It was then I knew it was absolutely hopeless. It was a political movement. It has nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with art. I had nothing to lose, nothing to win, you know. I didn’t want to win. But now we talk about what really happened in the end.
The city of Dessau decided to close the Bauhaus. They stopped us and they said, “You have to go.” The mayor, who loved the Bauhaus and wanted to help us, said, “Take all the machinery, all the weaving looms, and just leave.”
So I rented a factory in Berlin. I did that on my own. It cost me 27,000 marks for three years. It cost 9,000 marks a year. That was a lot of money in Germany, nothing in America. So I rented this factory that was terrible, black. We started to work—all of us—every student. Many Americans who were with us will remember that we cleaned it all up and painted everything white. This was a solid, simple factory painted clean, wonderful, you know. And just on the outside, on the street, there was a broken down wooden fence, closed. You couldn’t see the building. And I can assure you there were a lot of people when they came there and they saw this fence and went home. But the good ones, they came through and stayed. They didn’t care about the fence. We had a wonderful group of students.
One morning, I had to come from Berlin in the streetcar and walk a little, and I had to pass over the bridge from which you could see our building, I nearly died. It was so wrong. Our wonderful building was surrounded by Gestapo—black uniforms, with bayonets. It was really surrounded. I ran to be there. And a sentry said, “Stop here.” I said, “What? This is my factory. I rented it. I have the right to see it.”
“You are the owner? Come in. Come in.” He knew I never would come out if they didn’t want me to. Then I went and talked to the officer. I said, “I am the director of this school,” and he said, “Oh, come in,” and we talked some more and he said, “You know there was an affair against the mayor of Dessau and we are just investigating the documents of the founding of the Bauhaus.” I said, “Come in.” I called all the people and said, “Open everything for inspection, open everything.” I was certain there was nothing there that could be misinterpreted.
The investigation took hours. In the end the Gestapo became so tired and hungry that they called their headquarters and said, “What should we do? Should we work here forever? We are hungry and so on.” And they were told, “Lock it and forget it.”
Then I called up Alfred Rosenberg. He was the party philosopher of the Nazi culture, and he was the head of the movement. It was called Bund Deutsche Culture. I called him up and said, “I want to talk with you.” He said, “I am very busy.”
“I understand that, but even so, at any time you tell me I will be there.”
“Could you be here at eleven o’clock tonight?”
“Certainly.”
My friends, Hilberseimer and Lilly Reich and some other people said, “You will not be so stupid as to go there at eleven o’clock?” They were afraid, you know, that they would just kill me or do something. “I am not afraid. I have nothing. I’d like to talk with this man.”
So I went that night and we really talked, you know, for an hour. And my friends Hilberseimer and Lilly Reich were sitting across the street in a café window so they could see when I came out, if alone, or under guards, or what.
I told Rosenberg the Gestapo had closed the Bauhaus and I wanted to have it open again. I said, “You know, the Bauhaus has a certain idea and I think that it is important. It has nothing to do with politics or anything. It has something to do with technology.” And then, for the first time he told me about himself. He said, “I am a trained architect from the Baltic States, from Riga.” He had a diploma as an architect from Riga. I said, “Then we certainly will understand each other.” And he said, “Never! What do you expect me to do? You know the Bauhaus is supported by forces that are fighting our forces. It is only one army against another, only in the spiritual field.” And I said, “No, I really don’t think it is like that.” And he said, “Why didn’t you change the name, for heaven’s sake, when you moved the Bauhaus from Dessau to Berlin?” I said, “Don’t you think the Bauhaus is a wonderful name? You cannot find a better one.” He said, “I don’t like what the Bauhaus is doing. I hope you can suspend, you can cantilever something, but my feeling demands a support.” I said, “Even if it is cantilevered?” And he said, “Yes.” He wanted to know, “What is it you want to do at the Bauhaus?” I said, “Listen, you are sitting here in an important position. And look at your writing table, this shabby writing table. Do you like it? I would throw it out of the window. That is what we want to do. We want to have good objects that we have not to throw out of the window.” And he said, “I will see what I can do for you.” I said, “Don’t wait too long.”
