Like his future confreres at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers was painfully alert to his own feelings. Everything was extreme: his consciousness of himself, his awareness of the world around him, his faith that art was salvation.
Albers wrote Franz Perdekamp, “Elsewhere I know no pure or complete attention to anything but myself.” He had been inspired by The Green Flute to think of Perdekamp’s life and work. “I think that this is because of the clarity of this glorious dance. And the shining drunkenness of the dancer (R.J.S.) that gilds even the slightest Spanish footnotes.”17 R.J.S. was Ruth Schwartzkopf, who danced the part of the one of the princesses; “Spanish footnotes” was code for sensuality and exoticness. Perdekamp was the rare soul who lived in that same world of unabashed passion.
The young teacher from Bottrop felt beckoned from the emotional dead-ness of the milieu in which he had been raised. He described to his poet friend his awakening, albeit obliquely:
Now I sense how you must have felt about it. About him, who delivers so much of what I have wished for so long, and what (it seems to me) you also wish for.
Man, you have put the right thing in my hands, where everything feels so unreal to me. Where just before the Golem seemed to speak from my soul: “Night is there to be destroyed by our thoughts, only then does life begin.” Before, I could not so easily rid myself of this (and I don’t want to); however, crystalline clarity does do one good. With grateful best wishes, from your Jupp18
What Perdekamp had in common with the unidentified “him” and what Albers joined him in desiring is unknown; what is certain, though, is that it involved unbridled feeling.
AS LONG AS GERMANY was still fighting, Albers had little chance to spread his wings to the extent he desired. He might scrounge the money for a ballet ticket, and at least he had the possibility of making art on paper, but he still craved greater change. On April 25, 1917, he wrote Perdekamp from Bottrop: “Voracious longing in me, haste right through me, stifling dark heaviness around me (screaming for a form!): it sears and shatters me with prickling unrest.”19
The way out of that restlessness and beyond “the hell of my home” continued to be literature.20 Albers was discovering the world he would soon enough be joining. He was captivated above all by two contemporary writers: Franz Werfel and Oskar Kokoschka, who was a playwright as well as a painter. Albers could not have anticipated that both of these men would be lovers of the wife of the founder of the institution he was soon to join, but he clearly felt the magnetic pull of the sophisticated, daring world they inhabited. On June 20, 1917, he wrote Perdekamp that he had read Werfel’s Wir sind [We are]—it was “magnificent” and Euripedes’ Trojan Women translation, which was to be presented in Dusseldorf. In Dresden they performed Kokoschka (directed by him). They say it had very good reviews. Man. A new age is dawning.”21
Albers, though, was still in his “dark heaviness” of depression. On the back of the postcard where he reported these performances, he added, “I’m no use any more. I don’t even enjoy a smoke. Can’t really enjoy myself or let myself go. Maybe it’s for the best.”22 Albers’s vulnerability, which he carefully concealed in public, was a driving force behind his clean and logical designs. He longed to corral his wayward emotions. His approach to teaching, and his imposition of geometric order on the inherent disorder of the human mind, would enable him to achieve his goal. But, like Kandinsky, whatever the façade, he had the fire within.
TWO DAYS AFTER mailing the card that pitted manic joy against deep despair, Albers sent Perdekamp a poem, “The Mosquito Swarm.” For the rest of his life, he would periodically write poetry, but he would never recapture the candor of this first known effort, with its leitmotif of independence and leadership, and, at its conclusion, the writer’s powerful swipe at placing value on the latest fashion and his defense of the notion of real rather than superficial progress:
All afloat (The Mosquito Swarm)
I see many men—many paths
Everywhere a restless to and fro
Or up and down
Without moving from the spot.
Each feels his place by sensing his neighbor
But if one wants to advance he cannot
attend to others,
must go differently from them—straight ahead
Likely he will be alone
But outside—though it be the death of him:—
he will feel the infinity of the universe—
Will the others ever follow?
(That need not trouble him)
Perhaps a later swarm will
(unconciously, not on his account,
maybe blown there by the wind)
reach his solitary place or follow his path
and perhaps then sense a new air
I see a second one,
who wants to tear the mass away from the spot he must not fly straight ahead.
