Anni also had a good conversation with Philip Youtz, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, who was creating textile and industrial arts departments there and invited her to visit the museum the next day. But a “Mrs. Swan” was “not nice”—Anni had no idea who she was—while Mr. Swan was “very nice.” Anni was greatly troubled that Mrs. Swan had acted so strangely toward her; perhaps this was the person who appeared to regard her as either a communist or a Nazi, or both.
The major event of that day, to us if not to Anni, is that, at dawn, she had met Walter Gropius’s boat. We don’t know any of the details of that reunion on the docks of New York; all that Anni wrote is that she got up before 6 a.m. to be present when Walter and Ise arrived in America with the plan to make it their new homeland. When Anni was twenty-two years old, Gropius had changed her life with his few paragraphs describing the Bauhaus and then with his greeting to the new students. Now she was the one who welcomed him.
THE ALBERSES STAYED at Black Mountain College for sixteen years, and although it had financial and personality problems similar to those at the Bauhaus, it had a conviviality the Bauhaus had merely proclaimed. The United States was a splendid new homeland for the Alberses. In 1939, they both became citizens. They didn’t celebrate the way they had with the Kandinskys eleven years earlier in Dessau, when the Kandinskys became German citizens, but they were overwhelmed with joy.
On her American passport, for her profession, Anni put “housewife.” Perversity? A secret wish? In an odd way, this was probably above all an expression of the Bauhaus wish to focus on everyday domesticity. Anni could have written “artist” or “weaver” had she wanted to, but the first struck her as pretentious (she would never use the word for herself) and the second as “too artsy-craftsy, like one of those little ones making shoulder bags.” The term “those little ones” was one Anni regularly applied to women “still trying to find themselves,” which in her eyes included most of the female sex.
President Roosevelt felt to Anni and Josef like “our savior, or a beloved uncle.” Anni’s family lost everything materially—but she was able to get them and a number of friends visas for the United States.
Anni often said that “at least once in life, it’s good to start at zero.” She rarely voiced nostalgia for anything her family had given up. In fact, perverse though it sounds, she spoke of their difficulties not as a tragedy but as a cleansing ritual that reduced life to its essentials and facilitated a fresh start.
The idea of “start[ing] at zero” was consonant with Anni’s instructions to her students when she taught the principles of weaving at the Museum of Modern Art at the same time as she had her exhibition there in 1949. She advised the class members to imagine themselves on the coast of Peru, centuries ago, without any machine power. They were to consider how they might weave textiles. To assemble a primitive loom, they might place some twigs parallel to each other, spaced at equal intervals, and then connect them with perpendicular bands made from strips cut from leaves. The materials they would create could be comprised of anything from animal skins or bird feathers to vegetable matter: shredded tree bark, wildflower petals, seaweed. Anni told me that the student who most impressed her was one who made a miniature loom using matches taken from an ordinary matchbook.
In her own life, clearly, the starting at zero was not theoretical. She did it twice: once by choice, once because it was imposed on her. The first occasion had been her going to the Bauhaus; this flight to America was the second. But now she had Josef, and they both had their overwhelming wish to keep making art.
ANNI TOLD ME that on the single occasion when she and Josef returned to Germany together, on the trip back to America, they saw, for the first time, the Statue of Liberty. “It had been night when we arrived in 1933, so we had missed it. Now, in 1962, we saw that arm raised high, as if she was welcoming us.
“And Josef and I said to each other, ‘This is one time when abstract art does not work.’”
America afforded them the opportunity to continue making art, and to keep the Bauhaus spirit alive, which they did, continuously, for the rest of their lives.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
1
As director of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe summed up in one sentence the achievement of his main predecessor at the job: “The best thing Gropius has done was to invent the name Bauhaus.”1 He made the slight not just because Gropius left the Bauhaus without adequate financing. Mies was a fighter, and few people brought on his pugilistic instincts more than Gropius. Mies had first encountered the man whose job he eventually assumed well before the Bauhaus was founded. Back then, Gropius was a well-heeled playboy, versed in horsemanship and good clothing and the other privileges of upper-class life, while Mies himself was still suffering as a complete outsider who didn’t have a mark more than his meager earnings at the Berlin architecture office where he slaved away after hours and Gropius left work early. Not only did Mies harbor a lifelong resentment of his colleague who grew up on easy street, but he also never considered Gropius a top-level architect.
Sergius Ruegenberg, Caricature of Mies with Model of Glass Skyscraper, ca. 1925. Mies was a man of few words. He labored over every detail and nuance of his buildings and expected his students to do the same. The student who drew this was the same person whom Mies asked to burn the papers showing his pre-modernist past.
The man who started his life as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies dressed up his background as best he could. Whereas Josef Albers embraced his humble origins and made them central to his identity, Mies invented a new self. Born in Aachen in 1886, he was the son of Amalie Rohe—there was no “van” or “der”—and Michael Mies; Mies van der Rohe’s name, which he assumed when the Bauhaus was in Weimar, was one of his most elegant artistic creations.