Then from there on I went every second day for three months to the headquarters of the Gestapo. I had the feeling I had the right. That was my school. It was a private school. I signed the contract. It was 27,000 marks—a lot of money. And when they closed it I said, “I will not give up that thing.” And it took me three months, exactly three months, to get to the head of the Gestapo. He must have had a backdoor somewhere, you know. And he had a bench in the waiting room not wider than four inches, to make you tired so that you would go home again. But one day I got him. He was young, very young, about your age, and he said, “Come in. What do you want?” I said, “I would like to talk to you about the Bauhaus. What is going on? You have closed the Bauhaus. It is a private property, and I want to know for what reason. We didn’t steal anything. We didn’t make a revolution. I’d like to know how can that be.”
“Oh,” he said, “I know you perfectly, and I am very interested in the movement, the Bauhaus movement, and so on, but we don’t know what is with Kandinsky.” I said, “I make all the guarantees about Kandinsky.” He said, “You have to, but be careful. We don’t know anything about him, but if you want to have him it is O.K. with us. But if something happens, we pick up you.” He was very clear about that. I said, “That is all right. Do that.” And then he said, “I will talk with Goering, because I am really interested in this school.” And I really believe he was. He was a young man, about your age.
This was before Hitler made a clear statement. Hitler made this statement in 1933 at the opening of the House Der Deutschen Kunst, the House of German Art, in his speech about the culture policy of the Nazi movement. Before, everybody had an idea. Goebbels had an idea; Goering had an idea. You know, nothing was clear. After Hitler’s speech the Bauhaus was out. But the head of the Gestapo told me he would talk with Goering about it and I told him, “Do it soon.” We were just living from the money we still got from Dessau. Nothing else came to us.
Finally I got a letter saying we could open the Bauhaus again. When I got this letter I called Lilly Reich. I said, “I got a letter. We can open the school again. Order champagne.” She said, “What for? We don’t have money.” I said, “Order champagne.” I called the faculty together. Albers, Kandinsky … they were still around us, you know, and some other people: Hilberseimer, Peterhans, and I said, “Here is the letter from the Gestapo that we can open the Bauhaus again.” They said, “That is wonderful.” I said, “Now I went there for three months every second day just to get this letter. I was anxious to get this letter. I wanted to have the permission to go ahead. And now I make a proposition, and I hope you will agree with me. I will write them a letter back: ‘Thank you very much for the permission to open the school again, but the faculty has decided to close it!’”
I had worked on it for this moment. It was the reason I ordered champagne. Everybody accepted it, was delighted. Then we stopped.
That is the real end of the Bauhaus. Nobody else knows it, you know. We know it. Albers knows it. He was there. But the talk about it is absolute nonsense. They don’t know. I know.47
The Bauhaus Lives
1
I was with Anni Albers in September 1980 when she received a phone call saying that Nina Kandinsky had just been murdered.
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br /> The person on the other end of the line was Tut Schlemmer. All three of these women—Nina, Tut, and Anni—were now widows. Anni had had nothing to do with Nina since Kandinsky’s death; there was no feud, but she and Josef felt no real connection with her. A letter they had received from the Kandinskys in 1935 summed up the problem. Wassily had complained for fourteen handwritten pages about the hardships of making his way in Paris: “Neither the public at large nor the beautiful people show the least interest in art.”1 At the bottom, Nina had scrawled an ecstatic addendum. At a ball given by a Russian grand duke, she had worn a magnificent gold lamé gown and danced a Viennese waltz with a prince: “I would have loved, dear Albers, to have danced with you.”2
Anni had often cited that letter as an example of who Nina really was. Regardless, the news of Nina’s violent death flabbergasted her.
