In January 1924, Albers was obliged to return to teach a semester in Bottrop, in order to retain essential funding from the regional school system there. When he came back to Weimar, he devoted himself with renewed purpose to the foundation courses he gave. He was disgruntled, however, by the amount of time his students had to spend on their homework for their other courses, mostly in technical drawing. He protested in writing to Gropius, who forwarded his complaint to Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Schreyer, urging them to lighten the load so that the students could do justice to their work with Albers. Everyone agreed, and Albers’s course became central to Bauhaus education.
Albers described himself in Weimar as uninterested in decrees “from some higher direction … independent … alone.” He went his own way, educating by encouraging experimentation, and by personally exemplifying traditional skills combined with independent thinking. Albers admired that same level of artistic passion and free thinking in three of his colleagues. Years later, in a 1968 radio interview with the BBC, he explained:
Klee, Kandinsky and Schlemmer … were masters in this sense, that they didn’t give a damn for their old masters. They did not look backward or read books before they went to class. They had developed themselves and therefore they were able to develop others. … I have never taught art, I think. What I have taught is philosophy. I have never taught painting. Instead I have taught seeing.45
Not that Albers was in the same echelon as Klee, Kandinsky, or Schlemmer at the Weimar Bauhaus. They were older than he was and had already proven themselves as artists; he had not. But he was on a steep learning curve. Of all the Bauhaus students, Albers had a fire and conviction—and an originality—that put him closer to being in the same league as his heroes.
Klee’s poetry and sense of the cosmic were unique, and Kandinsky’s spirituality and ability to pair abstraction with sound made him unlike anyone else. Gropius was apart in his multidimensionality, his extreme diplomatic grace and prodigious energy combined with a sense of conviction. Schlemmer was talented not only as a painter but as a choreographer, besides being a pithy observer of the cast of characters at the Bauhaus. Josef Albers, though less formed than they were, was distinguished by his rare combination of rigor and adventurousness, and by a ceaseless energy that enabled him to achieve a lot and enjoy himself fully while never appearing to have made enormous effort.
By 1924, Albers’s accomplishments in glasswork and his furniture designs had made him one of the star students at the school. But above all it was the impact of his teaching, which caused him to be, even while he was not officially on the faculty, one of the most influential people at the Bauhaus. His ideas were not as original as Klee’s or Kandinsky’s, but the way in which he delivered them made him uniquely effective as a teacher. He used language succinctly, and students felt the tremendous joy that could result from the skillful manipulation of materials and the creation of artistic form. Albers had fire in his eyes. With the force of a great preacher, he made complex ideas simple, so that his intoxication with seeing became contagious. As the situation of the Bauhaus in Weimar became immensely precarious, more and more people turned to him for guidance.
At that time, however, Albers was not even sure if he wanted to stay on. That October, he wrote the Perdekamps:
Dear Franz, dear Friedel,
There’s a great rumpus here. Pro and contra louder and louder. Whether we shall pull through or not is unclear or perhaps clear. We are getting an enormous number of expressions of strong support from all over the place.
I think that if we are allowed to stay we need to find a better atmosphere. I want us to succeed again so that we can take off for some other place so much the more splendidly. I am thinking of the West. A move will cost us a year, but that may help overcome internal defects. Of which there are not a few. Perhaps only the spirit should survive. So many people are thinking of their own legs in the spring. You have probably already heard that all masters have been given notice.46
What was telling was that, even as he considered going his own way, he had become enough a part of the Bauhaus community to say “we.” And he was unusually sanguine through the ups and downs of the institution. Albers dealt with life’s events the way he adjusted to the requirements and realities of the wood he was joining into intricate shelf units, or the glass he was cutting and mounting for windows. The goal was to do one’s best with whatever the reality was, without losing sight of one’s artistic goal.
He believed that the dismissal of the masters was just temporary, and that the negotiations to keep the Bauhaus in Weimar had a fair chance of success. Nonetheless, he favored pursuing the idea of the school moving to Cologne, as Konrad Adenauer had suggested. The priority, whatever was happening, was to maintain one’s perspective and keep making art. While he was not yet officially on the faculty, in spite of his doing more active teaching than anyone else, Albers was already proving himself to be one of the most stable personalities at the Bauhaus. He was completely alert to the conflicts within the school as well as the challenges from the outside to Gropius, yet he soldiered on cheerfully, assuring the Perdekamps, “We have a lot of work ahead of us and feel secure.”
