To keep the viewer engaged, the new creation, consistent with all of Anni’s compositions, had to eschew easy resolution. Like Josef, Anni imbued abstraction with a certain tension, a perpetual in/out motion, an ongoing play between image and ground. The artist’s own persona was to fade in deference to the sacred realm of art and to the comforts as well as the realities of the technical. Anni had no wish to reveal private emotions or the troubling fluctuations of her own mind and heart; she preferred, instead, to focus on the purely aesthetic and practical issues of printmaking, just as she had for many years reveled in the construction of textiles. It is no wonder that she kept a volume of Lao-tzu in easy reach at her bedside. Her favorite dictum of the great philosopher was:
Grasp the simple, embrace the primitive,
Diminish yourself, bridle your passions.
PHOTO-OFFSET, Anni determined, would enable her to reproduce her own deliberately irregular pencil work, allow crystalline edges, and facilitate a reversed mirror image with the click of a switch. None of this could have been achieved with weaving. Anni made a sketch of a sequence of triangles. The meandering three-sided forms, ostensibly in the foreground, were to appear in flat red. With the side of a soft pencil, she created a field of mottled grays that would appear in the voids between them.
The photographic reproduction that would capture the irregularity of the grays had never been possible in the print mediums in which she had previously worked: lithography, etching, and screen printing. It enabled her to obtain a desirable randomness and suggest mysterious communication of the sort that fascinated her in hieroglyphics and other ancient forms of writing, where, for her, incomprehension was an asset, not a deficit. She liked undecipherable language.
The sequence of triangles she had drawn was enlarged by a simple mechanical process and cut on a rubylith—a plastic sheet with two layers, one bright red, one clear—in the stripping department of the print shop. Anni was fascinated by the rubylith itself, by the precision with which the top layer could be cut and removed from the bottom one.
Eventually, when she visited Fox Press to supervise the press work, she would be almost as enchanted by the man who cut it, a six-foot-eight deepvoiced “stripper” named Gary Thompson. She appreciated the irony of the term “stripper,” admired his professionalism, adored his deference to her and wish to accommodate her desires, and, she told me, relished the Americanness of his name. When Anni had first given me the sketch for the pattern to be made in solid red, I had asked Gary to simulate her handwork exactly. My erroneous assumption was that she wanted the finished work to have the imprecision of her sketch; in fact, while she was seeking the hand-done look of the surface she had rendered in gray pencil strokes, she pictured those gray forms contained in triangles that were perfectly sharp and precise, unlike what she could have drawn herself. It had taken Gary days to cut a rubylith that perfectly resembled Anni’s drawing—only to have her respond by saying that she hated the wobbly appearance. She had meant her drawing only as a guide to the final design; her goal was to have exact, crisp lines and impeccable triangles, with the points just lightly touching. Gary then developed a grid from which he cut the triangles with the precision she desired.
ANNI BEGAN to use the word “miraculous” for Gary after I put her on the phone with him a couple of times so that she could explain what she wanted. She liked his deep voice and clear explanation of the technical possibilities in layman’s terms almost as much as she thrilled to the capabilities of the photo-offset. After one of those conversations, Gary made a proof that achieved an instant reversal of Anni’s design, so that what was in flat red on the top panel of this two-section print was a foamy gray below, and vice versa. Where there were solids above, there were pencil strokes below; where there was pencil on top, there was unmodulated red on the bottom. Anni’s growing familiarity with the photomechanical process was what had led her to make the grand scheme of her print depend on her simply producing the wavering gray in two easily made panels, in her eyes a delicious economy of means.