Ludwig’s father was eight years younger than his mother. They were both Catholic, and he was their fifth and last child; he had two older brothers and two older sisters. Ludwig’s paternal grandfather was a marble carver, and his father was a stonemason. It was an upbringing with few luxuries.
Michael Mies put the children to work at a young age. This was a necessity. Early in Ludwig’s childhood, Michael’s business, which had briefly flourished in the early 1890s, suffered financial reverses and went into such a sharp decline that it became impossible to pay workers’ wages. For All Saints’ Day, when people wanted grave monuments, Ludwig was given the task of carving the letters on them. He would in time develop a keen instinct for the finer things in life, but he learned the tough truths of stone first.
His mother, meanwhile, took him to mass almost every Sunday in the impressively grand but splendidly simple Palatine Chapel, built by Charlemagne around A.D. 800, when he made Aachen the capital of his growing empire. The clarity of its design impressed Ludwig; so did the power of balanced forms and harmonious proportions to suggest a totally different universe from the one he knew at home. He needed that domain of mental escape, for family life only got tougher as he approached adolescence. At age fifteen, Ludwig had to drop out of school to become an unpaid apprentice in construction work. His main jobs were to lay bricks and deliver coffee to the other workers. The idea was for him to get sufficient training so he could earn money, but when his parents stopped supporting him when he was sixteen, the builders still would not pay him for his work.
Forced to look elsewhere, Ludwig landed himself a job as a draftsman in a stucco factory. He quickly discovered that he had only just begun to harden himself to life’s difficulties. His boss, annoyed because of an error the sixteen-year-old had made in a drawing, threatened him physically. Ludwig told his employer, “Don’t try that again,” and walked out.2 The employer sent for the police, who agreed that such behavior was intolerable for a youth and went to apprehend the ruffian at his parents’ home. Ludwig’s brother met the uniformed officers at the door and argued that Ludwig had no obligation to return. Members of the Mies family put up strong arguments, and the police retreated, but shortly ther
eafter, Ludwig had a second encounter with the law. Inebriated, he mounted a large monument of Kaiser Wilhelm I and hopped into the saddle next to the emperor. This time when a policeman came he charged Ludwig. But the young man was too drunk to get down and be taken to jail. Again, Ludwig’s brother, who was on the scene and somewhat more sober, came to his rescue. He persuaded the policeman to go with him to get a ladder. By the time they returned, Ludwig had managed to scramble down and flee.
He remained in Aachen a bit longer, without further encounters with the law, and took odd jobs with some local architects, for whom he did whatever was asked of him. Then he made an even greater escape than his flight from the emperor’s saddle: he took a train to Berlin. It was 1905; he was nineteen.
LIKE ALBERS, who would be born two years later in nearby Bottrop, Mies was magnetically attracted to the sophisticated world of the capital. But while Albers would go to Berlin to advance his education and then return to his birthplace to work, Mies never went home again. Once he had tasted the pleasures of cosmopolitan life, he would not forsake them. And while both of these men from working-class backgrounds would marry sophisticated and wealthy Berliners, for Mies the marriage was merely a stepping-stone into a milieu he craved, while Albers’s alliance would be lifelong, enduring even after Anni’s family lost everything after the rise of the Nazis.
The first thing Mies did in forging his new life was to go to work for the architect Bruno Paul. He also took up printmaking. One day he was in the process of chiseling a woodcut when an elegant young woman approached his supervisor in the print workshop and said she hoped she might find a young artist who could design a birdbath for her.3 The supervisor did not suggest Mies, who might have executed as well as designed it, but the project for her garden was so successful that the woman came back to the supervisor saying that she and her husband were now looking for a young architect whom they could hire to design a house for them in the wealthy suburb of Neubabelsberg. The printmaker, knowing that nineteen-year-old Mies worked for Bruno Paul as well as in the print shop, recommended him. The woman, Frau Riehl, invited Ludwig Mies to dinner that evening.
Mies’s colleagues instructed him that he would be expected to dress formally. He rushed frantically “to all the desks in Paul’s office, borrowing money from anyone I could find so that I might buy a frock coat.” He also bought a cravat, which he later decided was completely wrong: “some wild yellow thing, totally out of place.”4
Mies van der Rohe later described that first encounter with the haut monde. He saw himself as having been a total rube, the ultimate provincial lad in the big city. He felt like a clumsy intruder as he observed the man ahead of him, in tails and covered with medals, gliding gracefully across the parquet. Mies had the impression that, as the host smoothly greeted one guest after another, he stuck out as a bumpkin.
In the following days, however, he showed no lack of mettle. Herr Riehl was enthusiastic about the neophyte, but Frau Riehl was not. Mies managed to convince her of his merits. Then, once he had secured the job, and Bruno Paul suggested he do it in the office under Paul’s guidance, Mies vetoed the idea. That decision cost him his day job, but allowed him to complete his first architectural commission on his own.
