Anni Albers’s bedroom in the masters’ house in Dessau, ca. 1928. Anni always lived austerely, but she never failed to have Josef’s art in her line of vision from her bed. For her entire life she kept the Egyptian statuette near where she slept.
Anni also engineered a trip in 1929 to Barcelona and San Sebastian in Spain, followed by a holiday near Biarritz. This is where Josef took his amazing photographs of people frolicking on the beach, of the Klees in resort wear, and of the tracks left in the sand by the water. It was Anni’s instigating that got Josef to travel and hence to make this extraordinary visual record of how the Bauhauslers could enjoy themselves despite the constant onslaught of problems in their lives.
Anni planned trips for herself and Josef from Dessau to Belgium, to look at the masterpieces of Flemish art, and to England, where he photographed the houses of Parliament. But the gambol she liked above all was to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, which they visited via banana boat in 1930. Anni felt the boat looked sufficiently substantial when she first saw it, but, she delighted in telling me, it had not yet been loaded. When she and Josef returned to the dock to get on board, the boat had sunk considerably, and suddenly looked very small. It took a lot of persuading to get Josef on board. But he ended up enjoying himself almost as much as she did. The passengers, twelve in all, ate with the captain every night of their five-week trip, and they visited two islands, journeying on muleback up to the high plateau of Tenerife. When she described that adventure in the Canary Islands, and a trip in 1953 to Machu Picchu and some less accessible Inca sites, she was aglow.
Josef Albers, Anni, Sommer ‘28, 1928. Josef Albers made this collage of two photos he took of his wife wearing an old jacket of his, which she remembered fondly when she rediscovered this work half a century after it was made.
ANNI WAS EITHER impressed by important people or deemed them silly and worthless. Their position meant nothing to her; it was their attitude that was crucial.
When Josef participated in the symposium on the Bauhaus in Prague and they met Tomás Masaryk, she was deeply impressed by their host’s “knowledge about art and education, which is very unusual for a head of state.” Her other strong memory of Prague was that it was where she met Galka Scheyer, who also attended the symposium. What Anni most remembered was that Scheyer showed her how to put lipstick on. Using lipstick was almost as revolutionary as having an affair before marriage.
After their encounter with Masaryk, the attitude toward art, and details of physical appearance, generally determined the Alberses’s taste in politicians. They both liked Nelson Rockefeller because of a description they had read of him wearing a flannel shirt and standing on a ladder in the governor’s mansion when he was installing a Calder just before his inauguration, and because he was gracious when they met him at a dinner at the Museum of Modern Art, where most of the other trustees talked primarily to one another and to no one else. Gerald Ford was out of the question because “he had a face like a knee.” I often visited the Alberses during the Watergate hearings, with which Anni was obsessed, but more as if she were watching a soap opera than a tale of venality and corruption; she adored every appearance of Maureen Dean and regarded Martha Mitchell as a comedian. While Josef cared less about the whole procedure, he was enchanted by the name of John Ehrlichmann, wondering why no commentator pointed out that in German “ehrlich” means “honest.” This was comparable to the green highway sign on the Merritt Parkway near the Alberses’ house that said “This is Orange”: a landmark he adored pointing out as an example of verbal treachery.
AS FOR THE USE of lipstick: Anni never lost her fascination with female contrivances. In 1982, I accompanied her to an annual meeting of the College Art Association, where she was on a panel with, among others, the sculptor Louise Nevelson. During the question-and-answer session, Anni was asked more than once if she felt that she had played second fiddle to Josef, and if she had suffered as the wife of a more famous artist. She simply answered, “No.” Afterward, chatting with Nevelson, Anni said, “Now I have to ask you a question. Are those marvelous eyelashes your own, or did they come out of a jar?”
The exotic, Russian-born sculptor burst out laughing and answered, “Listen, darling, sometimes you have to give yourself what nature did not provide.” At that, Nevelson pointed with both hands to her breasts, making clear that she wore falsies, and continued to laugh. Anni always maintained that this moment was the highlight of the event, “much better than all that feminist nonsense about Josef’s and my marriage.”
