I was taken to meet the Alberses for the first time on a fall day in 1970. In my mind’s eye, the last surviving Bauhaus masters would live in a sleek, flat-roofed house, glistening white, with a band of industrial windows. I imagined them appearing on a balcony railed in stovepipe—just like the ones I had seen in photos of the Dessau headquarters of the revolutionary art school. They would eat lean, geometrically organized food—possibly in keeping with the Mazdaist rules of vegetarianism—and drink tea poured from one of Marianne Brandt’s streamlined metal teapots.
This was one of the many ways I had pictured a very different encounter from the one I had. I certainly had not anticipated that within a couple of hours I would watch Anni Albers put Kentucky Fried Chicken out on a three-tier hospital-style rolling cart, explaining, with her soft voice and German-accented English, that it was always essential to specify “extra-kahrispy”—in order to have chicken like the classic Viennese version. Nor had I imagined that the former Annelise Fleischmann would arrange that take-out chicken on her perfectly plain white Rosenthal porcelain plates in a way that created a lunch with an aesthetic harmony I had never before witnessed.
Nor had it occurred to me that in extolling the merits of Heinz ketchup and observing the charming emphasis on “fifty-seven” as the fixed number of the company’s “varieties,” making me consider the excellence of a glass bottle properly shaped to fit into the palm of one’s hand, Josef Albers would lead me to an understanding of the goals of the Bauhaus. This was my way in to an appreciation for the Bauhaus’s fundamental values: knowledge of materials, the need for an object to be designed according to its purpose and executed with a respect for human scale, the willingness of businesspeople as well as artists to devote themselves to bettering the experience of others, and the real emotional benefits of such intelligent, moral, generous thinking.
All that I knew was that the Alberses had been associated with a lot that was pioneering in twentieth-century art. Josef’s Homages to the Square had made such an impact on modern painting that he was soon to be the first living artist to be given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Shortly after the end of World War II, Anni had been the first weaver to have a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, and had subsequently become an innovative printmaker. I looked forward to encountering living history, but I did not yet grasp what the lives of serious artists were like.
As I went off on that autumn day nearly forty years ago to meet the only remaining gods of the Bauhaus, I looked forward to the encounter with combined thrill and anxiety. But I did not imagine that my eyes would be opened to an entirely new way of seeing. Nor did I realize that with Anni and Josef, and the link they gave me to Klee and Kandinsky and the architects who led the Bauhaus, I would glimpse the humor and pain and the everyday realities as well as the consuming goals of the great Bauhauslers. More important still, I would discover that dedication to one’s passion, and the celebration and attenuation of what is wonderful in life, could become the fulcrum of earthly existence. The immersion in the visual world, not as something peripheral but as the central issue of one’s being, was strong enough to assure not merely one’s survival but an abiding sense of joy.
TURNING THE CORNER from a divided state road onto the Alberses’ winding residential street in the suburban Connecticut town of Orange, fifteen minutes from New Haven, I could have been anywhere in America, but I still expected to end up at a streamlined modernist villa with the style and perfection of a movie set. Instead, we turned into the driveway of an awkward, raised-ranch house, its wooden shingles stained the flat beige of Band-Aids, its slanted roof covered with the same asphalt as every other house on the block (see color plate 23). I was astonished by its ordinariness.
But the exterior of the Alberses’ house did have some startling elements. The graceless pair of standard rolling garage doors, the first thing that faced us when we stopped the car, had their windows painted out, as if to conceal something important. (I would later discover that there was a treasure trove of paintings behind them.) And the concrete foundation around the perimeter of the house was bare. Whereas most people shielded such foundations behind shrubbery, the Alberses had elected to leave exposed a rough, off-white expanse that conjured images of diggers and cement mixers and boldly acknowledged the demands of building in a climate with frost.
Perceptive visitors noticed. Joseph Hirshhorn, the collector and museum founder, went to the homes of many artists, as well as to those of his rich friends. He told me later that he could not get over the impact of that absence of foundation planting.
The barebones American idiom that suggested L.L. Bean ruggedness more than the international style of Gropius and Mies was deceptive. For, as I would come to learn through the Alberses, this unusual place was more emblematic of Bauhaus values than I initially realized. Its true simplicity and the use of standardized components made this shingle-covered raised ranch the perfect extension of the values of the art school that was one of the glories of Weimar Germany. The way that house facilitated the work and creativity of its residents, and made possible a pleasant standard of everyday living, achieved a Bauhaus ideal.
