbered route and was therefore unconfusing. It took almost exactly an hour; Anni told me this last fact as if the roundness of the number were part of the suitability of the destination. And, very important, there was a good restaurant for lunch.
The following day, I asked how the outing had gone. Anni smiled and said that it had been exceedingly nice: “We didn’t shout at each other once all day.” This was the only way she and Josef acknowledged that it was their golden wedding anniversary. Anni knew, however, that Josef was aware of the significance of the date, because she had snuck a look at his desk calendar and seen that he had circled it.
WHEN THE NEWLY MARRIED Alberses moved to Dessau in 1925, they took, as their first home together, “a small, two-room apartment, neither sensible nor attractive.” The crack under a door to the adjoining apartment was so gaping that Anni had to stuffit with a mixture of mothballs and crumpled newspaper. Then the main Bauhaus building was completed, at which point they moved into the only accommodations available: studios with sleeping alcoves, each for single occupancy, on separate floors. There was only one community bathroom on each hallway. Yet, even as she described this to me some fifty years later, Anni emphasized that to the townspeople of Dessau, who were suffering from a housing shortage, that dormitory was an enviable luxury. She did not mention the splendor she might have had in Berlin, if she had wanted—only how comfortable the dormitory rooms were compared to the way the local population lived.
Josef and Anni Albers on the grounds of the future masters’ houses in Dessau, ca. 1925. The Alberses were the only couple at the Bauhaus who were both esteemed artists. From totally different backgrounds, they were strikingly similar in some ways.
The Alberses went to Florence together for a sort of wedding trip in the summer of 1925. They would never have used the term “late honeymoon,” with its suggestion of the way more ordinary people celebrated their weddings, but that was the idea behind the journey to Italy. What Josef did in glass and Anni did in textiles after returning showed, in her opinion, the impact of the geometric façades of San Marco and Santa Croce and the stripes on the Duomo. When I mentioned this to Josef, thinking it would evoke fond recollections of the trip and of those early Renaissance buildings, he pooh-poohed the idea; as always, the concept of direct influence was unacceptable to him. Afterward, Anni confided to me that she was certain: they had both been so moved by the boldly patterned buildings that they worked accordingly back in Dessau, which is why their art from about 1925 to 1928 is so remarkably similar in appearance.
The extant gouaches, as well as a rug and a tapestry lost in the war, all done in 1925, show the subtle effects of the trip to Florence. Anni was quick to admit to me that she was also influenced by the work of another student in the weaving workshop. If Josef refused, always, to acknowledge anyone else’s influence on him, she made no bones about what she considered to be the wonderful exchange of ideas, the mutual give-and-take, that was essential to the Bauhaus community.
Still uncertain of her own direction, she followed her colleague in using a reverse mirror image. A tapestry in red, yellow, black, and gray silk follows this pattern: areas above and below the three central horizontal stripes are the same, only turned 180 degrees from one another. The result in each case is a satisfyingly crisp geometric composition, with distinct positive-negative relationships.
They were, however, Anni’s last forays into panaceas for solving design problems. Again she ventured beyond symmetry, this time never to return. While her red and black rug of the same year has an overall equilibrium, it is a constantly dynamic whole in which no sequence is repeated, or even restated—thanks to an almost centrifugal force around the bold bars of red and black in the center (see color plate 17). Each visual phrase is allotted the precise amount of space Anni determined with a sense of scale she felt could never be explained. Anni pointed out to me that the rug gets narrower toward the top, an imperfection that shows her unfamiliarity with the ancient Smyrna knotting technique. Nonetheless, it has her trademark precision and boldness along with a new element of high-speed movement.
7
Anni said that there was one book she read in those years that made everything come together for her. It was Wilhelm Worrin
ger’s 1908 Abstraction and Empathy, the same small volume that was so vital to Klee and Kandinsky. Worringer made the drive toward abstraction and away from naturalism easy to grasp. He explained the motives behind the art Anni and the others were so desperate to create in a way that made complete sense to them.