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Anni felt that the Bauhaus, like all institutions, suffered from the way too many people tried to have the upper hand. The longing of certain individuals within the school to have power for its own sake was in her eyes more problematic even than all of the difficulties imposed from the outside by the bureaucracy that supported the school. Moreover, for all the good artists at the school, there were plenty of second-rate ones. The geniuses—like Klee and Kandinsky and Josef—changed your lives; the lower tier not only wasted your time, but, being more competitive than talented, disrupted the possibilities of equanimity.
Although Gropius had tried to prescribe a universal rapport in his “Principles of the Bauhaus,” his stated goal of “encouragement of friendly relations between masters and students outside of work” and “cheerful ceremonial at these gatherings” did not mitigate the caste system that was a reality of life in Weimar and Dessau. The older masters were the highest; the young instructors next; and then, lowest, came the students. “Kandinsky was the one who was closest in a way to Josef, although I couldn’t say close, because none of the upper region of the Bauhaus ever felt close to the younger ones: Albers, Breuer, and Bayer.” Mies van der Rohe was “a very difficult man who lived in a space of no-man’s-land, very self-centered, self-contained. I liked him very much better when he came to this country, which had a good influence on him.”
After George Muche resigned as form master of the weaving workshop in 1926, and Klee took his place, even though Anni considered him her “god” because of his work, she struggled with his lectures, which is perhaps why she remembered having attended fewer than was the case. She reiterated, “I couldn’t understand them. They were beyond my grasp. They touched on form problems that pertained to his own investigations and were of no help to my own struggle, though some of the students profited greatly from his discussion. To me he did not seem to be the teacher whom you could easily approach with a personal question.” It was, of course, as always, the vantage point of someone who specialized in seeing people’s limitations, who reserved her 100 percent approval only for artworks.
One specific assignment served as a kind of railing for Anni in the confusing period just after Gropius resigned. The term “railing” was hers, and she said it in the most appreciative voice, savoring the idea of something firm to hold on to, a support against both her own unsteadiness and the vagaries of life. After Hannes Meyer came on board as the new Bauhaus director, he designed a school for union workers in Bernau. Meyer enlisted Bauhaus students to work on aspects of it and asked Anni to come up with a textile that could reduce what otherwise would have been an echo in its large auditorium.
The usual method of subduing reverberations was to put velvet on the wall, but velvet would have been impractical in a public place unless it was a dark color, which Meyer did not want. Anni therefore relegated the velvet quality to the back of the material and kept the front a light-reflecting surface that could be brushed and wiped off as needed. (See color plate 26.)
Hundreds of yards of the material were produced for the auditorium. Soft like a caterpillar’s fur on the side hidden from view, it presented a subtly shimmering silver and black mixture on the auditorium wall. The juxtaposition of metallic and matte cotton fibers made a combination of exuberance and restraint that was the quintessence of elegance. Meyer decided that Anni merited her Bauhaus diploma on the basis of this textile, and so it was awarded.
Generally, Bauhaus gra
duates moved away and went out into the working world. Anni, however, was not going to be apart from Josef, who, in spite of his occasional whims to leave, now had an important position at the school. She remained in Dessau, briefly as head of the textile workshop, but mostly to work.
IT WAS A BIT more than fifty years after Anni received her diploma when I took her to the opening of the marvelous Paul Klee retrospective organized by Carolyn Lanchner at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was not easy to get Anni, who by then required full-time nursing care, into the city, but as I wheeled her around the show, her nurse tactfully out of view in the mob, it seemed totally worthwhile.
Few people in the crowd were looking at the art, and fewer still had any idea that the silver-haired lady in a wheelchair had been one of Klee’s students and was at that time the last living member of the Bauhaus faculty. But Anni was content, for she was completely absorbed by the art. It was as if the crowd was not present, and she was communicating directly with the paintings before her just as she had when Klee tacked his watercolors to the Bauhaus corridor walls. The rhythmic forms, the visions of cats’ faces and fishlike creatures and underwater plants and vibrating squares, seemed to penetrate Anni’s being.