He would glide past the others and they would not notice him.
Only by perpetual slow tugging forward, moving up and down or right and left
Could he tow the others along his path
(But the many knocks in his neighbors’ ribs and the leader’s bruises bring him down before his time.)
And yet there was a gothic time,
when the whole swarm moved forward
Maybe that was the result of a conjunction
Of many strong congenial leaders.
Later, though we still had very strong men
They were singular and unrelated
And did not give their time a great purpose.
Of the third kind who aim to achieve it smoothly,
My brief opinion is: cunning is not leadership
And a fashionable hairdo will not breathe new life
into an outmoded movement
And if we sense today
a great common urge
And divine and hope for
a new gothic age
(I just give the name Expressionism)
That only gives us the
involuntary unity
of many eyes “focused on infinity”23
These would be the values Albers would promulgate to hundreds of students every year at the Bauhaus: the need to set one’s own course, the silliness and futility of trends, the dangers of “Expressionism.”
Eyes needed to focus not “on infinity,” but on what was near, finite, and comprehensible. Inner passions might burn, but emotionalism worn on one’s sleeve was an unpardonable indulgence, a diversion from the search for clarity. Albers craved precise articulation. He believed that the overarching goal of communication must be the recipient’s comprehension—even if what was being communicated was the inherent imprecision and mysteriousness of life. These standards would dominate Albers’s thinking as a painter and a teacher for the rest of his life, especially when he and Anni became the first émigré Bauhauslers and Josef was, through his teaching, the primary transmitter of Bauhaus ideology to the New World.
ALBERS WAS DRINKING a lot in those days. On March 26, 1918, he wrote Perdekamp:
It was too delightful to sense health in Lersch and to see Winkler getting steadily grayer with the “Equals” and “Knockheads” (till I lightly stroked his little beard). How I got to bed I do not know. In the morning Mostert informed me that he had taken me to room 12 (afterward I remembered a green chaise longue) but that I had got into another room and crawled into Winkler’s bed there. At 9 a.m. Lersch then recited Franz Werfel to me in his boat. All vague. Except this one thing: that Brinkman (who met me for the first time and who valued me for my ingratitude) threatened to smash my windows if I would not accept him.24
What this was really all about—the sharing beds with other men—remains a mystery. Anni Albers was fascinated by homosexuality, male and female; Josef seemed completely uninterested.
When I knew him, Josef Albers was a very sensuous octogenarian, and by current standards out of control. After my first visit to the Alberses’ house, Ruth Agoos, the beautiful woman who had taken me there, described a moment that afternoon when Anni and I were upstairs looking at Anni’s prints and Albers invited her to see his latest Homages to the Square. They had no sooner stepped into his basement studio than Josef, gazing into Ruth’s face, cupped both of his hands around her ample breasts, massaged them for a few seconds, and then just exclaimed, “Ach! Ja!”
When he had to go to New York for the initial meetings about his retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the first ever given to a living American—Albers had a young driver who would take him to bars in Yorktown so that he could drink a schnapps and savor the sight of the young German waitresses. That was the extent of things, but when Josef was middle-aged, he had a series of love affairs, of which Anni was well aware. She was so insecure about herself as a woman that after Josef died she told me that one of her proudest moments in their fifty-year marriage was when Josef came to her saying he required her help to end a relationship with a mistress. Unable to shake off the woman with whom he had been involved, he needed his wife to step in; she willingly set up the necessary meeting and did so.
Albers associated homosexuality with weak art. His student Robert Rauschenberg (the Albers-Rauschenberg relationship merits a book in itself) was, he thought, a messy, out-of-control artist whose work garnered disproportionate attention; part of the problem was that the stars in the Rauschenberg—John Cage—Merce Cunningham galaxy struck him as something less than real men. (When asked by an interviewer how he felt about Rauschenberg’s work, Albers replied, “I’ve had so many students, you can’t expect me to remember all their names.”)