TUT EXPLAINED to Anni that she had gone to Nina’s villa in Gstaad, the Esmeralda, for a dinner date, and that no one had answered the door. She rang and knocked for nearly five solid minutes. Finally, she went to the nearest telephone and summoned the police. When they broke in, they discovered that Nina had been strangled.
Tut, who had been in Nina’s chalet a number of times, was pretty certain that none of Kandinsky’s paintings were missing. Everything was where it was supposed to be. And she knew that Nina kept most of her jewelry in the bank vault. But eventually it was discovered that Nina’s latest diamond necklace, valued at almost a million dollars at the time, was gone, as were some other items.
Anni, who favored Mexican clay beads, was fascinated with Nina’s taste in jewelry. A couple of years earlier, a curator from the Guggenheim Museum had described Nina at the Carlyle Hotel getting ready to go to the opening of a Kandinsky show. Anni, remembering how broke most everyone in Weimar and Dessau was in the 1920s, and having personally considered the Bauhaus an escape from the ostentation that prevailed in the Berlin of her childhood, was intrigued as she heard about Kandinsky’s widow going through a jewelry box that was like a treasure chest trying to decide whether to wear emeralds or diamonds or rubies around her neck that evening, and then addressing the question of which earrings to wear, and which bracelet and how many rings of precious stones. After Kandinsky’s death, the price of just one of his paintings had skyrocketed to a higher value than all that the artist had earned during his lifetime. With her new fortune, Nina had become so well-known for her million-dollar jewelry habit that Van Cleef & Arpels and Cartier vied for her patronage.
When the Bauhaus was in Weimar and Dessau and Berlin, the main issue had been survival; Kandinsky had been excited when he could finally buy new shoes. And those conditions had been an improvement over the earlier period when the Kandinskys’ toddler son died from malnutrition. No one could have imagined that there would someday be a group of Bauhaus widows who would be among the most powerful figures in a money-driven art world, or that Kandinsky’s former housekeeper would be a millionaire. But all this had come to pass. After Kandinsky’s death, the Paris-based art dealer Aime Maeght had “no problem worming his way into [Nina’s] confidence” and had encouraged her to spend freely—to enjoy herself for a change. This was observed by the pithiest of commentators on the worldly side of artists, John Richardson, who wrote:
The more she splurged, the more art she was obliged to sell, and the more Maeght profited. After all those years of hardship, why shouldn’t she treat herself to a car and driver and clothes from Balenciaga? Since she was Russian, why shouldn’t she play lady Bountiful with the vodka and caviar and wear a sable coat? And why, above all, shouldn’t she indulge her as yet unindulged passion for jewelry? Rubies, sapphires, above all emeralds reminded her of Kandinsky’s resplendent sense of color. … “Van Cleef & Arpels are my family,” Nina would declare.3
Anni and Tut chatted briefly about their new lives as managers of important artists’ estates. “We have something called ‘a foundation,’” Anni explained, as they discussed the irony that, having once been nearly destitute, they now spent so much time with lawyers and accountants and tax experts trying to manage the good fortune that had come their way in recent years. She also told Tut about recent and upcoming exhibitions of Josef’s and her work, although she was not boastful, and still acted as if the recognition that was Josef’s due had not fully arrived.
She and Tut agreed to stay in closer touch, and Tut promised that if anything more was discovered about the circumstances of Nina’s death, she would let Anni know.
THE MURDER OF EIGHTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD Nina Kandinsky has never been solved. But I was with Anni a month or so after the call from Tut Schlemmer—who never phoned again, because there was nothing substantial to report—when she had a conversation about the crime that fascinated her. John Elderfield, who was then curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was working with me on what was to be an interdepartmental Josef Albers retrospective there, had come to Connecticut so we could look at Josef’s unknown work together. Anni, however, was not so interested in Josef’s show as in what she might learn further about the strangling in Gstaad.
Elderfield, in his buttermilk voice and North-of-England accent, smiled mischievously and told her, “There’s a rumor that Felix Klee did it.”
“Nein!” Anni answered. But she was excited at the prospect, even as she and John Elderfield concurred that of course it was impossible.
