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To be concerned exclusively with relations, while creating them and seeking their equilibrium in art and in life, that is the good work of today, and that is to prepare the future,” Albers wrote.⁵⁸ He had no doubt that to approach art with integrity went hand in hand with how one addressed everything else in life. Balance and temperance were vital; so was enthusiasm. If in his personal relationships, other than with Perdekamp and Anni, Albers was a shade remote, he made a conscious effort to get along not only with everyone at the Bauhaus, but even with the family members back in Bottrop with whom he shared so few interests. His goal in his human connections was consistent with that of his art and design work: to guide others to the visual pleasures to which he was privy.

Among his Bauhaus colleagues, Albers spent a lot of time with Kandinsky, a friendship they maintained with an intense exchange of letters after the closing of the school. They did not, however, reveal personal intimacies to each other. What Albers wanted, more than the storminess inevitable in truly close human relationships, was a quality of equilibrium, a mutual support—which suited the very private Kandinsky.

With his desire to avoid disturbances in life, Albers remained deliberately distant from politics. He avoided anything associated with Communism during Hannes Meyer’s reign in Dessau. In America, in the 1960s, he declined to join an exhibition of work by artists opposed to the Vietnam War, saying he felt a debt to the policies of the government that had offered him and Anni a safe harbor when they fled Germany. (In that instance, what he considered “respectful” antagonized many in the art world, affecting the market for his work and his overall artistic reputation in a liberal milieu that not only endorsed such protest but expected it.) Rather than argue with people, Albers would express anger and then walk away. What for him was the satisfactory resolution of a problem was a source of hurt feelings for others.

Albers ultimately had rifts with almost all of his former colleagues. In the case of Marcel Breuer, he would come to feel wronged, and while he stayed in touch with Bayer and Feininger, he never went out of his way to see them, although they maintained their connections at a distance. Albers seemed to require detachment in order to focus all his energy on his work, and he often assumed a superior position, cloaked in modesty that made his reserve come easily. He did not feud with Mies van der Rohe—they were never close enough for there to be a reason—but he claimed that, when Mies was in Chicago, his collection of Klee paintings faded because of all the cigar smoke and gin fumes in the apartment. Unlike Anni, Josef wasn’t bothered by any of the schisms, even by a dreadful feud with his last print-makers, Sewell Sillman and Norman Ives, whom he initially intended to manage his legacy. Ives had a terrible automobile accident after their split. When eighty-six-year-old Josef and seventy-five-year-old Anni learned of it, they drove to the local hospital and delivered a card to the nursing station but did not visit the patient, who was just down the hall. This was Josef’s idea of equilibrium.

Albers’s retreat to essential solitude and his well-tempered but relatively cool connections with family were, like his eschewal of his own hand in his work, a means of staying pure by avoiding anything disruptive. His art did, indeed, represent his ideal for how the individual should integrate with society—by maintaining the same independence and the well-regulated interdependence he gave to colors and forms. Mondrian wrote that “equilibrium, through a contrasting and neutralizing opposition, annihilates individuals as particular personalities.”⁵⁹ That balancing act, in painting as in human interaction, was Albers’s objective.

FORTUNATELY, when he was at the Bauhaus, Albers confided more deeply in the Perdekamps than he did in most of his friends later on, so we have a record of his inner life. The recently discovered letters let us see the fire and vulnerability and humor he was intent on concealing. On New Year’s Day 1928, from the Hotel Zum Löwen, in Oberstdorf (Allgäu), a resort in the Bavarian mountains, Albers wrote to those exceptional friends who were allowed behind the façade, and who evoked the warmth he generally kept in reserve:

Dear Franz

Dear Friedel

We are so far apart that we have rarely been able to hear each other. So today I must shout more loudly. First of all our best wishes for the 28th. That you may be happy. Your children well. Your house in order. Your work satisfying.