The house was not remarkable, but it was a decent start. By the time the twenty-six-year-old Ludwig Mies was photographed on the Riehl house veranda, his attire was impeccable, his wing collar and understated cravat and pinstripe trousers as correct as his cutaway. It did no harm that he had the face of a young prince. Mies was one of those people whose handsomeness opened doors, and who knew how to put his assets to good use.
2
In 1908, four years before that photograph was taken of the dashing and impeccably attired young architect with his first clients, Mies’s transformation had been given a jolt forward, when he went to work for Peter Behrens. For young designers interested in a new approach, Behrens was Berlin’s leading architect. Walter Gropius, three years Mies’s senior, was also employed by him. Gropius and Mies first met in Behrens’s office.
It might have been a scene in a Balzac novel. When the young workman’s son from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Aachen met Gropius, he was instantly aware that, unlike him, this well-connected young man had everything a rising architect could have wanted. Gropius’s father served in the city administration as a building councilor; his great-uncle had been a distinguished architect in the tradition of Schinkel. Besides having designed important public buildings and private villas, Martin Gropius had headed the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts, where Mies had briefly been a student. Walter Gropius had gone to the finest schools and served in the Wandsbeck Hussars—among the most glamorous of Germany’s cavalry regiments—whereas poor Mies had been nothing but a low-level soldier, and only for a brief period. When he went to work for Behrens, Gropius had just returned to his native Berlin from a thrilling year in Spain; Mies had never enjoyed a day without obligations. Mies assumed that the well-born, confident Gropius was not even paid by Behrens, even though he had a high-level job. Mies himself received a pittance.
Then, in 1910, Gropius, who was more bent on industrial streamlined form than was Mies, went off to work on his own. Mies, who did not even have an architecture degree, certainly could not afford to do the same. The groundwork was laid for a competitiveness and antipathy that would only intensify with time.
AFTER A YEAR in Behrens’s office, tensions between Mies and another young architect escalated to such a point that the two could no longer remain in the same place; since the other man had seniority, Mies had to leave. Following a hiatus of about a year, he returned. By then, his new social circumstances were forcing him to comport himself in such a way that his rough edges were concealed from everyone except for his intimates. His first clients, the Riehls, had some friends, the Bruhns, also a worldly and prosperous family, and the Bruhns had a daughter, Ada. The prospect of an alliance with an affluent, well-connected woman from Berlin was very much to Mies’s liking, and he began to pursue Ada Bruhn.
Ludwig Mies in the doorway of the Riehl house, ca. 1912. It was hard to believe that the impeccably dressed young man who had ascended to the upper echelons of Berlin society had, only a few years earlier, been running from the police in the town where he was doing construction work.
His improved social position had in the meantime gained him entry into a milieu that would enable him to forge into new territory with his architectural work. Mies was taken along one evening to the home of a second important client for a private house, Hugo Perls, a successful lawyer and collector of contemporary art. Perls, who regularly hosted soirées for the leading intellectuals of the day, was pleased to meet a young architect who was so different from others in the strength and clarity of his passion for clear and elegant design. The young architect explained to Perls in few words why he eschewed ornament and would avoid the usual vestiges of classical motifs most rich people expected on their houses. Mies was not blind to the past—he revered the strength of the nineteenth-century designer Schinkel, whose bold structures dotted Berlin—but he craved a simplicity that no one else dared imagine.
Hugo Perls’s unpublished reminiscence of his first encounter and subsequent meetings with Mies provides a vivid portrait:
After many experiences in old, more recent, and new art we returned to Berlin in the hot summer. Our small apartment under the roof, in the midst of the forest, had been furnished by mother and sister. We had only to unpack the cases with our treasures from Paris and to hang Picasso’s paintings on the wall. In the exhibition of the Secession we quickly bought Munch’s Bathing Men.
Soon there was activity in our attic. Artists came, one introduced another. One evening Ludwig Mies van der Rohe appeared. …Van der Rohe did not talk much; the few things he said, however, seemed right and were easily understood. Something like a new era had come about in building. Better architects were already trying to keep away from façades, useless ornaments, angles, bay windows, and all the glue-
on romanticism. A new classicism came into existence, and there was much talk about “decency” in building after Henry van de Velde had introduced morals into construction. What was being built was already less horrid than the usual, boastful architecture under William II. Van der Rohe’s convictions were sharp. If I remember correctly he explained the way of building a new house about so: “The architect has to become acquainted with the people who will live in the future house. All the major factors are easily derived from their wishes. Situation, direction, and the terrain, of course, play an important part in the final outcome of the blueprint. If all these are taken into account, the ‘how’ of the exterior follows organically.” We spoke about the functions of the parts of the house, although the rather dogmatic word “functionalism” perhaps did not exist. …
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