The elusive fuzziness against the crisp purity of machined forms was, for her, the realization of a dream. And the idea that, with a flick of the wrist, she could make what was negative in one rectangle positive in the other permitted the sort of interplay with which she loved to divert the viewers of her art. Anni was grateful to the technology for having opened new visual possibilities—as if it, not she, were the responsible party. Now she could achieve the sort of contrast and unpredictability, the mixture of the personal and the impersonal, the coincidence of order and spontaneity, and the playfulness and elements of surprise intrinsic to her work. She told me that all of this was in keeping with the fundamental values of the Bauhaus, and with Gropius’s goals. Art and industry functioned in tandem, not as adversaries. A creative person “listened to the voice of the materials and the process, and learned from the skilled laborer,” rather than trying to impose all sorts of demands or ask the people executing the work to achieve something unreasonable.
At one of our meetings to discuss the print, I inadvertently placed a partially translucent negative of its image on top of a shiny, opaque proof. Anni was fascinated by the completely unexpected patterns that resulted. She made a slight adjustment to the position of the negative image on top, so that the forms were all off register in a consistent, well-measured way. She asked if this, too, could become a print: in dark brown and black. What could have occurred only through the photo-offset process, and could never have been achieved as a drawing, eventually became Fox II (see color plate 27).
ANNI FINALLY got to meet her heroic stripper in person. The occasion was a trip to Fox Press to watch the actual printing. She needed to be on the spot in order to determine the intensity of the gray as it rolled off the press and to make sure that the opaque red trapped it exactly, containing the pencil without any unwelcome white space around it.
For her Fox Press outing, Anni wore a simply cut, rather severe khaki skirt that ended just below the knee, a silky white crepe blouse, and a pure white cable-stitch sweater. Not yet knowing her well, I assumed that the sweater was expensive, handmade, and imported—that someone of Anni Albers’s stature would wear nothing else—but, no, it was machine-made, synthetic, washable, and from a discount store. I was still to learn that Anni preferred the practical products of mass production to most luxury goods, and regularly instructed weavers championing the handmade and belittling machine-work to look at their own shirts.
Anni Albers in the Dreiers’ car in 1935. Photographs by Josef Albers
After I drove Anni the forty-five minutes from her house to the printing plant, she gave her entrance there the quirky charm that she lent to the most simple actions. Proportioned like one of Alberto Giacometti’s striding figures and walking with the aid of her plain stick, Anni was striking both for the dignity of her thick dark hair and her stately manner. Anni’s plain, inexpensive clothes acquired a rare elegance on her, in part because of the way they fit and hung; her suits from Alexander’s (a department store noted for its cheap merchandise) might have been Chanels. (When asked whom she considered to be the greatest artist of the twentieth century, she was inclined to answer “Coco Chanel.”) Along with the whites and tans she wore that day, Anni had on a brown suede jacket, a shimmering brown silk scarf, and heavy brown suede shoes; the balances were of color as well as of texture.
When we walked into the pressroom, I told Anni that when my father had built Fox Press, he had considered buying Standing Lithographer by David Smith, a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall sculpture in which a steel type case suggested a man’s chest. But the $10,000 needed to acquire it had ended up being required for a fire door. (The Smith had recently sold for $170,000, a detail I considered too vulgar to mention but of which I was keenly aware; even in 1972, art had begun to assume its current role as a commodity for investment.) Anni was unmoved by what I considered a misfortune. Without missing a beat, she simply pointed to a large Swiss two-color press in front of us and
declared, “You see that machine? That, that is far more beautiful than anything David Smith ever touched.”
ANNI POSITIONED HERSELF carefully on a wooden chair next to the thirty-two-inch single-color press where her print was to be run. She exuded a sense of importance and rectitude, as well as of grace—an honest worker trying to do her job as best she could. What was remarkable was her quiet brilliance, the humility that accompanied her originality. As the pressman adjusted the speed and the pressure with which the suction cups would pick up her prints—they were being done on Rives BFK paper, heavier and thicker than the usual stock—Anni spoke, as if she were experiencing an epiphany, of the wonder of the machine and of the artist’s need to respond to the capabilities of the equipment.
