The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Nicholas Fox Weber and Anni Albers at the Royal College of Art graduation ceremony, London, June 29, 1990. Anni enjoyed going to London to receive the college’s Gold Medal, its highest level of honorary doctorate, but considered the ceremony “completely boring” and much preferred her visit to the British Museum, where she appeared to communicate directly with the Minoan art.

  Once she had her diploma, Anni was, apart from this stint as director, not connected officially with the Bauhaus, although she attended many activities as Josef’s wife. With her large loom at home, spending time there rather than in the weaving workshop, she was not as taxed by the move to Berlin as were people more directly connected to the school. And she did not have a salary to lose, as Josef did.

  Otti Berger, 1927–28. Photograph by Lucia Moholy-Nagy. Berger was a favorite of Anni’s among her fellow weavers; they often went to Berlin together. Berger’s death in a concentration camp marked Anni forever after.

  This was when her family helped pay the rent in an apartment that delighted her and Josef in one of the recently developed Berlin neighborhoods. If others felt the pain of exile after the brief idyll in Dessau, and were sad to leave behind the school building and the masters’ houses, Anni was excited to be back in the capital and to put white linoleum on the floor.

  Berlin, she told me, was the way it appears in Cabaret. Although she had seen only vignettes from the live and film versions, she had read Christopher Isherwood’s stories on which it was based and thought them a perfect vision of the world that fascinated and appalled her in a society falling apart. Anni, however, could not bear most books or films set in the Nazi period. She found the sound of German military marches intolerable. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, she explained, was simply too painful to read.

  THEN, ONE DAY, Anni began to talk to me about Otti Berger. Berger was among her favorites of the other weavers. Before Anni was married, she often took Berger to Berlin for weekends with her family, and since Josef liked her as well, the three of them occasionally did things together.

  Berger, Anni said, lost her life at Auschwitz. Anni managed to tell me this without using the word “Jewish,” which never came to her lips easily, but she didn’t need to. I had never seen her look so sad.

  She then told me that Berger had given her a jacket that was true folk art, made of traditional material from Berger’s native Yugoslavia. Anni had saved it. One day she would have the strength to show it to me, she said, but at the moment she could not face it.

  15

  On August 31, 1933, the twenty-four-year-old Edward M. M. Warburg, the rich young New Yorker who had bought two oils from Klee in Dessau, wrote the following letter to Alfred Barr:

  Dear Alfred,

  I want to tell you about another project that I have been playing with during the last few weeks.

  One Mr. Rice came into my office several weeks ago and told me he had formerly been connected with Rollins College in Florida and that due to a disagreement with Dr. Holt, the president, he and several other professors resigned (9 to be exact) from Rollins College. And some twenty students resigned with them. The argument, it seems, concerned itself with progressive education. …

  Rather than wait around for jobs that might be offered from more conservative organizations, they banded together. They found a place in North Carolina that is used by a conference centre in the Summer by the Young Men’s Christian Association, and which, with very little change, could be turned into a college during the Winter months. They decided to rent this place and with a $20,000 guarantee which they have collected, and thirty students, they are opening up this Fall.

  The members of the faculty will receive no salary for the first year and are pooling their own personal libraries for the benefit of the students. …

  Mr. Rice came in to see me about finding a man to head their Fine Arts Department, and both Phil [Johnson] and I immediately thought of Albers. We have written him a letter to find out whether he and his wife would come over here, and we received a cable to the affirmative.

  The problem now is how to get them into this country. Phil, Mr. Rice and I went down to see Mr. Duggan of the International Institute for Education, and he informed us that the Immigration Authorities demand that the invitation for any professor who has taught for a minimum of two years prior to application, must come from an accredited institution. As Black Mountain College (the proposed name for their college) is not yet on the list as an accredited institution, this does not apply to them. However, Mr. Duggan felt that if it were possible to guarantee a salary of $1500. to Albers, and his wife as well, that Col. McCormick, the head of the Immigration Bureau, would be perfectly willing to let him in. And we are now trying to figure out where we can get $3,000. …

  Unfortunately, Albers’s not being a Jew, my usual contacts are fairly useless as my friends are only interested in helping Jewish scholars. The Christian people who might be interested, have given towards foundations and the foundations are usually a bit scared of new organizations.

