For Albers, the calmness and grace of Giotto’s work, achieved as much through the consistency of the brushstrokes as by the composition, exemplified the overriding control fundamental to good art. Equanimity through visual means would be a lifelong search for him and his future wife. He had no wish to imitate the appearance of Giotto’s work, only to try to achieve its eloquent clarity in the language of the twentieth century.
Albers was, in the most traditional sense, a picture maker. His priority was always the creation of wonderful artworks. Like Gropius, he was a connoisseur of beauty, but for him it required a spiritual element. Much of what topped Albers’s list of humankind’s greatest creations had a deeply religious aspect. The deities varied—the Parthenon, Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, and Machu Picchu were among his chosen masterpieces—but the attitude of worship was consistently vital.
As Albers formed his taste, Cézanne increasingly became the recent artist who mattered most to him. Once he received his certificate of good health, which allowed him to leave the sanatorium and resume teaching in the second half of 1916, he looked at Cézanne’s work wherever he could. He zealously applied his discoveries to his own drawing and printmaking. There were good paintings by the Frenchman in the museum in Essen, and Albers also made return visits to Osthaus’s collection in Hagen. He later said that this was the time when “Cézanne got into my bones.”12
What he learned from Cézanne became the artistic priorities Albers would take to the Bauhaus. With his blocky forms and undisguised brushstrokes, Cézanne made human presences and physical matter more impressive and real than did the nineteenth-century academics who attempted a flawless verisimilitude of surfaces. Where the traditionalists were fussy, Cézanne was earthy. He disregarded everyone else’s dictates, painted from the heart, and carved out flatness and three-dimensionality at the same time. He also presented colors boldly. Albers spoke of Cézanne’s “unique and new articulation in painting. He was the first to develop color areas which produce both distinct and indistinct endings—areas connected and unconnected—areas with and without boundaries—as means of plastic organization. And, in order to prevent evenly painted areas from looking flat and frontal, he used emphasized borders sparingly, mainly when he needed a spatial separation from adjacent color areas.”13 The acquisition of technical knowledge, the development of one’s eye, the will to push one’s art to an extreme and to brave the unprecedented: these were the main issues.
The notion of what was German, or in vogue, was irrelevant. Albers’s priority was visual art of universal appeal and staying power. The German expressionist Max Beckmann, his countryman and contemporary, was his artistic nemesis; Albers had a physical loathing for the thick lines Beck-mann used to divide colors, and considered them a trademark of incompetence and crudeness. Such lines stopped the special flow and prevented color from creating movement as it did in Cézanne’s work; it also denied each hue the magical power to affect the tones to which it was adjacent. (Several years after Albers’s death, when I was looking up a word in the dictionary he used, a handwritten note fell out from a page in the s‘s; on it he had written “‘swindle’ like Max Beckmann, who didn’t know his colors.”) In art as in his life, the housepainter’s son was in search of harmony and subtlety. Precision, clearheadedness, and the discipline required for magic were his goals.
THEN ALBERS WITNESSED an extraordinary dance performance. The Green Flute was a three-act ballet with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal set to the music of Mozart. Max Reinhardt directed it as a sort of musical pantomime; the performers included Ernst Lubitsch as well as Isabella and Ruth Schwarzkopf.
From Bottrop, on November 19, 1916, Albers wrote Perdekamp:
Dear Franz! if you want to see something insanely crazy (in a good sense), enjoy good expressionist stage art, then you must be at the Düsseldorf City Theater tomorrow (Monday) evening at half past seven. They’re presenting The Green Flute (by the Deutsches Theater, Berlin), a complete ballet with narration. I saw it on Friday in Duisburg. The greatest thing I have ever seen, the little old fairy tale is absorbed into something hugely dramatic and deeply fantastic. I could have screamed. In short: you have to see it! But the seats are very expensive. Try to be at the box office early. First try to get something in the stalls, seated or standing. Not the balcony! Rather standing in the stalls (that is already 5 marks!). I shall certainly be there—cost it what it may. In frenzied anticipation, best wishes
Yours, Jupp14
His enthusiasm inspired a series of drawings and lithographs based on the performance. They have a finesse and articulateness, as well as a Mozartian animation, that make them Albers’s finest work up to that time. These artistically restrained yet emotionally exuberant graphic images utilize lean, economical form to provide a succinct picture and create a powerful mood. With only the most essential lines and dashes, the Green Flute drawings and prints flow with a rapturous, graceful movement.
Celebration emerges from this work. Their mood is completely counter to the prevailing spirit of a grim mining town not far from the action of one of the worst wars the world had ever known. All of this would be essential to Albers’s teaching at the Bauhaus and afterward: the ability of art to provide energy and joy as an antidote to a less felicitous reality, and the use of a bare minimum of elements to impart volumes of information.