Anni was curious about the flexible plate that was being locked onto a roller and wanted to know more about how it was made. The pressman fetched the platemaker, who suggested that we go into the prep department to see exactly how it was created. Observing the chemical processes and the fixing of the halftones, Anni marveled at the accuracy of mechanization. As she exulted in the technology, she made this printing plant in Connecticut seem an outgrowth of Bauhaus thinking and life. What she evoked of that great and pioneering art school was not the complicated politics or the rivalries that so often sullied its atmosphere—which she and Josef made sure I never forgot—but, rather, its crisp thinking and marriage of creativity and technology.
WHILE IMPRESSIVELY HUMBLE in her demeanor, Anni had also displayed a degree of manners that suggested true nobility. Shaking hands with the men at the plant, she smiled graciously and told them that she admired what they did. “Craftspeople,” Anni complained to me in an aside, suffer from their inability to use machines; again she reiterated her favorite point, that they should simply look at what they were wearing to understand the value of mechanization.
Watching the rollers get inked and clamped into position, and then seeing the first few prints roll off the press, which was usually used to fire off brochures by the thousand, Anni was riveted. Trial and error—the essence of process—never seemed to frustrate her. By the time of the visit, she had redone the handmade pencil part of her print three times before we discovered that these gray units had to be larger than she intended them to be in the final print so that they could be totally trapped, as Anni wished them to be, by the solid design on top. Now, as the first prints began to roll off the press, Anni saw that the gray of the upper half was darker than at the bottom. She insisted that this was her fault; she had done the two panels on separate occasions and had applied too little pressure the second time. As with her work in weaving, certain issues were paramount: the knowledge of materials, the degree of force or laxity, the wish for a balanced setting for irregularity, and the flexibility required to proceed from the initial concept to an end result that was still completely fresh.
The foreman joined the pressman in discussing the problem of the two different gray tones and Anni’s wish to regulate them. They determined that a press adjustment would enable them to lighten the top gray. Anni was thrilled to use the machine to correct her mistake. She explained to all of us that the printing was as important to her artwork as was her initial design concept. The role of the equipment, she added, had been equally important when she started textile work at the age of twenty-two. She took comfort in tools that were meticulously fabricated and properly maintained. She respected sheets of paper as she had spools of thread: they did what they were supposed to do. The materials that performed so well, the jacquard cards and flexible steel printing plates, were not just dependable, unwavering in their charms, and therefore to be treasured as anchors in the storm of life; they also had souls.
She asked the two men if they had ever heard of an art school called “zuh Bauhaus.” When they said they had not, she told them what it had been. She said that this was where she had learned to respect materials and mechanical technique, and that her admiration for, and compliance with, them had been a mainstay of her life ever since.
10
A silk wall hanging of 1926 that Anni wove shortly after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau shows what was made possible with triple weave (see color plate 25). The three-ply technique opened a new world of possibilities. The black forbidden by Martin Brandenburg could now be gloriously solid. On the back, the textile appears as separate fabrics pressed against one another, joined at the perimeters of the solid shapes on the front, each of these shapes a pocket with harness threads lying loosely in it, the appropriate threads picked up at each joining for the next form. The precision of that technique allowed Anni to produce, on the side we see, work as purely celebrative as a Handel trumpet concerto. It has nonstop movement, and the unequivocal exuberance art allowed even as life continued to be confusing. Juxtaposed rectangles all the same dimensions become louds against softs, a musical sequence of cause and effect.
This silk wall hanging is also an ode to the sort of number system Anni had uncovered in her reading of Goethe. Everything derives from the factors of twelve. Using inches in the world of centimeters, she made the overall dimensions forty-eight by seventy-two inches, both multiples of twelve. There are twelve vertical rectangles on each row, each of them divided into twelve horizontal stripes of equal thickness. There is, however, no pattern to the striping or repetition of any one arrangement. It was Anni’s intent that, with the overarching order firmly established, the more we look, the more we are surprised by the unpredictable. Throughout the top six of the nine rows of vertical rectangles, Anni has kept the white horizontal stripes lined up, always on the same level; working our way down, we have been made to expect that rule to be maintained, only to discover that, on the bottom three rows (those she wove last), she has joggled the whites up and down and destabilized them.
