In the bank branch, I asked for the manager. An eager, young, on-his-way-up executive named Joe Maloney quickly appeared from a back office. I explained that I would be coming in with a woman whose husband had recently died, and that we were setting up an estate checking account, for which the first deposit would be about $170,000, although eventually there would be a great deal more money coming in. Maloney looked as if he might pass out. When I explained that Mrs. Albers had great difficulty walking and would need to sit the minute we got inside, since she refused to use a wheelchair, he rushed over to a desk right at the front of the bank branch and scurried to find chairs for Anni and me to face him there.
I went back to the car, and, grinning complicitously at Anni, told her we had “an eager one,” a favorite term of hers. She knew enough about the reality of money, and was interested sufficiently in the human comedy (her favorite television show was Merv Griffin, of which she would say, “I love Mehrve”), to understand the excitement of the young executive about to open an account with so much money. She would play her part accordingly.
Joe Maloney, in his neatly pressed gray suit, held the door open as Anni, leaning on my arm and using her cane, made her way in. He then rushed ahead to hold her chair steady. Once she and I were seated facing the desk, he went to the other side and extended his arm for a handshake, saying, “Joe Maloney, ma’am.”
The desk, which was generally occupied by the bank receptionist, had a nameplate on it that said “Carmen Rodriguez.”
“No, you are Miss Rodriguez,” Anni said, rolling her r’s. As she did so, she moved her eyes from his go-get-’em smile to the black Vinylite plaque with its incised white lettering; the little sign assumed significance because it used the same materials and technique as Josef’s Structural Constellation engravings.
“No, ma’am, Joe Maloney.”
“Yes …Miss Rrrrrrrodriguez.”
“Joe Maloney, ma’am.”
“As you say, Miss Rodriguez.”
I tried to stop the routine, even as he was muttering “Joe Maloney” yet again, and explain what we needed to do. But when I presented the document appointing Anni as Josef’s executrix and tried to get down to business, Anni showed no interest whatsoever. She was too busy looking around the bank, taking in the furniture design, the bad art, and the appearance of the tellers, especially the hair and clothing of one of them who was rather conspicuously cheap-looking. (Anni and Josef adored a receptionist at the art storage warehouse who had a nameplate on her desk saying “sexretary,” and whose shape lived up to her title.) Joe Maloney, meanwhile, looked like a hunting dog about to snatch its prey.
We filled out all the necessary paperwork and completed the transaction. Maloney spoke only with me, treating Anni as if she had dementia or was not present. But when we were all done, the deposit made, and a passbook created—it was the old-fashioned sort of savings account passbook, stapled on the spine, that fits into a plastic case—he turned to Anni and said, “Mrs. Albers, as you see from the poster on the wall, with every $5,000 deposited you are entitled to a five-piece place setting of Royal Doulton style dinner-ware. With your deposit, that means thirty-four place settings.”
Anni stared at him for what seemed like a long five seconds. “Do you know what the Bauhaus is, Miss Rodriguez?”
“Joe Maloney, ma’am. I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“Well, Miss Rodriguez, at the Bauhaus we don’t like Royal Doulton, or any flower patterns, for that matter. On the other hand, there is something for which I would very much like to ask you.”
“Joe Maloney, ma’am. Yes, of course.”
“Do you know that little sleeve into which you placed the passbook just now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you have an extra? If so, I would like one.”
“Right away, of course.” He jumped up and was back with it in a moment.
“Zank you, Miss Rodriguez.”
“Joe Maloney. You’re welcome.”
Once we were back in the car, I burst out laughing and told Anni she had been quite something with him. She grinned with mischievous satisfaction. I then asked her what on earth she would do with the plastic passbook holder. “You never know, but plastics always come in handy.”
Anni Albers—as she was now known—and other Bauhauslers on the Preller house balconies at the Dessau Bauhaus, ca. 1927. Anni is the figure in the middle. She had never before been as happy as she was at the Bauhaus.
11
Plastics, synthetics, new and useful practical materials, shaking up the bourgeoisie: these were everyday joys at the Bauhaus. The essential element of the 1926 wall hanging, as of all of Anni’s work intended to be viewed purely as abstract art, is the way it wakes you up and keeps you on your toes. Anni was immensely satisfied when, following an exhibition of her work at the Hayden Gallery at MIT, a guard told her that the technology students used to spend their lunchtimes sitting on the floor and eating sandwiches—she liked these details, and admired the practicality of sandwiches—as they tried to solve the puzzle of how this multi-ply weaving was done on a twelve-harness loom. What would have been easy on a Jacquard loom was much harder to achieve on the one she had used; to get the clearly defined, solid color areas she wanted, rather than the effect of interweaving indigenous to the process, Anni had trickily, and meticulously, calculated which threads to lift at which points. She enjoyed having baffled the technology students, just as she delighted in my surprise at the shifts in format and hence in tempo with the bottom three rows, a twist that had nothing to do with weaving technique, about which she realized I knew nothing, and was mainly aesthetic. Working within the rules, she dedicated herself to unpredictability.
