During the period I knew Josef Albers, by which time he was an octogenarian, he was focusing on two bodies of work: a series of geometric drawings he called the Structural Constellations and his Homage to the Square paintings. Although he would rarely allow conversations, with me or anyone else, to stray to the subject of the Bauhaus or of his youth, it was clear that his early religious faith and the territory he explored in the Bauhaus glass workshop were still essential to him.
For the Structural Constellations, he made countless sketches on scraps of lined notebook paper, or even paper napkins. These led to hundreds of large, polished ink drawings, related engravings, embossings, and lithographs; machine engravings on vinylite; and several vast architectural commissions. The Constellations were the optimum vehicle by which to communicate the special ambiguity and geometric mysteries that, along with color, had fascinated him even before he began teaching in Weimar. The name “constellations” is apt: Albers drew them by connecting dots with straight lines. The points of intersection appear to fluctuate in space, like stars that seem to move because of their brightness and gaseousness. Stellar constellations are an attempt of man to organize the infinite, to pin down the eternal by creating imaginary representational forms; Albers, contrarily, wanted to evoke vast, timeless phenomena, to use his tidy images to create infinite variability.
In these images, the outlines are the result of constant refining, and their subtle interior variations—the addition or deletion or widening of lines—are the product of further deliberation and perseverance. The result is that shapes that are open and inviting become impenetrable. Illusory paper-thin surfaces show both of their sides at once. Flat planes bend. Straight lines curve. Parallel lines appear to be at oblique angles. Parallelograms flip-flop and twist as we look at them. This action diverts us and takes us out of ourselves. We feel secure, on a course that has been precisely premeditated, and at the same time adventurous, as we perceive impossibilities. We learn to maintain our faith in the face of ever-changing situations.
These graphic images depend on selectivity and economy of activity. They result from carefully calculated decisions, with anything extraneous cleared away. They reflect Albers’s belief that, while we are constantly confronted with an infinity of impressions and possibilities, we must choose a direction and adhere to it to survive. We must trust in what we are doing. The basis of the Structural Constellations, this confidence and forging ahead, methodically but with an openness to mystery, was Albers’s view on how to live.
Compared to Albers’s Constellations, much geometric art is oddly muted and “laid back;” its elegance seems blasé, worldly, the least bit languid. Here is Albers the mad magician, telling us to go for broke. We run through city streets, in and out of neighborhoods; we move into unknown territories. The man who taught students the value of “repeating and reversing,” and of varying the spaces between parallel lines to create three-dimensional activity, used his elements, his parallels and right angles, to give us all he could, something that never existed before. The results are like marching bands with everyone playing at once. Our eyes move here and there at the same time; sounds go off in all directions simultaneously. We take many paths in a single moment.
Albers wrote:
Looking at my “Structural Constellations” demands from us repeated changing of the direction of our vision and of our reading.
Thus we follow the lines, and so look down and upward, in and outward, from the left to the right. We read along the extension of planes and volumes, but also penetrate them forward and backward.
Changing our viewpoint changes besides our standpoint also the position of the construction. It seems to tilt, to turn, to recede, to advance as a whole or in parts.
With this the 2-dimentional arrangement of lines appears as a 3-dimentional body, and also as opaque and transparent. It presents simultaneously front and back, face and profile.
And all this is to demonstrate that true mobility is not achieved by making an object move but making an object that makes us move—besides moving us.78
ALBERS’S OBJECTIVE, impersonal absorption in visual phenomena—the approach that we allow and in fact demand of doctors and scientists—is hard to accept in an artist. But this rigor and austerity led him to fertile ground. The work he produced so methodically is vibrant and mysterious; its calm is not shallow or stagnant. The late drawings impart movement that, without imitating or replacing natural phenomena, has natural complexity. Albers simplified but never put a brake on motion; the work evokes temporal progress, and has a rich structure that saves it from the emptiness that often occurs in refined, geometric art. The result of years of development and planning, the Structural Constellations are built on a solid base and describe activity and flow, not a void.