For a special Bauhaus issue of the magazine Young People, published that November, Albers became a spokesman for the school. There was, as he described it to the Perdekamps, “a revolutionary essay written by me: ‘Historical or Present,’ in which school and youth movement and Bauhaus are projected in one line.” In that essay, he further articulated his credo of respectful independence. “If we adopt the corrective action of freeing ourselves from history, to be able to walk on our own two feet, and to speak with our own mouths, we need not fear disrupting organized development.” He advocated “freeing ourselves from the conceit of individuality and from received knowledge.” Albers believed that such an approach would lead to “becoming united.”47
Similarities of human dwellings, clothing, and household objects produced by machines would, Albers wrote, lead to a better way of life. That was one of the objectives of the Bauhaus; the growth of each human being was another: “Schools should allow much learning to occur, i.e., teach little. May each individual be given the widest latitude to explore his options, so that he finds the place that suits him best in working life. The Bauhaus is pursuing a path toward this goal.”48
In this early essay, Albers expressed his desire for everything to lead toward “construction as synthesis. … Our desire for the simplest, clearest form will make people more united, life more real, and therefore more essential.”49 Albers’s embrace of rational thought and the belief in the removal of excess were always in service of those higher purposes. He sought to use arts education as the means to achieve greater harmony among individuals and a deeper understanding of the inherent wonder of life. He had the charisma to convince others that this was possible. The schoolteacher from Bottrop became the Bauhaus’s first homegrown deity.
MOST OF THE MAJOR BAUHAUSLERS had their angels in the outside world. For Kandinsky, it was Galka Scheyer; for Klee it was, above all, his dealer Goltz, in combination with his devoted sister Mathilde. Albers’s ambassador and source of financial support, Franz Perdekamp, had far less importance in the art world, but he still provided the emotional and practical sustenance that enabled Albers to go on. In that period of the early 1920s when inflation was most dire, Perdekamp sent him small amounts of money. Like Kandinsky with Scheyer, Albers wanted to make sure it represented an exchange and was not just a gift. He wrote his friend, saying he hoped Perdekamp had “subtracted the necessary bottles for the art dealers. This is most important to me. If you did not, please catch up on this.” (“Bottles” was Albers’s way of discussing commission money, which could be used to buy doppelkörn, or other libations.) At the same time, he was eager not just to sell his own work, but to help the Bauhaus in general: “If you know somebody who wants to build a house, please get him interested in us. We will organize everything.”
In Hamburg, Albers had met a Mrs. Monkeborg, who lectured at Hamburg University and who “reinforced my belief that young Catholics are the best basis for our new efforts. I would like to meet with them in the West. Who is the director of the ‘Weißer Reiter’? Are there any other major groups and any individual big guns?”50 The Weißer Reiter—White Rider—was an organization in Bavaria that focused on Jesus as the prophet. Albers believed that this religious group might support Bauhaus modernism, and he also shared their faith.
Neither Albers’s family nor the regional teaching system in Westphalia approved of his self-imposed exile, but he was increasingly sure it was the right decision.
At home they seem to be very disappointed that I am not coming back. I am only sorry that I may have to disappoint them further. Life is after all terribly hard and yet wonderful. Recently I have been a little down. But otherwise I feel very confident. And I am enjoying the mutual education in my preparatory course enormously. Write soon and tell me all about you and Friedel and the children. Long live life.
Your Jupp 51
BY DECEMBER, life at the Weimar Bauhaus no longer seemed tenable. Josef and Anni and Marcel Breuer were considering starting off on their own.
He wrote the Perdekamps:
My dear chums,
It is really nice of you to send me something again. I feel myself strongly in your debt and I know that you do not have all that much yourselves. It has become terribly difficult to stay here. My relations with Gropius and the Bauhaus ideal have shifted so far that I shall have to roll out the heavy artillery. It emerged in a meeting today that I am financially the worst off of all and that there seems to be no possibility of an improvement. For me it is now critical to think of leaving and finding something better elsewhere. Anke [Anni], Lajko [Breuer], and I are thinking of trying to set up on our own in Berlin or somewhere else. …
I don’t think anyone believed in the Bauhaus ideal as much as I did. But I see the inifinite possibilities that are available here draining away because nobody believes in a financial change for the better. I can’t give you all the details. Perhaps the start of the letter does not indicate clearly enough [that] it is not just one thing that is causing me to leave. For a long time all efforts here have been expended on wasting all our resources polishing the façade and it is impossible to combat the internal tuberculosis.
As I said, it cannot go on like this. What would be needed is a thorough reform, starting in particular with improving personal relations. But nobody sees this as a possibility.
Perhaps it may be possible to get more people together somewhere else, and find better ways of cooperating without harmful centralization, based on individual independence.52
Albers’s next communication to his friends was from the small island of Sylt, in the North Sea off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. He was in high spirits, had gained weight, and now knew that the Bauhaus would relocate to Dessau, where he would have a real teaching position and a large workshop in which to make glassworks. Yet again the Bauhaus was a source of hope.