He also made withering remarks to gay men. One day, a well-known textile designer and businessman who dressed and comported himself like a stand-up comic’s version of a gay interior decorator came to pay a call on Anni. In the eyes of people who really knew the field, he was above all a clever fellow who had taken Anni’s approach and made a fortune with it by creating commercially viable draperies and upholstery fabrics, then marketing them worldwide; with none of Anni’s genius or originality, he had taken her ideas and made millions of dollars with them, while she probably never garnered as much as $100,000 in royalties in her entire life. None of this bothered Anni, even as she acknowledged it, for she was beholden to the man for having enabled her to receive some major awards and for praising her at every opportunity. But the fellow was of no interest to Josef. He dressed too flamboyantly, and even if he was a cult figure to certain elements of the New York design world, to Josef he was neither an authentic human being—the man was too enchanted with gossip and big names—nor someone with creative genius. And, although Josef would not admit it, the man’s lack of masculinity was unbearable to him. When the designer walked into the house, Josef waved hello to him from the kitchen but did not offer a real greeting. He had the air of a schoolmaster looking at a student he did not take very seriously. When he noticed that the man was wearing large, pink-tinted sunglasses beneath his wide-brimmed hat, he exclaimed, after addressing the man by his last name, “You look like a rabbit!” Josef then bustled by to go to his studio, making it clear that he had important work to do.
Once, during lunch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the openly homosexual curator Henry Geldzahler, whose father had been in the jewelry business, was wearing several rings, including a gold band with diamonds. Josef suddenly looked across the table at the moment when the diamonds caught the light and said, “Hen-ahrheigh, zat ring is for a voman!” To this, Geldzahler grinned and calmly replied, “That’s right, Josef.” Both men were pleased to have made their points.
As for his drinking: he was one of those people who could go for long stretches without alcohol, then imbibe to excess. When Josef was in his eighties, the collector Joseph Hirshhorn knew that if he arrived at the Alberses’ house with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, he could leave at the end of the visit with a group of artworks at a significantly discounted price. Anni described an occasion at Black Mountain when Josef passed out on the front porch of the small wooden house they were living in. She decided to put him into his pajamas and drag him to bed. Again, where many women would have been furious, Anni delighted in being helpful. The great manipulator of textiles removed what her husband was wearing and eased him into his pajamas. When she was done, she stood and admired him on the wooden floor, thinking he looked “beautiful and innocent, calm like a mummy.” She then realized the reason he resembled a mummy was that she had put both his legs into one pajama leg.
What exactly happened back in 1918 with Lersch and Winkler and Brinkmann is unclear. But there is no doubt that Albers was inebriated—and that, as was always the case throughout his life, whatever occurred, he appeared completely comfortable with himself. Although she had a sense of assurance when she wove or made prints, Anni Albers never enjoyed a feeling of self-confidence in her social interactions. Josef never lacked it.
IN THAT PERIOD just after World War I, Albers developed his draftsmanship further. He fine-tuned his ability to angle his lines and mete out their proportions so as to establish the volume of a head or the spatial configuration with nothing but a dash here and a stroke there. In his figure studies, he trained himself to present as few facts as possible—one line of one shoulder, the outline of its opposite hand—so that the viewer knows the entire pose and feels what he does not see.
A drawing of Perdekamp on plain brown paper brings his great friend to life simply and effectively. Albers had whittled his art down to basics: volume and plastic reality. He said a lot simply, as he would in the glass constructions he made in Dessau and, much later in life, in his series of nearly three thousand paintings, each composed of only three or four squares in identical relationship but offering an infinite range of visual experiences. The steady pencil profile line of Perdekamp’s profile is masterful, and the hair and spectacles exemplify Albers’s steely articulation. His ability to make flat paper a gently rounded head is nothing short of alchemy. The effectiveness of that visual conciseness was echoed by the inscription on this drawing—”Mein freund Perdekamp!”—with its out-of-character exclamation point, and the rare, euphorically scribed signature “a.” Having achieved his objectives, Albers savored the victory.
TOWARD THE END OF 1919, Josef Albers managed at last to escape, for a second time, the hometown that oppressed him. With the war over, he was desperate to taste the wider world again as he had in Berlin. In October, having saved up sufficient funds, he went to Munich to study at the Royal Bavarian State School of Art.