I have the feeling that we have told each other very little since the summer holidays. There was a lot to tell. Anni had a kidney problem, which troubled her for a long time and has still not quite gone away. At the Bauhaus there have been internal and external frictions. The internal ones due to the obligatory autumn student revolt. External ones with the press. City elections in which we were the point of contention. Slurs as usual but on the other hand unexpected interest. Over 12,000 visitors in the last year. From all over the place. But the financial situation is very difficult. Everywhere lack of money, space, time. Everyone had to do their bit. For me it is relatively easier than for the other Junior Masters because I have no workshop, but if I could not frequently get to Berlin I would probably already be more rigid.

This year I shall be 40. So I must make my mark soon. I have two aims for the coming year. A pedagogical text about my teaching method, just aims and results, and an exhibition of my new glass pictures. That will be a lot of work. I must not let this book evaporate like my planned one on “Functional Formulas,” for which I still have a lot of material.

In my classes I have developed a new method of teaching design, which is generating a lot of interest and attention here. I am after all supposed to be a pedagogue.⁶⁰

Albers had, he told his friend, as many as seventy students per term. He was also creating what he called “wall pictures in glass,” for which he invented a form that his friend Ludwig Grote, director of the Dessau Museum, termed the “thermometer” style—an expression the nonchalance of which Albers liked and used forever after. He had a commission for large windows at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, and had been asked to make proposals for windows in the lecture halls of the new Folkwang Museum in Essen as well as for a modern church in Berlin, all in keeping with Gropius’s wish for Bauhaus work to be broadly disseminated. Albers continued his letter:

So I have boasted enough, because business is not what I really want. I would much rather sit quietly to one side and occupy myself with my experiments and investigations into form. Not too long, and then back to business, preferably in Berlin, which is getting a fabulously modern look. We are always dreaming of erecting a shanty hut there.

As yet we are a long way from there.

For the moment we need to air ourselves here, especially Anni, who is still not fully recovered.

Every morning we go skiing, although the snow here sometimes fails us. We have to trek ½ an hour and only find crusted snow, falling on which (and that is what we are best at so far) can be quite painful, but afterward one is out of breath, tired and hungry so that it is wonderful to lie down again.

How are your children? How many will there shortly be? I have heard nothing from Andres. Give him my regards if you see him and also the Hunkemöllers. I have indirectly heard that Alois Bürger had blood poisoning and lost a finger. Natz Becker has died.

My sister Lisbeth has got married. I not only hear very little about how things end up, but almost nothing from the West. But I have made a note to send you some photos soon, so that you can see that it only seems that way.

So have a happy 28th and all our best wishes from your Alberses⁶¹

This was the dash with which Albers was proceeding in life. As was true for Klee, his marriage provided a stable base that enabled him to put the greater part of his prodigious energy into making art, designing, and teaching.

Albers’s wish to transform the world visually, to modernize it intelligently, consumed him. In February, he sent Perdekamp a postcard:

Dear Franz. There are certainly reservations about flat roofs. Namely for the reason that our builders do not want to do a high-quality job. There are different methods of constructing a flat roof. But the most important thing is that it is done conscientiously and thoroughly. Here in our area it works well if it has been properly constructed. The cleverest method seems to me to be the one Le Corbusier used in Stuttgart. He says that too much movement of the reinforced concrete due to heat and cold can cause cracks, he covers the waterproof membrane with a rain-dampened layer of sand which he covers with concrete slabs. Grass grows in the gaps (c. 5 cm). He has flower beds with direct connection to the layer of sand. So it always has the same humidity. The contractors: Durumfix-Roofing Ed Klar and Co Ltd, Stuttgart, Ulmer Str 147.⁶²

Albers continued on the back of the card:

A steel house built according to your own plans would probably come much more expensive. Or you would have to adopt ready made plans, and they are unlikely to have several stories. Exterior and interior plastering? That doesn’t seem right to me. It must be the most significant thing about steel houses, that plastering is not necessary: dry assembly.