The essence of the Bauhaus workshops in glass and metalwork and furniture, all of which Josef was in, and of textiles, where Anni ended up, and glass and ceramics, had nothing to do with a set style. The importance of Bauhaus ideology was in the way it addressed the connection between our surroundings and our feelings. Morality, emotion, religion, humor: all could be echoed and nourished by what we look at and touch.
The Alberses exemplified this spirit in ways that were, like this house in Connecticut, surprisingly usual and completely unusual at the same time. Josef and Anni were direct and unaffected in their manners; they bought their groceries at the large local supermarket as well as at the more upscale family-owned market nearer by; they went to nearby discount stores and knew the ins and outs of the nearest strip mall. It’s just that as they did these ordinary things they brought magic to the experience, through their astuteness and powers of observation. Moreover, when they returned to their studios from their errands in Middle America, they made art that was poetic, original, and inestimably rich.
RUTH AGOOS, the friend who had brought me to Bauhaus North, was a collector of the Alberses’ work whom I had first met because her daughter and I taught tennis together in New Hampshire during the summers when I was at Columbia College. Now studying art history at Yale Graduate School, I was intimidated by the prospect of meeting these gods of modernism who were two generations older than me. Wanting to get everything right, I had tried to dress neatly for the introduction to these artists whose work was so impeccable, but my car had failed to start, and while hammering the fuel pump with a rock, I had gotten grease all over my one respectable pair of corduroys. My nerves were jangled as we walked in.
Knowing that the Alberses did not negotiate steps easily, Ruth had rung the bell and then opened the door on her own so that they did not have to come down the half flight of stairs between the main floor of the house and the entrance. As we stood in the entranceway and looked up over the scuffed white risers and worn wooden treads, Josef materialized first, from a corridor, with Anni following him. As soon as they were standing side by side, it was apparent that the immaculately dressed pair were almost the same height, about five-foot-seven. They could have been brother and sister—or a priest and a nun at a church parish house.
Josef greeted Ruth warmly. Not only did she collect his work and have the impressive cleavage that he found irresistible, but she was exotic in a Gauguin-like way, and he lit up at the sight of her. Resembling Spencer Tracy with his shock of straight white hair, he then took a moment to study me. He was polite, his speaking manner carefully modulated, but there was something slightly Teutonic in the way he immediately asked, “What do you do, boy?”
“I’m studying art history at Yale, sir.”
“Do you like it, boy?”
What should I do with this question? Albers had asked it with an edge to his voice, as if he were trying to penetrate to the truth.
I had just started my second year of graduate school, benefiting from a full fellowship that I would have hated to lose in an era when everything seemed up for grabs because of the Vietnam War. Albers had been chairman of the Department of Design at Yale through most of the 1950s. I feared that, with someone so high up in the university power structure (or so I falsely assumed, having no idea that Albers considered himself a renegade who had been victimized by power-hungry inferior faculty members and their hidebound backers in the upper ranks of precisely the sort of institution he had spent his whole life challenging), I risked losing my foothold. But my interlocutor’s direct manner invited an equally candid response.
“No, sir, I really don’t.”
“Why not, boy?” I explained that I was being forced to research the minutiae of iconography, that for a course on Seurat I was consigned to a library basement to learn about gas lighting fixtures in nineteenth-century France, and that when I asked my professor about the color relationships in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, or about how Seurat applied his pencil to the textured paper on which he often drew, I had been reprimanded for the irrelevance of those questions to the subject matter of the course, which was exclusively socioeconomic. I told Albers I was afraid that my passion for art was being eroded. The effect of this sort of education was that when I now went into museums, rather than having the direct visual responses that had until now made me want to devote my life to art, I was tending merely to process information.
“This I like, boy. Which of those bastards in art history don’t you like?” We discussed a couple of well-known names in the department at Yale, and then Albers asked me the key question: “What does your father do?”
I wanted to tell him what my mother did. My mother was a painter—I had grown up with a studio in the house, redolent with the smell of oil paint—which I thought would be of greater relevance than Dad’s profession. But I sensed that my questioner cared far more about my male lineage.
“My father’s a printer, sir.”
“Good, boy, then you know something about something. You’re not just an art historian.” I suddenly had the feeling that the grease stains on my corduroys, making me resemble a car mechanic more than a graduate student, had not done me any harm in Albers’s eyes.
I WAS SO TRANSFIXED that I cannot remember at which moment in the conversation we had walked up the stairs to where Josef was standing, the statuesque Anni silent but beaming at his side. I had never before encountered someone so visibly possessed by his beliefs, and who gave of himself so totally. Both he and Anni—she was commanding and radiant even while saying little—appeared to be partaking of the richness of life to an extent I had not previously witnessed.