ANNI WAS AGAIN EMPHATIC: there had been little response to this wall hanging when she made it. This was Bauhaus reality; while Klee and Kandinsky sold some work and had some attention from the outside world, they mainly worked away with little feedback, and the rest of the artists and designers were even more alone. Josef was respected, and had the occasional commission for a window, but he rarely received kudos. They all depended on their teaching salaries. What I and the people at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the owner of Anni’s wall hanging, and numerous experts had come to regard as a textile classic by the time that she and I were discussing it—and which, since Anni’s lifetime, has become considered such a masterpiece that it is perpetually in demand for exhibitions all over the world, although Harvard rarely permits it to travel, or even be exhibited, because of both its fragility and their institutional capriciousness—was ignored when it came off the loom. It was only because Anni gave the hanging to her parents that it even survived the war; most of her best pieces did not. After her solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, when she hoped MoMA would buy the hanging at a very low price, they turned it down. The Busch-Reisinger acquired it shortly thereafter, thanks to one curator with an unusually adventurous vision.
“The parents didn’t know what to make of it, either,” Anni told me. “I gave it to them as a form of thanks. I thought it was the best thing I had done to date. They put it on the grand piano, as a sort of cover. And then they put a vase of flowers on top, with water in it so that the vase made a ring, which is still there.”
When I visited the Busch-Reisinger to see the work in storage, the curator then in charge—not the one who had acquired it—told me that she and the conservator wondered how Anni had created the circular form. They also remarked on the carefulness of its positioning, and when I told them it was the inadvertent result of a damp vase having been placed on the piece, they were initially incredulous. When I told Anni the story, she replied, “Yes, you see, museum people cannot see.”
She then looked off into space before continuing: “They can’t dress, either. Greta Daniel was curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art, yet she wore the most horrible dresses. I said to Arthur Drexler, ‘How can she think she understands everyday design and wear those sacks?’”
ANNI’S S
ENSE of her own rightness, and her tactlessness, were not always easy to take. Fortunately, my wife had a better sense of humor than Joe Maloney. Katharine, who didn’t care a lot about clothing when we first met, and generally was most comfortable in jeans and turtlenecks, had an elegant dress made for the opening of the Josef Albers retrospective at the Yale Art Gallery in 1977, the year after we were married. She was then twenty-one years old. When my very pretty wife and I arrived to pick Anni up to drive into New Haven for the opening, Anni looked her up and down and then asked, “Is that dress new?”
“Yes,” replied Katharine, smiling. I had told her how becoming it was, and she had every reason to feel confident.
“Can you still return it?” asked Anni.
It was remarkably similar to an incident that had occurred during a 1962 exhibition of Josef Albers’s work at the Pace Gallery, then still in Boston. At the opening, the gallery owner’s mother said to Anni, “I have a hairbrush in my handbag, and you need it.” It would be many years before Josef’s work was again represented by the Pace Gallery.
If she never forgot, or forgave, these putdowns, no one could issue them more harshly than Anni herself.
THE PERSON who could be so difficult was as an artist immensely generous. Her goal was not just to find some form of satisfaction in her own troubled life, but to provide calm and diversion and pleasure for her fellow human beings. She really meant to serve humankind, whether by gracing their experience of going into the synagogue in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, with the richly soothing panels she wove for the Torah ark at the end of the sanctuary, or by using the saturated inks and engaging, intelligent designs of her prints to entertain people she would never meet. Abstract art was her music, and she wanted others to benefit from it.
At times, Anni reduced the components of her textiles to nothing but black and white thread, which she would use on their own or in combination to achieve a range of grays. She would pare her compositional elements to squares exclusively. She embraced the limitations with which she countermanded the excess of choices, the too much of everything, of her previous world; from her few chosen givens she was able to build great beauty. This use of “minimal means for maximum effect”—a precept of Josef’s—was intended to be both enjoyable and instructive for viewers.
Anni’s 1927 Black-White-Red is a triumph of its three colors and regimented structure; she told me that it was also one of the works that clearly showed the great impression Florentine architecture had made on her. Vibrant, celebratory, invariably upbeat, this testimony to the possibilities of thread and to the emotional impact of abstraction is today regarded as one of the triumphant works of its era, for even though the original was thought to have been destroyed in the war, it was reproduced in 1964 by Anni’s fellow Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stolzl. Stolzl did this with three of Anni’s images of which it was assumed that only gouaches remained, and the new versions were purchased by the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with all those institutions treating them as masterpieces. But when Anni made Black-White-Red in Dessau—and about this she was emphatic—”recognition was still distant.” When an interviewer who was researching the Bauhaus asked her, in my presence, if she and Josef had foreseen their eventual eminence, she replied, irritably, “You can’t think in those terms. Maybe the ambitious young ones today do, but we certainly never did.”