“Experiments” are really thankless unless the contractors are trained and interested. So I advise you not to try things with the walls that are not well-known in the area. The flat roof will also cost more, but it adds space. With a house the interior is the most important thing. Use plain standardized doors without panels. Plain fittings and handles. The Planning Department in Frankfurt has good used ones. Plain walls, sharp corners, no molding on the ceilings. A large surface is the most beautiful thing about a room, as the ancients knew from the Egyptians to Pompeii and up till Schinkel, then it went wrong.

Simple, simple, simple. Empty space is the most beautiful thing !!!!!!!!!!! Best wishes, the children must soon be well, Jupp⁶³

Albers was as adamant about these points half a century later as when he wrote Perdekamp. He was outraged by the flat roofs his old colleague Breuer had put on houses in Connecticut, because they were not engineered to withstand the snow and ice of New England winters. The emphasis on “design” rather than effectiveness was, Albers remarked, “the problem with architects,” which was why he “preferred engineers.” And the need for standardization was essential. Breuer had designed a school with seventeen different sizes of windowpane, many of which had to be custom-cut. Albers was appalled. Especially at a school, where “children playing ball can be expected to break windows,” it was imperative, he felt, to have only one or two sizes of windowpane, even if they were multiplied in different configurations, “so the janitor can keep them in stock and easily replace them.”⁶⁴

It wasn’t just that he had opinions; he was passionate about these issues of right and wrong. Albers, who often described himself as “a frustrated architect,” felt that illogical design choices that made people’s lives unnecessarily difficult were immoral. He found the falseness of postmodernist fagades, just coming into vogue at the end of his lifetime, an inexcusable lie.

A chair that Albers designed in 1929, which could be broken down for easy shipping, was featured in an exhibition of the latest Bauhaus products.

Albers himself never lied. He just became silent if Anni asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.

ALBERS’S CHAIR OF 1929 exemplified his beliefs. It was made of units that could readily be assembled and disassembled and could fit into a tidy flat box for shipping. These pieces of bent laminated wood—veneers molded around matrixes and glued—were as thick as they were wide. This was not an original idea—knockdown chairs had been made and sold through catalogues since the nineteenth century, and other designers had worked in bent laminates—but what distinguished Albers’s work was the subtlety of its proportions and the perpetual flow of its gracefully modulated right angles. That aesthetic grace combined with functionalism was rare. Albers brought the painter’s eye to the crafts. He made objects that had the meticulousness, and the splendid sense of measure, of his glass constructions. Thus fulfilling his concept of moral form, he gave harmony to the everyday act of sitting.

A person sitting in this chair acquires something of Albers’s own attitude toward life. Held upright, ready to read attentively or to talk alertly, the user is impressed by a quality of decisiveness. The chair is not tough or hostile—the seat is cushioned, the wood smooth—but it encourages alertness; one does not slump.

While the supporting elements provide essential structure, a cantilever causes a slight oscillation. The result is that the chair is steady yet vibrant, grounded yet floating, so the experience of being in it is at once earthly and fanciful. And whether one simply feels that life is in order or allows one’s mind to wander, the correctness of the proportions and the logic of the material impart a sense of rightness and, therefore, well-being.

Albers’s design was in deliberate contrast to the furniture of Mies van der Rohe, which Albers knew well. Mies’s seating and tables are emphatically elegant. His Barcelona chair of 1929 was a modern version of a throne; for all of its purported simplicity, it connotes grandeur. The materials of Mies’s tables are fine and expensive, the chrome polished and shiny, the marble the richest travertine. Albers used stovepipe and structural steel brackets. Rather than employ saddlemaker’s leather, he chose a modest, easily cleanable textile. Artistic flair was evident not in the lavish choice of expensive materials, but in the proportions, which cost nothing. That approach realized Gropius’s original ideal: design that would work for the masses.

