The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The other image on Anni’s Klee is a form that resembles both a stone tablet standing at an angle and a ghost with a sheet over its head. Near the cap of this form with a domelike top, another large arrow, longer than the first one but not as dark, points off to the right. The only additional element is a cut triangle, like a ship’s stern cut off by the right-hand side of the painting.

  Everything suggests something, yet nothing is clear. There is a distinct narrative in these bold arrows, a sense of movement in many directions, but the reason for the hurry, or the purpose of the helter-skelter dashing, or their differences in proportion and tonality, are unknowable. What is without question, though, is that while life is enigmatic, the processes of making art have an irresistible fascination, and creativity enables one to celebrate, rather than shun, indecipherability.

  THE COMPONENT OF DISAPPOINTMENT—or, alternatively, of disapproval—was inevitable in all of Anni’s memories. When Klee was form master of the weaving workshop and the students hung their wall hangings for him, “he came in and judged all the various pieces, mostly smaller than my big hangings there, and he passed my pieces every time. My heart sank lower and lower. I thought, ‘What on earth have I done?’” The complete lack of reaction from her hero was so devastating that, when she told me about it half a century later, she readily relived her misery.

  Socially, the Alberses’ age group was rarely included with the more established generation; they felt they “did not count.” The one time Anni and Josef were invited to Klee’s home, when they were all neighbors at the masters’ houses in Dessau, Klee played a record of Haydn for them. When Anni passed Klee on the street, she always was so afraid of interrupting his reverie that she did not even try to say hello; nor did he.

  But that sense of his remoteness is what had inspired her fellow weavers to conceive of the miraculous delivery of his presents for his fiftieth birthday, the event that proved, somehow, that in spite of all the vulnerability, all the challenges, the Bauhaus was a place unlike anywhere else. For there were no boundaries on human imagination.

  9

  When the sparkling and luxurious Bauhaus building opened in Dessau, the weaving workshop acquired new equipment. Naming the machines to me, Anni sounded like the ultimate gourmet reeling off a litany of beloved delicacies: “a kontermarsch, a shaft machine, a jacquard loom, a carpet-knotting frame, and dyeing facilities.” The machinery and the opportunity for more color variations inspired her to new work.

  The first of these was a vibrant jacquard weaving. The composing units are straight bands, occasionally cut short into small blocks, elsewhere doubled when they are placed next to each other in twin lengths. Often Anni crossed stripes with other stripes to make a grid; sometimes she took most of a stripe to the back of the textile and allowed only tiny segments of it to appear; at other moments she matched it to itself, at right angles, to create a pure, unadulterated solid rectangle. Following Klee’s playful suggestion to take a line for a walk, the inadvertent weaver put her compositional unit through a series of jumps and rest positions. While maintaining a visual integrity because of the use of a single core element—a circle or a diagonal would have been alien in this neatly unified world—she established the impression of ongoing motion.

  The series of studies Anni made in advance reveal her appetite for resolution and balance. Knowing she would have to compose linearly once she was on the loom, she used graphics to work out, on a grid, the precise arrangement and proportions. In the drawings and gouaches, she moved toward simplicity. The jacquard loom, with its system of cards, is what pushed her toward this pattern that makes the wall hanging look like a close-up detail of a larger piece, and thus brings us in with a consuming engagement.

  That the capacity of the mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard more than a hundred years earlier, had facilitated this was something Anni celebrated. Jacquard looms depend on hooks that have two positions so that they raise or lower the harness, which carries and guides the warp thread so that the weft will lie either above or below it. The arrangement of raised and lowered threads is the source of the pattern.

  That rich result required enormous patience and concentrated work. The threading of the Jacquard loom took a long time, as did the tying in of further warps to the existing one with a knotting robot that ties each new thread on individually. The process demanded day after day of repetitive work. But the woman who had loved watching the transformation of her parents’ apartment and preferred the sounds of the orchestra tuning up to the final performance responded not just sensibly, but viscerally, to the dictates of the machinery. She gleaned satisfaction from the logic, the straightforward course of cause and effect, of the process.

  THAT REVERENCE FOR MACHINERY, and the desire to be inspired by it, so vital to Bauhaus thought, became understandable to me in 1972, when Anni expressed an interest in making some prints at my family’s printing company. Since it was a commercial shop, this was an unusual move on her part.

  It had not occurred to me that Fox Press would offer anything to either of the artistic Alberses. The business, some forty-five minutes from their house, mostly churned out booklets and brochures for insurance and manufacturing companies; it was known for high-quality color-process printing, not for the sort of work that bears an artist’s signature on each sheet in the tradition of limited-edition lithographs, etchings, and screen prints.

  But Anni made her proposal with the same eagerness and openness with which she entered the vast domain of her local Sears, Roebuck (ten minutes from her house) and embarked on a course of what, with her lilting Berlin cadences, she enthusiastically called “tahreasure hunting.” At Sears she would extol the merits of plastic containers and polyester blouses, declaring that “all this emphasis on handmade” was nonsense, that machine processes were a wonderful thing and that synthetics were among the great achievements of the twentieth century. Now, with the unusual idea of grappling with the technology of photo-offset printing to produce artwork, she became a little girl eager to embark on a sublime adventure. The eyes of the sometimes dour septuagenarian lit up with expectation. She was entering her favorite realm: the unknown.

