In Berlin, the lean and rakish Albers had encountered beguiling women very different from the girls back in Bottrop and developed a circle of male colleagues who shared his interest in art, as well as in fine clothing and in worldly living. It was a setback to have to resume teaching at the Volkschule, and move back in with his family.
Albers’s solution was to make art as never before. He compensated for his isolation from urban pleasures by beginning to draw more, and in a freer style, than he had in Berlin. He returned to the Münsterland and sketched its picturesque life—the horse-drawn carts and barnyards full of chickens. He made vigorous drawings of the grandest houses in the towns—they suggested affluent living, and he was enchanted—and of the Münster Cathedral with its richly variegated surface. He also made multiple images of the dramatic interior spaces of the naves and side aisles, and of the towers reaching heavenward.
He became fascinated with rabbits and made vivid sketches of them. But he did not turn only to subject matter that was intrinsically charming. Albers also did many drawings of the sand mines and workers’ houses in Bottrop. There seemed to be no sight that did not fascinate him: schoolgirls with their feet slipping out of their wooden shoes underneath their desks, workers climbing electrical poles to repair power lines, the myriad aspects of ordinary everyday life—he captured them with a style less inhibited than in his earlier work.
That range of subject matter is emblematic of Josef Albers’s approach. When he began to work with color at the Bauhaus, and then when he taught and wrote about color for the rest of his life—treating it as something that should be seen on its own, independent of associations with known subjects—he stressed the need to abandon judgments that elevated one hue over another. In his eyes, every shade of the spectrum was valuable. If it could be seen, it was interesting: this is the approach that emanates from his drawings of bleak streets of humdrum architecture in Bottrop, as it would in his teaching at the Bauhaus.
In Albers’s drawings from 1915 to 1919, every stroke is loaded with significance and intensity, and with an ease that was previously missing in his work. Albers had developed a rapid shorthand that enabled him to sum up sights without a gratuitous dot. He revealed his subjects as they were, encapsulating the unique shape as well as the timidity of those rabbits, and the haughtiness of owls. He endowed dancers with suitable grace and made children sweetly awkward, all the while strictly eschewing any hint of personal commentary or evaluation. The idea was to observe and then to present.
Beyond teaching at the Volkschule, he gave courses at the high school level, studied at the School for Applied Arts in nearby Essen, began to work in stained glass—designing and executing a rose window for the local Catholic church—and made a number of woodcuts and lithographs. In the prints of the grim neighborhoods where the local miners lived, Albers managed with just a few short, rapid strokes to put the streets and buildings solidly within our grasp. He may have labored, but the labor does not show. Every spontaneous yet controlled movement of the crayon serves a purpose and reveals a trained hand.
The making and teaching of art completely absorbed him. The exigencies of wartime didn’t allow for travel or many escapes from his father’s household, and whatever extra money he had went for art supplies and to cover his printmaking expenses, but he was doing what he wanted. Fortunately, he had a soul mate who understood his priorities. Franz Perdekamp, a poet and writer, the youngest of his father’s nineteen children (by two different wives), was both a good drinking companion and someone to whom Albers could elaborate about his artistic obsession, which no one else he knew understood. They caroused happily when they weren’t working, and emboldened each other to believe that it was possible to follow one’s passion in life.
ALBERS WAS YET another future Bauhausler whose life changed in a sanatorium. At the start of 1916, a bout of what was probably pneumonia required him to go for a cure in the mountains south of Bonn. But while the sanatorium in which Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius met was an elegant hostelry that might have appeared in a Thomas Mann novel, the one where Albers received his treatment, Hohenhonnef, was for civil servants and soldiers recovering from disabilities caused by the war. He was there for nearly six months.
Albers’s deliberate lack of interest in health problems, and his denial of anything that got in the way of making and teaching art, caused him to eliminate those six months from the meticulous chronologies he made of his life. When I met him, he was in his eighties; he told me he had never been in a hospital or suffered a health problem beyond a cold. It seems that Anni Albers, although she was married to Josef for fifty years, never knew about the sanatorium stay either, since she often said that Josef had “never once been ill, except for colds and sometimes a hangover;” when she took him to the hospital on his eighty-eighth birthday, she told the doctors he had never been hospitalized before. All of the existing literature places Albers at work at Bottrop during the time period, as does the information Albers carefully disseminated during his lifetime.
If not for the letters Albers wrote to Franz Perdekamp—which became known only in 2003, when Perdekamp’s grandchildren revealed their existence—that half-year medical leave would still be unknown. And vital insight into the artist’s nature would be lost. The correspondence is remarkable, for it unveils the real Josef Albers, the very opposite of the Josef Albers most people saw. The world encountered an Albers who was entirely resolute, didactic, and lacking in playfulness. That misconception was largely perpetuated by the artist himself. Albers concealed his lack of certainty as well as his sense of mischief. The assumption that he lacked normal foibles is equally the result of a misperception of his best-known artwork, which at first glance looks austere. Most viewers don’t initially see its humor or poetry, or recognize the romanticism behind its creation. The letters to Perdekamp, which began when Albers was taking his cure in the mountains, show someone who was emotional in the extreme, who struggled hard against his demons, and who relished forms of beauty that bowled him over: this, in fact, is entirely consistent with the character of his art, even if the burning passion is initially recognizable only to people of unusual perceptiveness.