  I would like to know from you whether you think it would be diplomatic and right for me to place this whole matter before Mrs. Rockefeller.

  I cannot help but feel that getting Albers into this country would be a great feather in the cap of the Museum of Modern Art. …

  With Albers over here we have the nucleus for an American Bauhaus!

  What do you think of the whole scheme?

  As ever,

  Eddie17

  A couple of months before “Eddie” Warburg wrote Alfred Barr, Philip Johnson had run into Anni Albers on a street in Berlin. Anni invited Johnson to tea, in part because she rightly sensed he would be intrigued by the apartment she and Josef had recently stripped to the barest white and furnished with their own art and the leanest chairs and tables they could find, and where they served water from chemists’ flasks in order to avoid ornate decanters. Anni was also alert to any possibility that might lead to her husband’s finding a new job.

  Josef Albers, Anni Albers, ca. 1940. When Josef photographed Anni, he captured her intensity and her sensuousness to rare effect.

  When Johnson was in the Alberses’ new flat, however, he was as intrigued by Anni’s personality and work as by Josef’s. He told me about this on a couple of occasions in the 1980s and 1990s. Josef was too doctrinaire for Johnson, and, although Johnson did not say it, probably also too homophobic. He was more drawn to Anni, with her subtle humor; beyond that, Johnson could not get over the strength and serenity of her textiles.

  Johnson was also intrigued by a bit of deception of which he became aware on that summer afternoon. He saw several fabric samples that, a few months earlier, Mies van der Rohe’s mistress, Lilly Reich, had represented to him as having been hers. But these were Anni’s. Johnson told me that it was not simply that Reich’s work resembled Anni’s, it was that Reich had represented Anni’s work as being her own. Johnson realized that Anni Albers was not only exceptionally talented on the basis of what he knew she had done, but also on the basis of what he had been led to believe someone else had done.

  JOHNSON HAD his visit with the Alberses in mind when, shortly after his return from Berlin, Warburg invited him to join the meeting with John Andrew Rice at the offices of the Museum of Modern Art. Rice had gone to see Warburg at the suggestion of Margaret Lewisohn. Lewisohn was especially aware of what Eddie Warburg, who was a relative, was up to because her husband, Sam Lewisohn, was then secretary of the Museum of Modern Art’s board. Rice had approached Margaret Lewisohn on the advice of Ethel Dreier, the mother of a young man named Theodore Dreier.

  Ted Dreier, who had been seven years ahead of Warburg and Johnson at Harvard, was the nephew of Katherine Sophie Dreier, a pioneering collector of avant-garde art. His father, Henry, was the only one of Katherine’s four siblings to bear children. Ted had grown up with an especially close connection to his childless Aunt Kate. He saw her often and heard her discussed all the time. It wasn’t just her art collecting that gave the f
amily plenty to talk about. At one formal Sunday dinner, Katherine made a particularly strong impression on the children by scratching her back with her knife. Her explanation was that the conversation was getting a bit dull. She also made a point of challenging the usual way of doing things out in the world.

  Ted Dreier’s own interests were outside the art field. What impressed him most in the family legacy was the idea of rebellion and the spirit of good works. Another of his aunts headed the Women’s Trade Union League. His mother was chairman of the Women’s Suffrage Party of Brooklyn and the Women’s Committee for Mayor La Guardia’s Re-election, and she had politicized the Women’s City Club of New York City. What moved Ted above all were causes to better humanity.

