While it lacked the cultural richness, particularly the immersion in music, of the environments in which the others were nurtured, the household in which Josef Albers grew up was a bit like a medieval guild—a preparation for the communal living at the Bauhaus if not for its intellectual expansiveness. The apprentices of “Lorenz Albers Meistermaler” lived with the family. So it was not only from his father but from the trainees a decade or so older than he that young Josef learned the skills of carpentry, stonecutting, and housepainting. Before he thought about art, he knew the way to paint a door: “from the inside out, so that you catch the drips and don’t get your cuffs dirty,” how to control his brush for window trim, and the methods for making the large flat expanses flawless. He told me this when he was in his eighties and explaining why he always started his Homages to the Square at the center and then worked his way to the edges, never superimposing colors, deliberately avoiding the appearance of his own hand and managing to have the edges of the flat colors abut each other with perfect registration.
Within a decade of his birth, Josef’s parents had a second son and two daughters. But then the relative equilibrium enjoyed by the family on Bottrop’s Horsterstrasse took an abrupt turn. When Josef was eleven, Magdalena died. Her youngest child was only two years old.
His father remarried the following year; then, at the age of fourteen, Josef went away to school in Langenhorst. While he was there, his father and stepmother had a son who lived for only nine months; a second son would not survive a full day. After those two tragedies, the couple stopped trying. Life’s vagaries and hardships made Josef long for balm, and during his three years in Langenhorst, he developed the idea that he would become an artist. The prospect turned his melancholy into optimism about life’s richness. Lorenz Albers opposed the idea. In his view, the very thought of a life centered on art was a dangerous fantasy, and he was determined that his children have solid professions. Compliantly, Josef went to the Royal Catholic Seminary in Buren to train to be a schoolteacher. He was an unexceptional student. When he earned his diploma in 1908 his grades were a “sufficient” in musical harmony and gymnastics and a “good” in agricultural instruction and nature studies, although he achieved a “very good” in conduct, diligence, and drawing. His self-confidence had to come from within. But at least he passed his teacher’s exam, took the official oath, and was allowed to teach the full range of subjects in elementary school back in Bottrop.
Albers was, however, still magnetically drawn to visual art. As soon as he had sufficient funds and a day with no teaching obligations, he made the two-hour train journey to the city of Hagen. Having learned that there was a remarkable art collection there, he was eager to see original paintings by some of the most innovative artists of the era.
In 1902, the twenty-year-old Karl Ernst Osthaus, one of those exceptional artistic patrons who had the foresight and courage to go beyond the givens of his day and to embrace what others had not yet approved, had founded the Folkwang Museum. Osthaus was guided in part by Henry van de Velde, the architect who, more than a decade later, would beckon Gropius to Weimar. He collected work by the German expressionists—Ernst Lud-wig Kirchner and Emil Nolde among them—and also had late-nineteenth-century French paintings by the revolutionary artists who had transformed painting more subtly. Osthaus had startling canvases by Paul Cézanne and recent work by Henri Matisse.
What Albers later recalled as a simple fact—that he had taken himself to Hagen at age twenty to meet Osthaus and see the Folkwang—was exceptional. Like his brother and sisters, he had been brought up with the expectation that he would live pretty much as their parents had. But Josef responded to everything more intensely than his siblings did, and had more romantic aspirations. Hagen was at the edge of the Sauerland, a bucolic region where he managed to go, on a shoestring budget, for vacations. He adored the deep shade of its pine forest, of which he made evocative drawings, just as he succumbed, by an inexplicable instinct, to the works by Cézanne and Matisse that were total anathema to most viewers. In his receptivity to new visions of beauty, he was different from the rest of his family and most of the people he knew. He also craved universal truths, and imagined they would be disclosed through the eyes.
The revelations afforded by Osthaus’s pictures were startling. For the rest of his life, Albers would consider that first visit to be a pivotal event. “I had my first meaningful contact with modern art in Hagen, where I spent my time as often as I could, and where I knew and admired Osthaus and experienced Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Denis for the first time.”4
He was dazzled by the directness of these works, by the boldness and courage with which their makers animated nature and evoked the power of painting. The sight of these modern French canvases changed Albers’s life forever.