Suddenly Anni was startled out of her reverie. An elderly man had gently tapped her on the shoulder, and she had turned her wheelchair away from the art—she enjoyed her ability to execute that rotation—to face him. The man had long white hair, and a full beard and mustache, and although one could see little of his actual face, he was smiling. So was the woman next to him, who had straight white hair that matched his and was plainly dressed; she might have been a schoolteacher in a small town in Germany. Anni’s rare, wholehearted smile betrayed a total sense of pleasure. “Felix, ich kann dass nicht glauben!” she exclaimed. “Felix, I don’t believe it!”
It was Felix Klee. He and Anni at that moment were like any two people from the same small town: a woman who as a young bride had known a child when he gave his puppet shows and who has now, decades later, run into him. What made the small-town element all the stronger was when he presented his wife, Liva, and Anni instantly realized that this was Hannes Meyer’s daughter, whom she had also known as a child. The daughter of the man who had had the confidence to assign her to cover the auditorium walls and then grant her the Bauhaus diploma had married the son of the man she admired above all other artists.
Anni was looking splendid that evening. She wore a simple short jacket—loose fitting, with three-quarter-length sleeves and a mandarin collar—which she had made out of Thai silk. For ceremonial occasions, she forsook her usual look of reserve for this medley of bright squares, primarily pink and yellow. Years earlier, she had bought, on several occasions, bolts of this silk from a favorite supplier at an obscure location in Manhattan that required her to walk up several flights of stairs, a challenge she relished when the goal was worthwhile. With the splashy jacket, she had on a plain white blouse and long black skirt; the combination gave her panache. But nothing was more arresting than the aliveness of her face as she told Liva that it was her father who had awarded her her certificate for having completed her training at the Bauhaus. Anni admitted that, although she normally disparaged ceremonial documents, this one meant something.
Felix and Liva, even with their white hair, beamed like young newly-weds. And Anni delighted at seeing them, in her mind’s eye, as children, at the same time that she recognized them as the elderly pair they had become.
IN THOSE FERTILE YEARS when, diploma in hand, Anni had a new confidence, she made a curtain for a theater café in Dessau that had a soigné flair in the same way as Marlene Dietrich’s singing did, and a children’s rug that was a checkerboard of brightly colored washable fabric (see color plate 22). She designed and wove a mercerized cotton tablecloth using narrow vertical and horizontal stripes that vibrate at their intersections. While it was never produced commercially, this animated covering could bring exuberance into any household where it was deployed.
In Florence, Anni had bought a cap crocheted out of strawlike cellophane, one of the earliest synthetics. She unraveled the cap and tried weaving with the clear fiber. She found it so useful that she bought longer lengths in Germany and then made a wall covering with a linen warp and two strands of raffia, one tan and one white, for every strand of cellophane, in a plain weave—using a simple technique to accentuate the imaginative juxtaposition of materials—and went on to create further variations of the same idea.
For wall coverings, she liked materials that could be cleaned easily and brushed off, and that would not show nail holes; for upholsteries, she wanted fabrics that were pliable. Everything had to be as practical as it was visually potent.
ON ONE OCCASION when I was with the Alberses in Connecticut, Josef, Anni, and I were looking at a photo of one of Josef’s fruit bowls. Josef explained that a couple of institutions—the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin—had originals, but that he no longer owned one. This suited him, he said, because his ideal, and that of the Bauhaus in general, had been to get clean and effective designs out into the world, not to hoard possessions. I quoted back to him one of his short poems, published in various places—”To distribute material possessions is to divide them; to distribute spiritual possessions is to multiply them”—and he was pleased.
Anni, however, said she now wished they had not given so much to MoMA. Following her 1949 exhibition, she had donated to it a number of textile samples and study gouaches. “No tax deduction, by the way,” she commented. “Our accountant said the value for tax purposes was only the cost of materials, paper or thread. But now when someone else organizes a show of my work, the Modern charges a fee per object, for each little swatch a charge, even though they hardly ever show what I gave them and mostly keep it in storage.”