I felt that if I remained receptive, I might be taken into their world. Josef clearly had absolute opinions, but what was equally apparent was that, while issues like the craft of printing and the irrelevance of much art history obsessed him, and he knew he was set apart from most people, he was open and receptive, and eager for connection. He engaged with the totality of someone who was interested in giving. He thought of himself as a vessel of ideas, not an eminence; being privy to the miracle of art and of visual experience, he was determined that others have similar pleasures. He and Anni were the real thing.
THE MAN I ENCOUNTERED that day in 1970 was in many respects unchanged from the person who had started giving the Bauhaus foundation course in 1923. Albers followed a teaching method and approach he had developed even before Moholy-Nagy joined the staff, and which he considered superior to Moholy’s ideas. He deemed Moholy’s teaching, like the man himself, confused and unpleasant. His own teaching was, in contrast, an extension of the training he had received from his father, and therefore eminently sensible. He determined that the physical properties of the components of one’s work should be the starting point. While he believed that Itten went no further than texture—Albers often compared himself favorably to his contemporaries, stressing not just that they were second-rate, but also that they were morally corrupt—he was determined to investigate the real properties of materials. He would recall telling his students, “Let’s try what we can do new with wire. Give it a new shape, what can we do with matches, what can we do with matchboxes in a project. And then later I introduced the study of paper, what [sic] was at that time considered a wrapping material.” He exposed the students, he explained, to “the most important craft materials, such as wood, metal, glass, stone, textiles, and paint, and to an understanding of their relationships as well as the difference between them. In this way we tried …to develop an understanding of the fundamental properties of materials and of the principles of construction.”43
Albers had the students work with their hands with materials ranging from paper to steel, with rock that was resistant to cutting and rock that quickly crumbled, and with a diversity of artistic media. He also arranged for them to observe professionals using various techniques. “We visited the workshops of box, chair, and basket makers, of carpenters and cabinetmakers, of coopers and cartwrights, in order to learn the different possibilities of using, treating, and joining wood.”44 The students were then assigned to make objects, among them storage containers and toys and toy furniture, first from a single material and then from various materials combined. Once they had achieved the necessary mastery, he encouraged inventiveness, but the know-how came first.
IN THE EARLY 1970S, half a century after he taught this use of materials in Weimar, Josef Albers had a favorite restaurant on the Boston Post Road, in the strip mall nearest his home. It was called the Plank House; even the name appealed to him, with its straightforward reference to solid materials.
The Plank House—which Albers pronounced “zee puhlehnckhaus”—was part of a chain, a forerunner of the restaurants that have proliferated since, with a menu that consisted mainly of broiled steaks and a copious salad bar. It also featured an offering of fish sturdy enough to stand up to firing on a sizzling grill, which fascinated Albers because it showed an understanding of the chemical components and structures of the fish in relation to the way its flesh responded to heat, and also because he liked swordfish. What has since become a restaurant cliché seemed, at the time, excitingly inventive, and it was to the Plank House that Anni and Josefwould take Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lord Snowden, Henry Geldzahler, Maximilian Schell, and the other interesting visitors who came to see the master in his modest studio. The regular lunch crowd of bank tellers and car salesmen seemed impervious to the colorful art world figures who arrived with the elderly German couple in their dark green Mercedes 240 SL, while the Alberses marveled at every detail of this ordinary slice of American life.
On one of these state occasions when I was lucky enough to be invited along, the first thing Josef pointed out was the laminated tables. Their heavy wood veneer tops were coated in a thick layer of shiny polyurethane. Josef liked to rub his hand across the surface, saying it was a perfect use of technology, because it was comfortable to eat on, satisfying to look at with the wood grain shining through, and, most important of all, easy to clean. With one wipe of a damp sponge after every use, it always looked brand-new, he explained with unabashed joy—the same delight with which Anni, discussing new materials, would say, “I love ‘drip-dry.’”
Josef also admired the salad bar. For this, there were many reasons. The clear plastic domed shield that served the purposes of hygiene while one looked at the produce was, again, a perfect match of a modern material with multiple goals. The array of salads and condiments thrilled him—especially the pickled beets and the various seeds, which reminded him of some of the tastes and textures of his youth. But what was best of all was the way that the serving bowls and the plates were all kept chilled. He noted particularly how the metal containers retained their coldness even longer than other vessels.
He didn’t just make casual comments about these details; he marveled at them. They reflected an intelligence, a knowledge, and a clarity of thought that had, he told me, been the very essence of what he had tried to impart at the Bauhaus.