  Although Aunt Kate had made Ted more cognizant of surrealism and other modern art developments than were most Harvard undergraduates of the day, Ted’s world was different from that of Warburg and Johnson. At Harvard he majored in geology, before studying electrical engineering at Engineering School. At Rollins he was teaching physics when he met Rice, who was a classics professor. Then, as Eddie Warburg had intimated to Alfred Barr, Rice was fired by Rollins’s president, Dr. Holt. Holt claimed that, among other things, Rice had “called a chisel one of the world’s most beautiful objects, has whispered in chapel, … had an ‘indolent’ walk, has left fish scales in the sink after using the college’s beach cottage, and … wore a jockstrap on the beach.” Two other faculty members were fired shortly after Rice. Ted Dreier had resigned in sympathy with their cause.

  Almost immediately, this group of outcasts set about forming Black Mountain College, with Rice at the helm. Their progressive coeducational institution stressed free inquiry, gave faculty the control of educational policy, eliminated grades, emphasized participation in community life, and elevated the arts as the focal point of the curriculum. Rice was particularly glad to have Ted join him in the new venture. In his eyes the young Harvard graduate was “a sweet person, a very endearing dreamer—one of those strange creatures that the rich families produce every now and then; they want to repudiate the whole thing.” His coming from a wealthy family would do the new school no harm. Not only did his relatives have money, they had friends with money. Of the fifteen thousand dollars in contributions required to get Black Mountain off the ground, Ted’s friends Mr. and Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes had anonymously provided ten thousand and his parents had given two thousand.

  When Ethel Dreier told Ted some of the things she had learned from Margaret Lewisohn about what the people at the Museum of Modern Art were up to, it was only natural for him to go knock on the door. If art had never before been his main interest, that quietly changed. In little time Ted and John Rice were looking at photos of the folded-paper experiments done in Josef Albers’s introductory course at the Bauhaus. They both immediately felt that it was precisely what they were looking for. The Black Mountain founders were especially eager “to break the tradition of the idea that it was effeminate to be in the arts,” and felt that this sort of work would only help advance that point.

  Philip Johnson had various reasons for wanting to help Black Mountain get the Alberses. He thought that Anni was “the best textile designer [he’d] ever met.”18 He admired the honesty and rigor of her work. In his own designing, he was advocating the aesthetic of exposed radiator pipes and linoleum for clients who previously would have had ornate carpets. He believed in acknowledging the truth of things: that’s where heat comes from; that’s the material from which the object is made. It was time to stop disguising. Johnson believed that Anni Albers’s presence in the United States would improve textile design in general, and that she and Josef would help the Museum of Modern Art. Shortly after Eddie Warburg wrote to Alfred Barr, so did Johnson:

  Eddie is writing to you about Albers. … But Iknowheis thinking of paying his way himself if he has to. He also got $500 from Mrs. R. for him. Personally I wish no responsibility for him, but I can’t think better [sic] person could be got from the lot of ex Bauhaeusler [sic] than Albers. He could be very useful in all the industrial arts and in typography.19

  Barr, who had met Josef at the Dessau Bauhaus, and had written him a long letter (in German) four years earlier, was sympathetic.

  When Eddie Warburg wrote Barr about his scrambling for the funds to bring the Alberses over from Germany, Black Mountain College was still $500 short of the minimum needed to get started. Rice may have told Warburg that they had received a $20,000 guarantee and were opening in the fall, but in truth they weren’t there yet. Moreover, although Warburg was able to wangle things with the immigration authorities and Johnson was able to negotiate with Albers so that all that was needed to get the Alberses to America was a guarantee of $1,500—for Josef’s salary for one year ($1,000) as well as his and Anni’s steamship fare ($500 for both in first class)—no one was coming up with the necessary money. While Warburg did indeed go to Mrs. Rockefeller and get $500 from her, he gave the rest himself.

  According to Ted Dreier, without that gift from Eddie Warburg, “Black Mountain College would never have started.”20 Dreier had promised the Forbeses that he would abandon the whole venture unless he received $5,000 in addition to their $10,000. He had managed to scrape together $4,500, but had reached his deadline without seeing how he could possibly raise another penny. Warburg’s own contribution, along with the one he solicited from Mrs. Rockefeller, entitled the school to receive the Forbes money, in addition to guaranteeing that Josef Albers—whose salary would be the only wage paid to a Black Mountain faculty member that first year—could come to the United States.