We came back to the subject of the fruit bowl. I marveled at the use of the three bearing balls, a perfectly folded rim of stainless steel, and a flat sphere of glass, nothing more, composing an object that was elegant as well as machined and functional. As I waxed rhapsodic, Anni’s only comment was “Yes, but think of what happens with blueberries.”
It was true that there was a gap between the glass base and the rim to support the fruit, which suited the bowl for bananas and apples but nothing smaller. But Josef was annoyed. I wondered whether Anni was simply being truer than he was to the Bauhaus’s insistence on impeccable functionality, or whether she was just being perverse and acting out of her usual need to debunk.
Describing the masters’ house at Dessau, Anni likewise had to point out the silliness. The roof garden “of course was nonsense because the house was under the trees anyway.” She clearly took pleasure in implying that the lack of direct sunlight negated the value of that location for a real garden, without allowing the possible pleasure of a private, elevated space in the woods. Once she had that satisfaction, however, she was enthusiastic. “It was marvelous to live in a house that was so clean-cut and light.” Everything about the place was “a great luxury.” And she again spoke of the miracle of the Bauhaus receiving funds from the city of Dessau for the masters’ houses in such difficult times, with so many people in need.
She was determined as usual to treat money as a necessary part of reality. Anni had grown up in a household where anything having to do with finances was a forbidden topic at the dinner table, and she still agreed that it was a good idea to stay off the subject when eating, but what things cost, and how they were paid for, was as essential to her as the pliability of a particular thread or the functions of the human body. At the same time, preferring the art of impoverished Mexicans in their marketplaces to that of aggressive careerists focused on trends and auction values, she made a complete separation between artistic value and economic interests.
Money had been a central determinant for her family. Her parents and siblings’ way of life had been shaped by a fortune that allowed them to devote their days to sports and eating well and outfitting thems
elves with the clothing in which to attend the opera. The loss of that fortune had the effect of forcing her father, ultimately, to spend his days working on the loading dock of a warehouse in the Bronx, and her mother and sister to wait tables.
The idea of economic well-being as the main goal of life was anathema to her, but the role of economics was, at the Bauhaus and in the stages of her and Josef’s life that followed, to be addressed squarely.
14
All the Bauhaus books say that Anni was the director of the weaving workshop in Dessau after Gunta Stolzl left in 1930. When I first asked Anni about this, in the early 1970s, she said that if she had not read it, she would have had no memory of having headed the workshop. “My main function was the continuation of my own work.”
The weaving workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1928. While Anni Albers eventually became its director, she minimized the significance of the position and even pretended that she did not remember having held it.
What did this mean? Was it a slight game, to make clear that titles and official status meant nothing to the Alberses, that she and Josef were above such things? Or was it a reflection of the truth—that what she really cared about most was her own art? She then explained that the point of the Bauhaus was to leave students “largely on their own,” and that she was “simply an acting director who tried to interfere only when necessary.” So she remembered after all.
She had been toying with the facts to make her point. Anni manipulated the telling of her story, and that of the Bauhaus, as carefully as she interlaced threads. Her goal was to belittle titles, and to make clear how much more important official designations sounded than they actually were. This was of vital importance to both Alberses, who felt that designations like “Dr.” before the name of someone who had a PhD, or a medal on one’s lapel or framed certificates on the wall, had little to do with real intelligence or skill. Consistent with that belief, when an honorary doctorate was conferred upon Anni by the Royal College of Art, amid much fanfare in a long ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall—during which Sir Jocelyn Stevens, the director of the Royal College, said it should now be renamed “Royal Albers Hall”—she told me, after I wheeled her out while the attendees applauded her in a standing ovation, that it had been “three of the most boring hours” she had ever spent. On the other hand, after Maximilian Schell introduced her to H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria at a social event in Munich, her face lit up with a smile as she told me about it—but part of her delight was that she was among those who were invited to call him “Franzy,” and because he knew about modern art and asked her about her work.
The Bauhaus Group Page 55