He was following the footsteps of Klee and Kandinsky, although he did not yet know it. His painting professor at the Academy was Franz von Stuck, with whom Kandinsky and Klee had studied a decade earlier. At the Bauhaus, the three of them would agree that von Stuck’s practice of having them draw from the nude had no value. Albers would further belittle von Stuck’s method later in his life: “They teach them in front of naked girls to draw. When they called me to teach at Yale, I saved them 7,000 a year for models.”25 That absolute stance was part of how he presented himself to others, but it was as much a construction as were the geometric drawings he called “structural constellations,” for to create his identity as an abstractionist, Albers hid his own past as a figurative artist. What he had drawn “in front of naked girls” had been central to his own formation just before he went to the Bauhaus.
Two months after Josef died, while I was helping Anni Albers organize the artwork he had left behind, I drove Anni to New Haven, Connecticut, about fifteen minutes from where she lived. She asked me to park in front of a building that had previously been the headquarters of the Yale University Press, the publisher of Josef’s great portfolio, Interaction of Color. Anni handed me a large bunch of keys and said that she thought Josef had a storage room in the basement, down a steep flight of stairs that she could not possibly manage. She asked me to go down there and see if there were any locked doors, and, if so, to determine if one of those keys could open it. She said the cellar would be so deserted that no on would even ask what I was doing. She was correct.
Twenty minutes later, when I returned to the car, I told Anni that she was completely right, and that I had just found a treasure trove that set my knees wobbling. On walking in, I had spotted, on top of a pile of magazines, a drawing by Paul Klee that was the first page of a folded letter Klee had written Josef. I then realized there was a sizable number of Josef’s glass assemblages stored on racks, and I had happened onto a stack of photo collages; this was when I had my first glimpses of the Bauhauslers’ summertime idyll near Biarritz. I had also found some file folders labeled “my early drawings”—and realized that Josef had been drawing nudes and landscape scenes right up until he went to the Bauhaus. Like someone concealing a crime he had committed long ago, he had saved them as carefully as he had kept his students and the rest of the public from knowing of their existence.
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, I returned regularly to that basement. Because Albers had dated a handful of the several hundred figurative drawings he had kept, it was possible to group them according to style and establish an approximate chronology for the work. It became clear that once he got to Munich, Albers drew more fluidly than ever before.
Von Stuck might be considered Munich’s Bouguereau: a highly sentimental painter, stylized and embodying the latest short-lived chic. It is difficult to imagine what he could have taught Albers, who already knew basic technique, any more than one can see an impact of von Stuck on Klee or Kandinsky. But Albers mastered a fine calligraphic style in the course of that year, applying ink with a brush in a way that echoes Chinese drawing at its most refined. He had a new assuredness, and utilized a principle he had gleaned from Van Gogh’s work: “The strokes of van Gogh, particularly in his portraits, always go with the form, the lines go down the nose, the lines follow the form. … I tried, indirectly, to do something similar. I was not copying Van Gogh; but afterwards I realized I was doing what he had done.”26
In Munich, Albers developed the practice of tackling an identical subject in different media and of presenting a single subject from various vantage points. He drew a nude with a thick brush and ink, and then did the same pose, with the same black ink, but applying it with a fine-pointed pen. The first drawing has a deep, basso voice; the second is a light soprano. While having his model remain absolutely still, Albers also shifted his position from her right for a first drawing, to her left for a second one, and then presented her squarely from behind in a third. The first image emphasizes the interior musculature of her back and torso, the next reveals more of her breasts, and the last of the three, in its descent farther down her bare buttocks, is, more than the other two, undeniably sensuous. Albers was realizing to what extent the issues of art were a matter of choice—not merely of the subject, but of the way we perceive it and the means with which we present it. The subject is incidental to the selection of medium and vantage point, and to the nuances of the artist’s own attitude.
AMONG THOSE DRAWINGS that Josef Albers had concealed for more than fifty years were two that show a pair of nude figures. In one, the two naked people are dancing in an orgiastic frenzy; in the other, they embrace with their bodies pressed together. It’s unfortunate that these drawings and photos were not known by the larger public during the artist’s lifetime, because that knowledge would have prevented the clichéd thinking that has led viewers to miss the sensuality and fire that underlie all of Albers’s work.