FROM NOVEMBER 1, 1909, through September 30, 1910, Albers taught in Weddern at a Bauernschaftsschule. This is an old German term, no longer in use, and is translated as either “school for farm children” or “peasant school.” The experience helped define Josef Albers as an educator. In Bottrop, he had taught a single age group in a traditional way; now he was faced with a one-room schoolhouse. “I had all age-groups ranging from 6 to 14 years, boys and girls, together in one schoolroom. To do oral and written work in all elementary subjects—from religion to gymnastics—with these different age-classes in groups of changing combination, called for more than a carefully organized plan of study and curriculum.” As a result, Albers acquired (again the words are his)
a new understanding: That learning by experience cannot be lost and therefore outlasts book knowledge. That the experience of inner growth is the mainspring of all human development, just as the example of the teacher is the most effective educational means. That education by the school must lead to self-education … Education is not only an accumulation of so-called knowledge, but first and last seeks to develop willpower. For this is what education was originally invented for and why it was recognized time after time through the centuries: The integration of the individual into the community and society—that is, beyond economic aims for moral aims.5
As the Bauhaus professor who gave the introductory foundation course to more students than did anyone else—and later at Black Mountain, Yale, and the many other institutions where he lectured—he would emphasize experience over the accumulation of facts. He would also make himself the example of someone who learned by reacting and experimenting, not by amassing information. For Josef Albers, art was the encapsulation of morality—or of its lack. How one paints, designs, or builds testifies either to clarity and humanity or to selfishness and self-importance; art manifests generosity and intelligence or egocentrism and ignorance.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1910, Albers served briefly in the military reserves. That fall, his occupation as a teacher gave him a deferment, and he took another one-year assignment in an elementary school, this time in the town of Stadtlohn. Stadtlohn is in the Münsterland, a pleasant region of farming country and handsome villages whose center is the city of Münster, with its fine Gothic cathedral and narrow streets of half-timbered houses. Albers was delighted to be in this lovely part of the country, away from the bleak, industrial region where he had lived. His earliest extant drawing, Stadtlohn, dated 1911, depicts the view out the window of his rented room; by instinct, he enlivened an ordinary sight. This rendition of an unspectacular church pulsates with the artist’s visceral reaction to the force of right angles and architectural massing. He simultaneously animated two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, so that the viewer is moved sideways and up and down as well as into and out of the background. Albers could not possibly have anticipated his future—the Bauhaus did not yet exist even as an idea—but within a decade he would be manipulating glass and wood to similar effect in Weimar, and developing, with abstract shapes and folded paper, the approach to form that would take Bauhaus students into uncharted realms.
The young teacher was as enchanted by the possibilities of black and white as a musician is by changes in rhythm and tone. In Stadtlohn, Albers used unmodulated black lines and white paper to create a range of grays, demonstrating a point he would reiterate later in life: that in art one plus one can equal more than two. Most of the church windows have black panes and white mullions, but one is equally convincing with white panes and black mullions. The tower is white with black detail; the wall of the house in front is black with white detail. There were no factual reasons for these reversals. They reflect, rather, the spontaneous joy Albers took in transforming what was before his eyes. At the Bauhaus, he would pair photographs and sandblast refined geometric forms with a similar playfulness, exploring the unique territory opened up when one re-creates rather than reproduces.
Technique in hand, the artist was free, Albers demonstrated, to inject the visual with the quality of music. Beginning with his first drawing, he luxuriated in the opportunity that making art provided to enter the realm of imagination.
IN 1911, ALBERS RETURNED to Bottrop, where he continued to teach grade school. He was fascinated by teaching and learning in general, but became convinced that visual art was the most interesting realm. Now twenty-five, he felt that he had honored his promise to his father and earned the right to venture further. In 1913, he took a step no one in his family had ever taken before: he moved to Berlin.
In the sophisticated capital city of Germany, the housepainter’s son from an industrial backwater attended the Royal Art School in order to obtain a diploma that would enable him to teach art at the high school level. His professor, Philipp Franck, was a painter of mild-mannered impressionist-style scenes. Franck was a competent but unexciting artist; he had, however, developed a revolutionary approach to teach young people how to draw and paint. Franck had pioneered an educational method that required his pupils to be student teachers in the tough working-class neighborhood where the Royal Art School was located. In his book The Creative Child, he explained, “To be an art teacher requires a different disposition than being an artist. … Just as the artist can and must be as egocentric as possible …the art teacher must, with understanding and love, put himself in the place of his pupils whose natures are often quite different than his own.”6 Franck emphasized the need to draw from nature without attempting exact replication. The students’ task was to incorporate natural structure and growth in their work—very much the same principle Paul Klee would inculcate in his Bauhaus students a decade later.