The point of the artwork was simply to add to the world’s beauty. Anni had no artistic grandiosity. She did not think her textiles were any more worthy than the anonymous blankets of the Navajos or the fragments of the pre-Columbian weaving from the Inca and Maya cultures she adored. She only hoped that she was adding a further voice of sanity, one more source of satisfaction, even pleasure, in a universal language that enabled it to be enjoyed anywhere in the world, at any time. This was what the Bauhaus had confirmed for her: that, in spite of all the weaknesses of humanity, everyday experience could be made better through the eyes. Purely visual events could provide a sense of logic and rightness.
SHE HAD EVERY REASON to believe that Black-White-Red had been destroyed after the closing of the Bauhaus and subsequent events in Germany. But in December 1989 the original work reemerged.
Anni and I were in Munich, where Maximilian Schell had organized a show of her and Josef’s work at the Villa von Stuck, an institution named for the teacher Klee and Kandinsky and Albers had all disparaged. At that time in her life, Anni would do anything that Schell asked, and she had agreed to the exhibition in spite of the inappropriateness of the setting; now it was the evening of the opening. Before the event, we were waiting in a back office of the museum, where, although she was the guest of honor, Anni was totally miserable. As usual, Schell had said he would be at her side at a certain time but was not there. I assured her it was only because he was making last-minute changes in the placement of the artworks, but she did not care; sitting in her wheelchair, looking at her watch every two minutes, she was inconsolable.
Anni and I had planned to meet, before the opening started, some collectors from Aachen who said they were eager to show Anni one of her original works thought to have been destroyed. In they walked, a pleasant couple, he an architect, she a teacher. The man explained that his father, also an architect, had bought Anni’s wall hanging, the original Black-White-Red, directly from the Bauhaus in the 1920s and had always kept it safe.
One of her greatest pieces had not disappeared after all! I was overjoyed, and was sure she would be.
Anni continued to look at her watch and over the collectors’ shoulders to see if Schell was coming. She also stared at the woman’s pointed, white, stiletto-heel shoes, which she disliked intensely. She had no interest in this miraculous resurrection.
The collectors unrolled the original wall hanging. It was threadbare in many places, faded in others, but some sections had retained their brilliant colors. Compared to the 1964 edition, it was in terrible condition, but there was no question that this was the real thing.
Anni, however, gave it a shorter glance than she had the shoes. “No, no. Thank you for coming. But, no, I never made that. It doesn’t count.”
I argued, perhaps as emphatically as I ever had with Anni. The owners, who were polite and tactful, again reminded her of the history of the piece, and apologized for its condition. “Thank you for coming,” Anni said, gesturing their dismissal with her right hand. They rolled the hanging and walked off.
I followed the couple out of the room and explained that Mrs. Albers was having a very difficult evening for personal reasons; of course this was her work. I assured them that I would talk with her about it. I did not allow that the woman’s shoes had been the clincher.
At the opening, surrounded by her and Josef’s work, receiving congratulations from an endless stream of people, Anni’s only happy moments were when Maximilian was holding her hand and looking directly at her and not at anyone else. There were times when art simply could not provide the balance and serenity with which she hoped to counter the tumult of human emotions.
12
Anni enjoyed the Bauhaus festivals in much the same way as her parents’ costume parties: as an observer of transformation more than a participant. For the White Festival of 1928, Josef used a curling iron to turn his straight blond hair into tight ringlets. “He looked absolutely appalling,” she recalled with a joyful lilt in her voice. She helped him look all the worse by working on his eye gear: white ping-pong balls, cut in half, with little holes so he could see, and held in place by a rubber band that she had twisted in a series of knots so it attached to his ears. For the Metallic Festival on February 9, 1929, in response to the invitations sent on metal-colored cards, Anni prepared a costume for which she sewed little brass bells close together into a tight-fitting knitted cap that she pulled onto her head like a wig. “I think it looked quite good, a bit like an Indian goddess or Buddha.” But there was nothing about the parties worth re
calling other than how she and Josef looked.
TO OUTSIDERS, Anni was quiet and unknowable. But she was not reticent when she wanted something. Anni had made up her mind, she once told me, that if she wasn’t married by the age of twenty-five (which she was, by barely a month), she would “have an affair;” given the mores of her milieu in that time period, this was as radical as her decision to go to the Bauhaus. She was equally determined to travel. Besides the trips to Val Gardena and Florence, she was the main instigator behind a junket she and Josef took to Paris with the Breuers in 1926. What she recalled of that first trip to France was a visit the four of them made to a bordello. Unfortunately, when Anni told me this, I did not know her well enough to ask for further details. And it was only in 2009 that it was discovered from a guestbook entry that while they were in Paris the Alberses, along with some other German artists, visited Le Corbusier’s recently completed Villa La Roche. The Swiss banker Raoul La Roche had commissioned this innovative modernist pavilion to display his collection of paintings by Léger, Braque, Picasso, and the Purists Amadée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier’s real name, which he then used as a painter). It would have been wonderful to know what both Josef and Anni thought of Le Corbusier’s curved ramps and the balconies around the luminous atrium, as well as the boldly geometric façade of that building.
The Bauhaus Group Page 54