At Hohenhonnef, Albers—whom Perdekamp addressed as “Jupp”—was feeling, even more than before, how different he was from the people around him. Jupp wrote his friend:
My neighbor here in the hall has just returned from [a visit to] his wife and child and tells me of the treasure of having one’s own hearth while upstairs I am trying to write and abuse my homeland. I feel both love and and hate inside myself. The faithful tales next door go on. The attic in my head is in a terrible jumble.8
Alcohol brought him some relief. Part of the prescribed cure consisted of taking long walks, and Albers would head off to a small town on the banks of the Rhine, where he snuck the occasional schnapps. To describe this to Perdekamp, he invented a verb derived from the name of the strong wheat-based liquor indigenous to the region: “I doppelkorned too much,” he wrote.9 Pleased to have gained a needed six pounds, he considered the drinking that the sanatorium authorities forbade part of his private cure.
IN THOSE SIX MONTHS, Albers had more time to reflect than he had ever had before. He further crystallized his belief that artistic and human values are the same. He considered painting and poetry, the forms of expression most on his mind, as exemplars either of humility and compassion or of pretentiousness and mendacity. He became insistent that tenderness was one of the most essential elements of painting and poetry—as it was of a person’s soul.
Albers also prized and exemplified forthrightness. A person must never dissemble about what needs to be said and is true, even if its effect is painful. When he wrote Perdekamp a frank evaluation of a recent poem, he did not hesitate to risk hurting his friend’s feelings; the need to perfect one’s art mattered far more than the possible pain of a critical word. That belief would underlie all of his teaching at the Bauhaus and afterward. The opinions Albers voiced kindly but candidly to his closest friend were the essence of the standard he would bring to the Bauhaus and try to imbue in his students: “You want it that way, namely firm and wild. And yet you have, I think, so much warmth and softness in you. Why don’t you yield to that a little more. Perhaps it speaks in other poems, particularly as the ones you sent cover only a short time span. You know I like spikiness and hardness, but it has to be organic.”10 Albers believed that artwork, while it should be done well and done carefully, failed if it was too emotionally restrained.
Albers had not yet formulated the credo he would promulgate for the rest of his life—”minimal means for maximum effect”—but his subsequent reflections on Perdekamp’s poetry led him directly to that idea. Modernism was not, nor would it ever be, the issue; what counted for him were qualities that were universal and timeless, and could be found in various civilizations throughout history. This was the consciousness he would urge on others in Weimar and Dessau, and then when he carried the gospel of the Bauhaus to the New World:
On reading your poems I have often thought about my old theme: equilibrium in works of painting.
And I always came back to the old (or better early) Italians. The ones you can still call primitive: the group around Giotto and the Siennese. Why do they give such an immediate impression of greatness? Because their techniques were so simple. They only had tempera and fresco and a few pigments. The master had to make his own tools and so there were not many. Look at a modern catalogue of artists’ materials and ask yourself what percentage of this was available to the great old masters. They had great souls, but the limitations of their means certainly helped to prevent them dissipating themselves. With modern sophisticated materials all you ultimately need is a certain cleverness. But that needs to be searched out, and the overall result is not so outstanding. Juggling about with particularly attractive details destroys the balance. That is what the old masters had. You find the same brushstroke in the corner as on the face of the principal figure. They don’t tie themselves in knots, and although they had no theory of composition they instinctively made their works harmonious. And they did not hold back their emotions. This is what I would like modern art to value: spatial distribution. It is so much better than composition and comes much closer to the ideals of the old masters, and for me it feels much less artificial (think of the idea of composing by the golden section), much more artistic, and much freer.11
The work by Giotto that Albers knew firsthand was a single magnificent panel in Berlin: the large Death of the Virgin, a tempera from circa 1310. This tympanum in what was then the Kaiser Friedrich Museum is a complex and delicately balanced arrangement of a crowd of characters. What Albers calls the “spatial distribution” has been achieved with such eloquence that the scene perfectly accommodates the broad triangular form for which it was made. The subtle colors, and the precision and flair with which the facial expressions and postures have been rendered, give great poignancy to the scene. The end of the life of the Holy Mother is both suitably sad and exquisite.
The overlapping in a graceful sequence of golden halos testifies to the supreme artistry of the early Italian master who, by the standards of the early twentieth century, was still considered a “primitive” rather than an artist of the Renaissance. Albers had studied Giotto’s work through black-and-white reproductions, which is all that were then available, but the Berlin tympanum had been his only chance to observe the color orchestration the Italian had managed with his restricted palette. The young artist from Bottrop marveled at the way that Giotto’s adjustment to certain limitations—the obtuse angle of the top of the panel, the dictates of his medium—enhance rather than diminish the result.
That take on Giotto’s work was unusual. What Albers admired—the small number of hues, and Giotto’s great reach in spite of shortcomings inherent in tempera and fresco, the only media available to him—were not the qualities most people first discerned in the Italian. The direct connection between the impact of the artwork and the realities of the technical means was vital. Without knowing it, at the very moment when Gropius was formulating his ideas in a military tent, Albers was embracing what would be one of the fundamental principles of the Bauhaus.