  It was as Anni had said about the Bauhaus and everything else in her life: money was secondary in importance to art or love or the spiritual aspects of existence, but it mattered more than many people wanted to admit.

  IN NOVEMBER 1933, Anni and Josef Albers arrived in New York on the S.S. Europa. Anni was excited about their new adventure, and had astonishingly few regrets about having left Germany and the world in which her family had had such prominence, but she still felt guilty that her being Jewish, even more than the closing of the Bauhaus, was the main reason that Josef had to leave his homeland. I often argued that her guilt was preposterous, but she insisted that she felt it, and she blamed herself for being “that stone around his neck, like a weight.”

  Once the Europa had docked, press photographers began to shoot pictures of the Bauhaus professor who was being imported to teach in the United States. Then someone called out, “Let’s get the wife, too.” Anni was utterly delighted. She did not for a minute mind her position as the famous man’s wife; rather, she considered the wish to include her in a picture, and the way the journalist called out, to be marks of American friendliness. In the shot taken of her in her sealskin coat, next to Josef in his perfect top hat and overcoat, she doesn’t look cheerful, though. But she does look dignified, with the elegant reserve that also pervades many of her textiles.

  Philip Johnson was waiting at the docks. The following day, he and Eddie Warburg took the Alberses to Warburg’s parents’ house at 1109 Fifth Avenue—today it is the Jewish Museum and houses Anni’s Six Prayers—for a tour of the collection of Rembrandt and Dürer etchings. Then they crossed the street and walked downtown a few blocks to the Metropolitan Museum, where the Alberses marveled at the eager crowd, as they had at the energy and dynamism on the city streets.

  Two days later, Anni and Josef were at Black Mountain College. At first things were hard to get used to. A thumbtack attached a notice to an Ionic column at the school’s Robert E. Lee Hall; this was impossible in Germany, where columns were made of marble. There were no notions of aristocracy. Back home, people of the Dreiers’ social and economic class might have spent their holidays taking the waters at Baden-Baden; Ted and his wife, Bobbie, preferred to go backpacking. Where their German counterparts might have whiled away the hours playing baccarat, Ted and Bobbie joined the road crew. But Anni and Josef Albers fit in soon enough, and Anni in particular warmed to the more rela
xed attitudes.

  On Thursday, March 18, 1937, the day before Josef’s forty-ninth birthday, thirty-seven-year-old Anni wrote a letter, in German, to Ted Dreier from New York. The metropolis scared her in some ways. If Weimar had been her haven from Berlin, Black Mountain was her haven from Manhattan. She wrote Ted—with whom she may well have been having a love affair, just as Josef was probably having one with Bobbie Dreier; based on the photos Josef took of Anni and Bobbie together in the nude, the chemistry between the two couples was powerful and extensive—a vivid account: “Dearest: Here in the great wide world it is not nearly as agreeable as at Black Mountain. Something is terribly wrong here in the big city, and as always, I don’t know how I can become a communist and a Nazi at the same time, and so I am quite confused.”21

  The day had already been packed with events; Anni was a player on the scene of modernism in her new country, even as she maintained that she thought of herself as an outsider. She had gone to the house of a “Miss Post” for breakfast, and at noontime she went to the remarkable house of the modernist architect William Lescaze for a cocktail reception. It’s unlikely that Anni had anything more than a glass of water as she stood, for an hour and a half, surrounded by expanses of unadorned white plaster and curved glass and talked with people she had never before met—no easier for her physically than psychologically, given the absence of arches in her feet and the malformation of her legs, as well as her social malaise. She wrote Ted, “I think I was terribly awkward.”22 But Joseph Hudnut, who was dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and had invited Gropius to take a position there, was present and was very nice, as was Lawrence Kocher, managing editor of Architectural Record, who had, the previous September, included an article on Black Mountain, which had interested him from its start, in an issue of the magazine devoted to the education of architects. Kocher would advocate future collaborations among Anni and Josef and Breuer and Gropius.