Franck stressed that whatever the level of the student, seeing and observing were the essential prerequisites to attempting to record what one saw on paper. It was a simple enough idea, but given the way most people hurry without reflection, the idea of this Zen-like approach to contemplation was as radical as the interest in working with the poor. Albers was deeply impressed.
IN FEBRUARY 1930, when Albers was an established professor at the Bauhaus, he had a significant encounter with Philipp Franck. The occasion was Albers’s first public lecture outside of the Bauhaus, in Berlin in a large lecture hall at a library that specialized in the applied arts. Albers’s subject was “creative formation.” He had anticipated a small turnout and was pleased to find the hall nearly packed. The audience surprised him with their enthusiasm. He was particularly happy when his former professor was among those to come up to him afterward. Franck told Albers something he had never known: that Max Lieberman, probably the best-known contemporary painter in Berlin at the time, had chosen a colored paper “Montage und [sic] has today the much weaker name Collage” made by Albers7—the subject was a bottle of Benedictine—as the best in the class. Fifteen years later, he was delighted not only by Lieberman’s approval, but by the generosity of his own admired teacher in telling him this story.
Most of the paintings Albers did in Berlin, however, were, while spirited, rather coarse. Deny as he might the influence of other artists, the evidence makes clear the profound impact on him of Van Gogh’s work. Albers admitted to having a passion for Van Gogh, and at the early stage of his own painting, he could not help but imitate what he admired. Yet while his Berlin oils and watercolors have Van Gogh’s boldness in their charged brushstrokes and vibrant colors, they lacked the Dutchman’s refinement. Albers was still grappling with new styles in a new world, and had not yet developed a fine touch; it’s as if he was so excited by the possibilities of raw paint, applied directly from the tube, that he could not control his exuberance. The results are energetic, but short on subtlety.
His drawings of the period are far better. Here it became clear that Albers had an extraordinary gift, as well as the intelligence to take advantage of the chance to see, firsthand, work by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. He used his study of those northern masters to make real people emerge from his own subtle renderings in pencil.
Albers could turn a head, pull back hair, define a profile, and bring out a cheekbone. He knew how to use every line and angle to create weight or lightness. This was in part because he followed Franck’s advice of lengthy contemplation, and also because he studied the technique of some of the greatest artists of the sixteenth century. Beyond that, Albers modulated his pencil strokes to differentiate between quiet contemplation and feverish intensity. He could, when he chose to, draw in a competent, traditional style that was forthright and tender—rendering an old lady’s profile with authority and handling the graceful mass of her bun and the knotting of her scarf with skill and freedom, establishing the volume of a head as a complex sequence of curves. On these occasions, he adhered to many of the techniques of the masters. He was equally capable of sketching with lighter, faster strokes, charging his images with tense energy. At those moments, he was a mix of warrior and modernist: a product of his own invention.
But it was the Bauhaus that unleashed Albers as an artist of true originality and panache. There, the skill and knowing eye he had had from his start would be liberated; he would escape the last remaining bonds of tradition and make art that was more original and vigorous than any he had made before. Secure in a world where other open-minded individuals would marvel, rather than scoff, at art made from unexpected materials, and where rhythmic lines and vibrant colors were allowed to be the raison dêtre rather than devices in the service of representation, he would leap into an entirely new realm.
ALBERS RECEIVED his diploma from the Royal Art School on June 30, 1915. No one encouraged him to take the unusual course of becoming an artist rather than working in a trade like everyone else in his family. His grades on graduation were unspectacular: “adequate” in drawing from the live model and painting; “good” in drawing after natural form, drawing of objects, and drawing on the blackboard, with his only “very good” grades in line drawing, method, and art history.
That same year, Josef’s only brother, Anton Paul, was killed, at age twenty-five, fighting in the German army in Russia. With his own deferment from the military, Josef remained in Berlin, where he taught drawing at a high school level. But in November, when his leave from the regional teaching system in Bottrop was coming to an end and he sought to renew the permission to remain in Berlin, the authorities turned him down, although his sister Magdalena had replaced him at his teaching post, in effect fulfilling his obligation. After two years in an international metropolis, with great art and lively friends, he hated the prospect of returning to the small-town atmosphere and visual heaviness of smoggy Bottrop. It was equally disconcerting to him to be back under the watchful eyes of his family. But he had no choice. The Bauhaus did not yet exist.