Albers certainly did not see either pose in von Stuck’s class. The naked man in the dancing couple is a self-portrait; even though this may not seem obvious since he is seen from behind, he has Albers’s identical head shape and haircut, the same thick neck, the same stocky build. Albers, who liked to dance, renders himself as perfectly in control. His posture and pose are confident and graceful. Doing what appears to be a tango, he is sturdy and dominating while at the same time calm and patient: an unbrutal master. He has his massive arms precisely where he wants them, and his bulging muscles function well. His feet are perfectly placed. This impressive specimen is a good dancer under whose steady guidance the woman is gyrating with pleasure. In the other drawing, a naked woman is being embraced by a second naked person we see from the rear and whose gender is indeterminate, although the hips and build suggest that it is a second female—an impression furthered by the hair, although not decisively. The two press their bodies against each other with tremendous physical and emotional force.
Loathing artists like Klimt and Schiele for their unconcealed eroticism, and even more for the excesses of their visual style, Albers was not going to risk the comparison, as he would have if he let the world see these images (and, we might imagine, many similar ones that have not survived). But, subject matter aside, they are, at heart, consistent with everything he would do once he arrived at the Bauhaus. They reveal a high level of concentration and a sure hand. They make clear how much Albers liked to tease and manipulate, to force our imagination. We picture the passionate looks on the dancers’ faces all the more forcefully because we cannot see them. Albers has us keyed up and stimulated rather than satiated. These deliberately enigmatic drawings anticipated the taste for unresolved mysteries that would underlie his teaching and his abstract work in Weimar and Dessau.
We cannot fathom everything at once; we feel the moment fleeting. The mood is one of expectancy and tension; the figures that join only at their hands are like the colors that touch only along shared boundaries in Albers’s later art, yet are palpably connected beyond their physical contact because of the way they interpenetrate and create mysterious shadows and illusory afterimages. Albers would deny the value of drawing nudes, yet in his own figurative work, the very stuff he would conceal forever after, he was acquiring the force and integrity that would define him at the Bauhaus.
THE WOMAN DANCING with Albers was most likely Frieda Karsch, whom he called Friedel. Two years younger than Albers, she was from a rich family; her father was a prominent architect. Born in Münster, she had been sent to Ireland as a young girl as part of her parents’ efforts to have her learn manners and become a society lady, but she returned wanting to take up a profession. Her parents would have nothing to do with the idea, so she ran away.
In Munich, Karsch sold her jewelry to have some money to live on. She arrived on the scene not long after Albers; in his first letter to Perdekamp, written a month after he arrived, he refers to a wonderful outing to the countryside with her. Karsch’s presence, however, did not mitigate his despair over his new life. It cost a lot more to live in Munich than it had at home, and the money he had to pay for his classroom replacement while he was on leave added a sting. Worse still, he was experiencing a form of painter’s block. From his cold rented room on Tuerkenstrasse, Albers wrote Perdekamp:
I must write to you of my complaints to Elenah. I would have preferred to write earlier and differently, but I cannot get free of myself, and the outside world is wearing me down. I see myself as a last [violin] string stretched to breaking point. And cannot release itself. No one can get it to sound. Nor to break. Not until the peg screeches back and it hangs loosely in space. Beside the instrument. Then an invisible spiteful finger comes and tensions it to the utmost. And so on. Changing quickly or slowly. Unpredictably.
Instead of doing something, I run around wildly. Do errands for others who put them to good use. Give the best advice, that brings rich profits. And steal myself from myself, so that I am left without time, money, or leisure.
Oh damnation, to be able to tear my bound hands painfully free, and the consciousness of having tied the bonds myself. So many obligations and considerations on all sides and such weakness.
I need to earn some money since I am so high and dry: the school office is demanding 1600 marks for a replacement for 4 months. According to that calculation I am left with 61 M[arks] for a whole year after 11 years’ service with corresponding seniority and cost-of-living increases. And I could earn good money. But I dissipate time and energy. Annoyed by silly insufficiencies I fill my palette but just sit there with my head in my hands. Paint one stroke and lie down. Work out the finest financial plans but am the most unbusinesslike person where my own interests are concerned. And am always aware that the roll of money would crumble away before the bare necessities had been purchased. So much has already gone and I hardly know where except for a glass of good wine.