LITERATURE BECAME another route to transport in this period when Albers was enjoying renewed physical health. On April 14, 1917, referring to a play by Reinhard Johannes Sorge, who had died the previous year at age twenty-four, he wrote Perdekamp:
Sorge’s King David has set me all aflame.
I have never cheered so continuously while reading anything. He has it: a glowing temperament and iron discipline. Oh, the glorious sun in the first act. I was so absorbed that I thought I could play the young David myself, I had to act him (in mime).15
Albers was at the same time making self-portraits in which he depicted himself as a hollow-cheeked, psychologically haunted young man. In 1916, shortly after he left the sanatorium, he vigorously gouged linoleum to make his own profile ferocious. The piercing strokes—and the harsh juxtaposition of concentrated, pitch-black ink and the white of the paper in the resultant print—evoke raw emotional force. Having mastered, as if by instinct, the ability to reconstruct and evoke his own appearance, transforming the flat sheet of paper so that the void appears contoured and rounded, authentically representing the bulges and indentations of a lean human head, while simultaneously using line and shape to create a violent energy, he invests himself with all the force of Sorge’s David. Albers would shed this persona at the Bauhaus, where he structured and polished his art and became an elegant young man in spats, but he would not subdue the vehemence.
Albers continued, in his account to Perdekamp: “I was so absorbed that I forgot my Mephisto. And that means a lot to me: as I find it so difficult to get out of myself (and for that reason) so difficult to empathize with others: here I read with more assurance and confidence than ever before.”16
“My Mephisto” was a reference to a small oil self-portrait in which he presents himself looking so grim and demonic that, when she saw the work sixty-five years later, the elderly Anni Albers refused to authenticate it (see color plate 18). Although she finally acknowledged that she suspected the painting really was by and of Josef, who had died a few years before the canvas reemerged from the collection of one of his sister’s heirs, Anni would not include it in the catalogue of his work because he looked “so unbearably tortured.”
Why Mephisto? In the German literary tradition—Albers probably knew the character through Goethe rather than Christopher Marlowe—Mephistopheles (also known as Mephisto) is the devil summoned by Faustus in the presence of Lucifer. Mephisto is so hideous that Faustus orders him to assume the appearance of a Franciscan friar. Faustus then becomes immensely proud for having gotten the devil to succumb to his will; he fails to realize that Mephisto serves only Lucifer, the prince of devils. Faustus ultimately learns from Mephisto that hell is a state of mind, not a place.
There was nothing extraordinary about a gallivanting young man playing with the idea of himself as a diabolical creature dressed as a friar. Albers was determined to break away from the moral and artistic confines of his upbringing. He wanted to eradicate the past and live differently in every way. But the direction of his rebellion was uncertain. It would take the Bauhaus to give that rebellion a purpose.
WHAT GROPIUS ESTABLISHED in Weimar would be the catalyst for Albers’s maturing. It was there that he would learn to combine his wish for self-control with his emotionalism—in his persona as in his art. New technologies and abstract form would be his means to let exuberance, somberness, tranquillity, euphoria, and other states of mind exist in single objects, fastidiously made. The psychological element, while as strong as in the letters to Perdekamp and the Mephisto self-portrait, would now be presented with balance and distance. And he would be given a new way to embrace the skills that were, in his eyes, the high point of his upbringing.
In the period before the Bauhaus opened its doors to him, however, Albers had two different, compartmentalized sides. At the same time as he was creating the harsh linoleum cuts, he was blatantly emulating Cézanne. Here he used the side of a lithographic crayon to construct a series of small adjacent planes that move us through the composition. Dexterously employing the ridges of the laid paper to enrich the gray tones, he leaves blank spaces to help build up the mass. The control and restraint are impressive. Every area reads clearly, and the picture surface and three-dimensional space interact dynamically.
The economy, and the play between flatness and depth, are of a piece with the Mephistophelian work, however different the spirit. What would make Josef Albers the first student at the Bauhaus to become a teacher there was his consistent sureness and know-how even as he presented different emotional climates. All the work looks fresh and spontaneous, yet it has the presence of a building for which there have been a hundred blueprints.
In a large self-portrait lithograph that echoes Cézanne’s work, there is a consistent rhythm, and every area has significance. Each stroke contributes to the physical solidity and the organic coherence. The mass of shoulder and chin and skull is clear and distinct. A solidity of character emerges as well. We see a believer in principles, newly capable and convinced of his own rightness. The self-doubts Albers revealed to Perdekamp and the anguish of his other images of himself are here under wraps. If this is Mephistopheles disguised as a friar, he wears his persona convincingly.