Worringer wrote that “the reason for making art—whether abstract or figurative—was the maximum bestowal of happiness for the humanity that created it.” More specifically, “the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic.”11 Anni’s attraction to that “life-denying inorganic” was perfectly explained by Worringer’s statement that “the simple line and its development in purely geometric regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena.”12
As Anni clearly acknowledged when she was in her seventies, from the time she was a young woman, life itself was fraught for her. She felt that only through art could she find the necessary ballast to survive the vagaries of human existence. Forms of one’s own imagining could, she was convinced, provide respite from illness, inflation, war, social discomfort, and the other realities beyond our control. The more that art enabled one to replace Worringer’s “entanglement of phenomena” with something positive, the happier she was. This meant not only seeking the certainty offered by straight lines and right angles, but avoiding “space which, filled with atmospheric air … gives things their temporal value” and thus exacerbates the troublesome fleetingness of so much in life.13
Anni’s wall hangings made no effort to reflect or solve the problems of the world; rather, they provided refreshment and strength to deal with the world’s woes by offering both their maker and their viewers security, grace, and ease. They were the result of what Worringer calls “the urge—in the face of the bewildering and disquieting mutations of the phenomena of the outer world—to create resting-points, opportunities for repose.”14 Not only her textile work but her later graphics serve that purpose.
BUT EVEN AS she subscribed totally to Worringer’s views, Anni, while guided primarily by her own imagination, was not averse to nature as a source of systematization and clarity. To serve its purpose as a stronghold of emotional uplift, geometric compositions, after all, needed to be possessed of rich systems. Anni deplored the sterile, vacuous abstractions she labeled “decorators’ dreams.” Even as she found the natural world impenetrable and mysterious, and its representation antithetical to her artistic goals, she had profound respect for the beauty and vitality of nature’s structures.
She came to understand botanical organization through Goethe’s Metamorphosis of the Plants. For her, from the time she was a child, Goethe “had a halo around him;” he was more to her taste than his Weimar counterpart, Schiller, whom she found “cold.” But until she was at the Bauhaus, she knew only Goethe’s literary work. Now she was riveted by his analysis of the single unit that, in various stages of transformation, is at the heart of plant life: “Everything is leaf. … None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness; therefore a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed.”15 Goethe analyzed the way that the outer details of flowers always relate in form and structure to the beginning of the plant. He pointed out that in a plant with a triangular striation in the stem, variations of the number three recur in all that follows. Root structure determines the number of petals and of leaves.
Aware that a weaver is a builder, Anni identified textiles with plants. The first few rows, like plant roots, determine what comes afterward; the act of creation is a linear progression. The many parts are irrevocably interdependent—pull a few threads and the structure falls apart—so it is essential to maintain a system. Adhering to the aspect of nature that was dependable, she constructed textiles with a consistent integrity.
Threads are to Anni’s yard materials what cells are to life. The individual units are combined in harmonious configurations. In the bulk of what Anni wove for upholstery and drapery fabrics, thread is not only the essential structural component, but it is the main visual element; whereas for centuries textiles had disguised their materials, using them to re-create pictorial imagery, in Anni’s fabrics, the structure and the materials are the subject. She intended for the viewer to delight in the way in which strands of cotton or jute or hemp are as mutually dependent as parts of plants or organs of the human body. Nothing could be removed without detriment to the whole.
Had she covered the structure with a design, rather than used the structure as the design, this would have been obfuscated rather than celebrated.
WHAT WAS AS VITAL as the structure was the touch with which it was achieved, and the feeling for texture. Anni looped cellophane around wool as if she were making music. When she pulled one color mostly to the back of material, so that it remains a vibrant but subtle accent on the front, she was like a magician performing a sleight of hand. In this way she elevated textiles and the status of woven threads, putting the medium on equal footing with oil on canvas and watercolor on paper. Buckminster Fuller, himself an innovative devotee of design for the larger population, would later say, “Anni Albers, more than any other weaver, has succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structure of fabrics. She has brought the artist’s intuitive sculpturing faculties and the age-long weaver’s arts into a successful marriage.”16
8
From the time she had started to look at paintings, the recent German art Anni liked the most had been by the Blue Rider group. But while she admired Macke, Marc, and Jawlensky (she showed no interest when I asked about Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin, dismissing them, it seemed, because they were women), she had always considered Klee and Kandinsky “the two great ones of the group.” Their presence at the Bauhaus thrilled her. “When Klee proposed taking a line for a walk, I took thread everywhere it could go.”