FROM TIME TO TIME, Anni would mull over these events in her head. Could Felix have done it? Of course not, but there had been a lot of animosity when he remained in Germany after all the Bauhaus masters had left. Felix as a little boy had been so close to Kandinsky, even before Nina was on the scene, and then the two families had shared that house next door to the Alberses’ on Burgkuhnauer Allee in Dessau; could there have been something that went on that no one knew about?
After the Bauhaus closed, the Alberses had grown apart from most of these people. They had exchanged warm letters with Klee, but he died before the war was over. Josef and Kandinsky had stayed in close touch throughout the 1930s—Albers had even tried to get him to Black Mountain, and Kandinsky had organized and written about a show of Josef’s work in Milan in 1934—but Kandinsky, too, had died before there was any possibility of the Alberses visiting Europe again. They saw Mies a couple of times in Chicago, in spite of Josef’s views of the cigars and gin fumes, but Mies was never someone to whom one could be close anyway. When he died in 1969, the Alberses were aware that there was no one to whom they could write a condolence note.
A dance at the Dessau Bauhaus ca. 1926. The couple in the lower right is Nina Kandinsky and Josef Albers. In 1935, when the Kandinskys were in exile in Paris and the Alberses were in the United States, Nina wrote, after a fancy dress ball, “I would have loved, dear Albers, to have danced with you.”
Gropius, who died the same year as Mies, was the only one with whom they maintained a professional connection. The Alberses had both worked with him in 1950 on the Harvard graduate center. Josef designed a brick fireplace for one of the public spaces there; it has a subtle abstract pattern made through the various angles at which white bricks were set in mortar. Anni created woven room dividers and bedspreads in bold abstract patterns—they bear a remarkable resemblance to what would become the trademark lining material of Burberry raincoats—that added considerable panache to the students’ lives. Josef also made a mural in the early 1960s for the Pan Am Building; called Manhattan, it was installed over the escalators that took 25,000 people a day to and from Grand Central Terminal. It was based on one of his Bauhaus glass constructions, yet it conveyed the liveliness and energy he and Anni discerned in New York the moment they arrived there after leaving Nazi Germany.
Except for the time when Ise had embarrassed Anni about the pearls, the Alberses had not seen the Gropiuses socially. And while Josef maintained a connection with Marcel Breuer, the friendship ended completely after a feud erupted because Josef felt that Breuer had taken one of his designs—for an abbey in Minnesota of which Breue
r was architect—without giving him proper credit. Josef often broke off from people definitively, even as Anni tried to be the diplomat and work with mutual friends to achieve a rapprochement.
With their savior Philip Johnson, however, neither of the Alberses cared about maintaining the connection, even after Johnson gave Anni her exhibition at MoMA; they were too appalled by his betrayal of modernism and his embrace of historical forms. Equally important, the Alberses considered Johnson a socialite, not a dedicated artist of the sort they had known at the Bauhaus. He may have been the person who engineered their getting out of Germany at the best possible moment, but his affinity for rich and chic friends was more than they could tolerate. This was most apparent when he invited them to the Glass House in New Canaan for Sunday lunch and served them leftover meatloaf from a dinner party for “more important people” the night before: an offense they never forgave.
After Josefdied, and when Anni was suffering too much from dementia to understand more than the simplest ideas, I had a moment with Philip that made it easy for me to understand the rift. Philip was graciously showing me his art collection, which was in storage in a gallery space on the grounds of the Glass House. First of all, the style of the building would have set Josef’s hair on end. Then, when Philip was pointing out a large painting by Jasper Johns, I said to him, far more politely than Josef would have, that while I recognized that many people considered Johns a major artist and that the early painting Philip was showing me on a storage rack was of particular interest to people who prized his work, I simply did not like Johns’s art. Philip smiled and quickly responded, “Oh, neither do I. It’s just that Alfred told us we all had to buy them, and we did whatever Alfred recommended.”
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