He honored the dictates of the wood and steel and glass he used for everyday objects, but he also manipulated them. For a fruit bowl, Albers measured and fit contrasting materials to render them ethereal. Wooden bearing balls, a sphere of glass, and a chrome frame—impeccably machined parts put to rare domestic use—create a container with a spirit and visual harmony that made the mechanical lovely.

Albers also designed a hotel room and two kiosks for the Ullstein Publishing Company, which was owned by Anni’s family. The kiosks were never built, but the hotel room was assembled on the second floor of a house Mies van der Rohe built for an exhibition in Berlin. Anni Albers’s brother recalled that on the wall there was a map of the city of Berlin, so visitors could find their way. This bit of logic, which garnered his young brother-in-law’s admiration, was a perfect Albers touch.

ONE AFTERNOON when I arrived at the Alberses’ house, Josef had me join him in his studio right away. He had just solved a major problem and was eager to tell me about it.

At the Bauhaus, he explained, he had designed an alphabet in which every letter was constructed from small squares and circles or fractions thereof. These were the only components allowed.

Having drawn the letters, he also made them out of white milk glass, cutting the geometric components out of a sheet about a centimeter thick. This was so they could be used in relief. The arrangement was such that if these letters were applied to outdoor surfaces, neither falling snow nor dead leaves would get stuck on them. Rather, they would fall through the letters, which had vertical slits and concave, never convex, shapes at their tops. Besides having in common with Klee’s work the artist’s self-imposed restriction to a bare minimum of underlying units, the “Kombinations-schrift” adhered to these inviolable rules. Thus Albers outsmarted nature.

At the Bauhaus, however, Josef had never been able to resolve the letter Z. He had tried reversing the S, but deemed the mirror image of the S’s right-angled triangles and semicircles not quite fluid. Now, after all these years, he had figured it out, and designed a Z that satisfied him. He had drawn it in pencil on top of a photograph of the original glass alphabet he cut at the Bauhaus. Looking triumphant, he showed me the new Z, and then handed me the photograph. “Here, Nick. You are the keeper of the Z.”

I tried not to overread the moment, but I took the responsibility seriously.

IN ALBERS’S TEA GLASSES, two ebony handles, each half of a flat disk, one vertical and one horizontal, are attached to a curved stainless steel band that holds the glass cup under its slightly flared lip. Here Albers was accommodating the way in which human beings instinctively pass or receive small objects. He explained to me, with considerable satisfaction, that for the person handing over the tea glass, it made sense to hold the horizontal handle, while the recipient did better with the vertical one. To deduce this, he had studied the way people cocked their wrists and used their fingers. That attentiveness to everyday experience, with its implicit reverence for human capability, was fundamental to Bauhaus thought. This was Josef Albers’s vital message: “Observe! Celebrate! Apply your intelligence to every act! Make the most of things. Relish the moment.”

YEARS AFTER GOING to America, Albers wrote, in English, about a conversation he had with Kandinsky in the time period when he was making these objects and advancing his work in glass:

	Kandinsky
	in one of our talks
	we had on our way home
	from the classes at the Bauhaus
	to the Meisterhduser on the Stresemann-Allee—
	he told me about his belief about great art.
	That he believed that no real work of art
	had been lost.
Because:	First they are done so well that they will last
	Second, they have been appreciated to such
	an extent that every care was taken to
	preserve them.
	This truly is the philosophy of a true artist.
	It throws shadows on those who declare:
	I don’t care whether my work lasts or not!
	It answers also the question
	who is a sincere artist.
	In this connection
	I remember also
	that he always painted in full suit
	without smock or apron
	and I believe that he never
	spoiled a canvas.65

By the time Albers wrote this, he had fled Germany; he had also had the devastating experience of finding that a number of his own glass constructions had been broken by U.S. Customs authorities, resulting from sloppiness in removing them from their meticulous packing, when these fragile objects arrived in America a few months after he and Anni did. But he still kept and repaired them, and believed he could order his life no matter what. Doing things well, staying neat and orderly, and maintaining optimism were essential.