While the ugly words stuff, leather, food buzz around in my head, because they have to be materialized. I am not where my efforts would pay off, carry sacks of potatoes for other people. Don’t send Merkauf the ordered pages, don’t paint the promised portrait that would bring in something, because I let myself in for silly distractions, because other people want to have company.
All the best, your ill Juppi27
The Josef Albers whom the public—and even his closest acquaintances—later came to know would have none of that vulnerability or stymied capability. If he had any sense of inadequacy, he would keep it under wraps. But for now he was contending with a self who suffered extreme low points and skepticism, and who felt as fragile as the taut violin string he depicts in his overblown analogy.
It wasn’t long, however, before life was looking up. Albers turned ebullient over the next couple of weeks, for reasons he explained to “Franz, Franz!”:
And don’t know whether I should rather be pleased or regret my last letter. For I am doing very well, since I already knew how many people were sympathetic to me. And it was nice to be able to be such a help to poor Friedel who coming from such a wealthy background now lives and eats so meagerly and has for so long been without not only ration cards but also coal and so freezes into the bargain. But doesn’t want to return home, where they want her back and always send her money so late. And she can’t come up to my room, so I carry bread and butter and baked apples out to her on the street and can only warm her with my hands. I may only carry a sack of coal just to her door. And play the flute beneath her window in the evenings. Sunday mornings we go for a walk, out to Schomenmacher. Me and my little child. And then Christmas. That will be beautiful. Bright and warm and beautiful.
Your Jupp28
ALBERS WAS DEVELOPING a specialty in wealthy young women intrepid enough to break away from their families. He was also awakening to an idea alien to his upbringing: sybaritic pleasure.
The idea that art and creativity might be one’s primary focus was revolutionary. In Bottrop, men got jobs, supported their families, and went to church; any enjoyment came mainly with schnapps. Albers was primed for something totally different. What the Bauhaus would be for him, as it was for Klee and Kandinsky, was not so much a place that pushed a particular philosophy and advocated modernism as a sanctuary in which to lead the good life and devote one’s self full-time to the unusual priority of making and thinking about and teaching art without feeling that this was an inappropriate distraction from some other, more “real” work.
At that moment in Munich, Albers did not yet know what Gropius had just started in Weimar, but he was ready to make a radical shift in his life. His plan at first was to join a trip to America organized by Backhaus, the man about whom he had written Perdekamp. Then he intended to head east and go to India, and was trying to work out the details. It was time for a life-altering change:
Easter Sunday, 1920
Franz!
We have been in the mountains for the last three days, where it is quite glorious. Although Friedel’s shoes have no heels anymore. But yesterday she wept for joy. …
Only one word comes to mind, “glorious.” One really is lost for words in the presence of such overwhelming timelessness.—
Now something else: travel. … Do you know anybody who could make a donation of part of the money, that he will anyway soon have to pay as a unification tax, for a scientific expedition or artistic experiments. Or perhaps a loan.29
If no one would back his going to America or India, or to Constantinople and Alexandria—which he was also considering—he was open to any adventure where the bills could be paid.
IN THAT TIME PERIOD, however, the farthest Albers went was to the Bavarian Alps—with Friedel Karsch. Now he began, with a loaded brush, to draw mountain peaks and chalets. These pictures of Alpine scenery soar with vitality. Art was a vessel for confidence. On July 5, he wrote Perdekamp a quick postcard:
From a cool bower surrounded by mountains of gooseberries and currants, birds chirping, cows mooing, dogs barking and distant boom-boom of the soldiers’ homecoming dance, best wishes from your block-nosed and smoke-tongued,
Jupp30
In his euphoria over nature’s bounty and the sense of life opening up in new ways, Albers stumbled upon the four-page leaflet with Feininger’s woodcut of a cathedral and Gropius’s few paragraphs describing the Bauhaus. In a society where documents about the most minor matters could run on for pages, this concise brochure, with its single illustration and one page of text, offered everything the restless Bottrop schoolteacher was looking for: a fresh approach to existence, freedom from the shackles of tradition, a place to pursue art, the chance of financial security, and the unknown.