Safely anchored to the requisites of weaving and the dictates of the loom, and to the system dictated by the mechanical givens, Anni then played. Her determination to do the unexpected bordered on the perverse. As our eyes move through the oscillating bands of this wall hanging, in the quiet mood induced by its muted greens and blacks and grays, colors that combine assuredness with subtlety, we can imagine the organizer of the sequence saying, “Here: I know what you are expecting, and I am going to do something very different.”
SURPRISE EFFECTS were her specialty. Even as she invariably clad her lean body in subdued colors, when a student at Black Mountain College asked the deliberately plain former Bauhausler who she would most like to have been if she were someone else, she replied, “Mae West.” And I remember once, when my wife and I were talking to her about a paintings conservator who had such an odd comb-over that we thought he maintained it with Toluene, the same varnish he used for Josef’s paintings, Anni asked us, “Is he lesbian?”
One simply never knew what to expect. At the opening of Anni’s major retrospective exhibition at the Smithsonian in 1985, a well-meaning admirer had made the trip from New Haven to Washington to attend the event. The woman, with a mixture of good-girl enthusiasm and intellectual shallowness that was not to Anni’s liking, presented her with an enormous, meticulously arranged bouquet. The group of people surrounding Anni’s wheelchair, assuming she would voice profuse appreciation, simply observed her scowling at the rigid assemblage of blossoms—there were too many chrysanthemums—and asking, “They are for my coffin?”
She did the same sort of thing in her art. She caught you off guard and startled you, although here it was always with the intention of providing delight as well as a form of awakening. There are moments in the Bauhaus wall hangings, as well as in the utilitarian materials, when a dash of color or a completely unexpected visual element appears for no reason whatsoever. As rigorous as the Bauhaus principles were, the lightness and the sense of play were essential to almost everyone at the school. That humor may be the element most neglected by its historians.
Not everyone responded to Anni’s flippancy, though. Several months after Josef died, I took her to a local bank branch to set up an estate
checking account. This meant driving to the Boston Post Road, where her and Josef’s beloved Sears, Roebuck and Plank House were. Anni at this point was having considerable difficulty walking; she had grown noticeably weaker since Josef’s death. I therefore parked very close to the entrance of the bank, and told her I wanted to go in ahead of her and organize things to make it easier for her to meet with the bank manager.
This was before the era of handicapped-only parking spaces or wheelchair access, which might have been just as well, for Anni had little use for the idea of special treatment. She was, in fact, incredibly unsympathetic about human disabilities, and oddly ashamed of her own. Fourteen years later, at the age of ninety, when she received the Gold Medal of the Royal College of Art in London, she made her first trip to London since a brief sojourn there during her Bauhaus years, I took her to the British Museum, which had no ramp or lift for wheelchairs, although many London cabs had special devices to accommodate them. Along with Anni and me that day were my seventy-five-year-old father and Anni’s nurse. When we arrived at the great institution on Bloomsbury Square, it became clear that we would have to carry Anni, in the wheelchair, up three steps. Instantly, a couple of museum guards appeared; they and my father and I each lifted a corner, and up we went. Anni smiled like a child at an amusement park as we transported her, with the chair wobbling, into the museum. After she landed, a museum official came out to greet her, and began apologizing profusely. “Oh, no,” Anni said. “Don’t be sorry. There is nothing I enjoy more than being carried by four men. And I don’t approve of that handicap nonsense they have in America, anyway.” Her delight in being carried that day was rivaled only by the Minoan art in the collection. Even more than the Elgin Marbles, which had been my reason for organizing the visit, this anonymous pottery from a civilization that used imaginative forms and geometric patterns to add luster to everyday living thrilled her. The exchange between objects and viewer was so powerful that, as she stared into the cabinets of Minoan pots from her wheelchair, I finally grasped Klee’s idea that art could be looking at us as intensely as we look at it.
The Bauhaus Group Page 53