  Discussing this process, this austere woman, dressed in her inevitable whites and pale beiges, her graying hair sensibly cut, her only makeup a hint of lipstick and maybe some powder, sparkled like an eight-year-old in a party dress.

  Printing had been the starting point of my relationship with Josef Albers, and Anni’s wish to do something at Fox Press was possibly also a way of entering his and my special territory and taking a more vital position. She was happy that Josef and I had this interest in common and talked about it animatedly, but by proposing that she take the step of making prints with me, she had in effect walked onto the playing field while he remained in the stands.

  WANTING TO DISPOSE of certain objects that were burdening him as he approached the end of his life, Josef had given me books of typefaces. Since I shared his passion for typography and graphic design, he taught me that the initial reason serifs had appeared on letters was because, when they were carved into gravestones, the stone cutter invariably left little lines at the end of each chisel stroke. He was delighted by the way those additions had the unanticipated effect of enabling the eye to move along through the words while one was reading.

  The way serifs came into existence, and their subsequent value, was for Josef a splendid example of how proper attention to a mechanical art could have an unintended by-product that significantly improved human existence. The issue of readability was vital. Albers deplored the use of sans serif type for long texts, for it impeded the act of reading and was therefore purposelessly arty. Helvetica Light was fine if used sparingly, but setting anything substantial in it was “too much design”—the last word being uttered disparagingly.

  This was the sort of issue about which he liked to speak to me, and I was a respectful audience. But Anni put me in a very different role when she broached the prospect of her wo
rking in photo-offset and turned me into her collaborator and aide-de-camp.

  BAUHAUS NORTH WAS unlike anywhere else in its richness as in its austerity. Josef’s studio in the basement was a hotbed of artistic production. This was where he painted the Homages. He had more than a thousand tubes of paint, and he applied the color directly, with a painter’s knife, to white Masonite panels that lay on two plywood worktables with sawhorse bases; it was over these identical surfaces that he had his varying installations of fluorescent bulbs. This arrangement, and the venetian blinds that made it possible to control any daylight that might seep in through the small windows, made the studio a perfect laboratory for the pursuit of color effects.

  I was always fascinated to be with Josef in his studio and to hear him explain the alchemy of his painting—with the mysterious interaction that appears to occur whereby flat, unmodulated colors illusorily penetrate one another. He emanated a force that dominated the small house, but Anni, in her own quieter way, was even more captivating. With Josef, everything was out there, shining brilliantly; with Anni, one sensed that there were layers behind the layers, and a vast unopened treasure chest of observations and images. I treasured every morsel of her life story as well as her rigorous aesthetic belief system, and spent as much time with her as with him. Anni and I would sit side by side at the folding aluminum table in her workroom on the main floor, where she kept her few remaining textiles and, now that she no longer had a loom, worked on drawings and prints. Although I did not even know the difference between warp and weft, I was enchanted by the meandering threads in her framed weavings, feeling that they took abstract art in an unprecedented direction.

  About six months after I met the Alberses, I earned some money by brokering the sale of an artwork; I used the commission to buy one of Anni’s weavings. It was when I was looking at it and telling her why I enjoyed endlessly following the threads in the foreground, and why they resembled the solo violin in a Mozart concerto, with the background comparable to the full orchestra providing an infinity of experiences in counterpoint to the single instrument, that she first allowed, in her measured and soft voice, “Kandinsky said, ‘There is always an and.’” Anni rarely invoked the names of any of the people at the Bauhaus, so it was a great treat when she did. It was the beginning of my understanding of how the real geniuses in Weimar and Dessau profited from one another’s presence.

  Anni was fascinated by my love for her weaving as a pure artwork rather than a craft object—so much so that she suggested I write a book about her and her work. A small publisher gave me a modest advance, and I began to visit regularly in order to interview her. Those conversations were further impetus to her wanting to make the prints in my family’s shop: she hoped to demonstrate the essence of the Bauhaus mentality, which we had come to discuss on a regular basis when considering her formation as a weaver.

  EVERY VISIT to the Alberses’ house—the address, 808 Birchwood Drive, delighted them both because of the way the numbers 8 and 0 are formed without endings, thus seeming eternal, and because “Birchwood” conjured their favorite white-barked trees—was an inestimably rich experience. Inside that house that greeted one like a loping, awkward carbuncle, there was more genius and courage palpable than within any place I had ever been before. What was most exciting was the vision and work of the Alberses themselves, but their extraordinary friends from the distant past added greatly to the luster. The conversations, and the life I witnessed and in which I began to play a minor role, made a mythic world—in which Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were the other central figures—come into focus. I could always anticipate a rich nugget when either Josef or Anni began a sentence with the words “At the Bauhaus …”

  The Alberses’ nearly empty living room and an adjacent space that was intended as a dining area but was used to put up the occasional overnight guest, had only a few pieces of lean furniture of the sort one might have expected in a 1950s bank lobby. There was a complete absence of personal objects; the walls were blank except for four paintings by Josef. It was like a minimalist stage set, but the two Bauhauslers gave the scene Shakespearean magnitude.