One of the reasons for Klee’s great impact was the way he built totalities out of components. Anni felt that she was uniquely receptive to this approach because of its applicability to weaving. She also admired the way he made use of the fundamental tools of the drawing and painting processes. Rather than disguise the brushstrokes in his attempts to conjure the surfaces of houses or boats or faces, he had the imprint the brush made on paper or canvas serve as a compositional element. In drawings, he used the scribbling of the pencil, or the little points he created with the point of his pen, to build entire organisms. Anni was attracted to the ways that Klee celebrated rather than disguised the physicality of art and technique.
“The technical makes you focus on what you are trying to do and forget introspection,” Anni maintained. She enjoyed what she called “the stimulation of limitations” and applied Robert Frost’s views on free verse to her deliberate subjugation to the dictates of the loom and thread. She quoted Frost saying that to work without preestablished laws is like playing tennis with the net down. Similarly, she followed Klee’s self-imposed restriction to uniform components, declaring that “the work of any artist, if it’s in music or writing or painting or whatever, is that of reduction of elements.”
THERE WAS, HOWEVER, no pretending that Klee was accessible personally. At the Weimar Bauhaus, when Anni had initially tried to get into one of his classes, she was refused—with the advice that she develop her own work further. Anni recalled what happened when Klee became form master of the weaving workshop:
Klee was our god, and my specific god, but he was remote as a god usually is. Although it sounds like blasphemy, I didn’t think he was actually a teacher who could help those who were in their early stages trying to find their way. I remember his standing in front of a blackboard with us eight or ten students sitting behind him, and I can’t remember that he turned around once to make contact with us students. He had this strange remoteness; besides, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. It was a disappointment, because I admired his work tremendously—and still think of him as the great genius.
Anni took a fiendis
h delight in saying this to me while Josef was in the house with us but safely out of earshot in his studio. He would have become enraged with jealousy had he heard her put anyone else above him in the ranking of great artists.
Paul Klee, Zwei Kräfte [Two Forces], 1922–23. Annelise Fleischmann marveled at the spontaneous exhibitions of Klee’s watercolors, when the artist tacked them on the corridor walls of the Weimar Bauhaus. One of the rare students who could afford to buy One, she opted for a particularly mysterious image—although there was much about the transaction that left her unsatisfied.
Ise Bienert persuaded Klee to exhibit his watercolors on the corridor walls of the school. These occasional shows were “the great events of my time at the Bauhaus,” recalled Anni. But, as was almost always the case, even with Klee her memories were of things working out less than perfectly. She asked him if she could buy a watercolor with “valuta”—money in a stable currency, a gift to her from an uncle. Klee was delighted, and showed her a portfolio of twenty recent works. “I’m still puzzled by this: that I hardly liked any of them,” she said to me wistfully. “I thought he was not offering me his top works, they were all not quite in balance, but I chose one because I thought, ‘If I don’t do it today, tomorrow will be too late.’” Years later, when she and Josef were struggling financially in America, she would sell the water-color through Josef’s dealer Sidney Janis; if it had never been her favorite work, at least it helped financially.
Even if she later disparaged the watercolor one can see why Armi picked it. It is one of those Klees with a background that is undisguisedly paint applied to paper, with seemingly random brushwork almost like a child’s finger painting, the paint so thin and watery that every grain of the textured paper is visible. On top of that surface that, by unabashedly presenting the processes and materials of art, resembles a sea of microscopic dots, there are forms that are more mysterious the longer we look at them. One is made of two bands joined at a right angle, like half of a mitered picture frame constructed out of wide strips of wood. That inanimate object stands on another band, which rests on a cloudlike blob. At the mitered corner, there is a large arrow pointing down; three quarters of the way up, there is a small dark rectangle.
The Bauhaus Group Page 51