  This couple in their white and khaki clothing spoke with unparalleled clarity and intensity about the making of art. They emphasized the need for morality and modesty in painters, designers, and architects, as in everyone else who hoped to advance humanity. They both marveled at simple things—the form of an egg, the cleverness of egg cartons—just as they deplored pretense and corruption, of which they considered the New York art world a prime exemplar. These were just some of the ways in which they kept the true spirit of the Bauhaus alive.

  Maximilian Schell delighted Anni by his saying that the house was “nicht gemütlich” (not cozy). She liked repeating those words with a wry smile. Schell was right. Anni was considered the foremost textile designer of the century, but in her own living room the simple 1950s sofas were covered in white Naugahyde rather than one of her own marvelous upholstery materials. There were the same thin-slat venetian blinds on the one large window in that room as in Josef’s studio, and ordinary white rolling shades in the other rooms, ironic given that Anni’s own drapery fabrics had been sold for years by Knoll International and other high-end purveyors. The living room rug was industrial, probably a leftover scrap that was marked down on the Post Road, the commercial strip nearby where the Alberses bought most of what was in the house. The cabinets in the bedrooms were metal office furniture meant for storing papers.

  Yet not only was this monastic dwelling a hotbed of creation, with Josef working away on paintings and architectural commissions and print series, and Anni taking her geometric drawings into new realms and working on ideas for prints; it was also a place for exalted conversation. Most afternoons when I was there, at about four o’clock, Anni and Josef and I would have coffee and pastry in the kitchen. Josef’s passion was for strudel from a particular baker in New York, Mrs. Herbst, which was occasionally brought by one visitor or another. Sitting on plastic-covered metal side chairs at the white Formica-topped table with wooden legs that screwed into it, surrounded by the whiteness of the kitchen appliances and the walls that were completely blank except for a large, plain clock and an ugly, dome-shaped, gold-colored thermostat, we would talk away. Once the Alberses had decided to take me to some degree into their world, they seemed to enjoy having an audience for stories of their youth and the Bauhaus, and I was thrilled to listen.

  In the house itself, in the Alberses’ unequivocal dedication to their work on multiple fronts, in the central role of the visual, I felt that I was beginning to understand what the Bauhaus was really about in a way that none of its published histories conveyed. And hearing Josef and Anni reminisce about conversations with the Klees and the Kandinskys when they were all neighbors at the masters’ houses, learning about what bothered them as well as what gave them pleasure in the world where they had met and started new lives, but which they felt was oversimplified by its historians, I realized that the Bauhaus was both unique and like all other institutions for learning. At the same time that its dominant figures were some of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century, they were also just people. They feuded; they had love affairs; they divided into factions. But a small handful of them were creative geniuses of the highest caliber, and that made everything very different.

  For a weaver to decide to make subtle and sophisticated art using a commercial printing method was a perfect example, although I did not yet see it as such, of that originality and imagination, as well as brilliance, that went hand in hand with the modest way of living.

  EXPLORING THE IDEA of her doing a piece at Fox Press, I told Anni a bit about the technology of photo-offset. I gave a simple description of the process, trying to follow Anni’s patient and generous lead when, a few months earlier, she had led me to understand weaving by taking a Lord & Taylor box top and stretching lines of string from one end to the other and then inserting Popsicle sticks
at right angles to the string, with the sticks placed alternately above and below the taut fiber, in order to create a barebones loom that demonstrated warp and weft. She had told me then that she was delighted that someone so interested in her work knew nothing about textile technique, as she quite loathed “all that craft stuff” and wanted her work to be thought of as art first. I did not yet recognize the perverse aspects of her personality, but her wish to swim against the tide intrigued me, and since I thought that Anni’s “pictorial weavings” had all the qualities of pure and great abstract art—that they belonged next to the paintings of her Bauhaus confreres Klee and Kandinsky, as well as Mondrian—and since I, too, had the arrogance to link most weaving with macramé and needlepoint and the like, I was amused and willing to go along.

  When we began to discuss working with photo-offset, Anni proved to be a quick study. She decided that she would utilize the medium to make a print of two horizontal rectangular forms stacked one on top of the other. (See color plate 28.) Each of the rectangles would contain a triangulated pattern, in keeping with her recent geometric experiments, a design full of diversion and ins and outs but deliberately lacking in internal symmetry or repetition.

  Anni emphasized that she was interested in art that was timeless and universal rather than art with specific links to a known locale or moment in history. As at the Bauhaus, her work embodied Worringer’s idea of abstraction providing the opportunity to create “visual resting places” removed from the often painful realities of the natural world.