Albers’s geometric drawings parallel nature in some ways and outperform it in others. They allow north light and south light to shine simultaneously, just as certain Homages permit the darkness of midnight to coexist with the brightness of noon. They move us in opposite directions at once. Spare as they are, they are not “minimal” art. Even as they are reductions, they are all the richer for the ingredients distilled in them and the complexity of their development. Their combination of industrial meticulousness and spiritual mystery was the essence of the Bauhaus belief system.
The weightless figures of the Structural Constellations came from Albers’s mind and spirit. They have no physical mass. Albers did not like heaviness; he used thin white porcelain teacups and functional light steel furniture that was easy to move. He preferred airy, uncluttered spaces. And the spaces he invented and cultivated are not contained, like spaces in the real world, but are more mercurial and vaporous. Their forms move dramatically; their combination of black and white pulsates rhythmically. Their activity is as unflagging as the energies of the universe and as Albers’s own energy in seeking every possible variation on his chosen themes. Thus, they resurrected Klee’s and Kandinsky’s ideals after those artists’ deaths, and kept the Bauhaus spirit alive after World War II.
Albers wrote:
An element plus an element must yield at least one interesting relationship over and above the sum of these elements. The more different relationships are formed, and the more connected they are, the more the elements intensify each other and the more valuable is the result and the more rewarding is the work. This leads to a major factor in the instruction: economy, economy in the sense of being sparing of expenditure in material and labor and optical utilization for the effect aimed at.79
In the Structural Constellations there is not one line too many. Form is streamlined in them, just as color is intensified through the absence of medium in the Homages. Albers’s reductionism left punch and quality and dispelled anything peripheral.
The values were the same as the fundamental precepts of Albers’s Bauhaus teaching. He told his students:
Through works of art we are permanently reminded to be balanced within ourselves and with others; to have respect for proportions; that is, to keep relationships. It teaches us to be disciplined, and selective between quantity and quality. Art teaches the educational world that it is too little to collect only knowledge; furthermore, that economy is not a matter of statistics, but of a sufficient proportion between effort and effect.
Art problems are problems of human relationship. Note that balance, proportion, harmony, [and] coordination are tasks of our daily life, as are also activity, intensity, economy, and unity. And learn that behavior results in form—and, reciprocally, form influences behavior.80
The Homages to the Square share traits with the geometric drawings. There is a similar spatial play: simultaneously inward and outward, forward and backward, horizontal and vertical. We are near and far at the same time. Forms are at once together and apart. The mood is calm and controlled, the quiet activity constant. The means are always mechanical. The purpose resonates. These works are clearly the result of relentless, uncompromising pursuit, yet the effort is concealed, making them objects for serene contemplation.
In line as in color, proportions and relations are the key. To add or remove or thicken or lighten a single line would totally change the nature and rhythm and motion of a geometric form; similarly, to lighten or vary a single color would change the physical action and spiritual presence of any Homage.
Albers would often talk of nothing but these visual nuances and discrepancies. They were his lifeblood. He would take visitors to his studio to see his latest work—an Homage, or a drawing for a stainless steel Structural Constellation relief sculpture to go in a new skyscraper or on a city square—and would marvel yet again at the shifting movement and appearance and disappearance of form. He liked to explain the visual activity; his friends were those people who listened attentively and made the right remarks. He did not act as if he had created the miraculous phenomena, only as if he had brought them down to earth and made them accessible to us. In his late work, this devout apostle of optical mystery was as close to its wonders, and as able to make them occur, as he could be.
ALBERS STARTED OUT earthbound and then moved heavenward. This is especially true of the Homages to the Square. Having first given us implicitly weighty three-dimensional bodies, he makes them float. The transformation through which their mass is rendered weightless was his form of alchemy. In the sandblasted glassworks he had countered the heavy mass of the materials with the effect of light. In the Homages he began by methodically applying paint grounded to the panel, but he subsequently made the forms buoyant and the color ethereal. This achievement of poetry through the application of overtly scientific means was a Bauhaus goal.
The Homages have their feet on the earth and their heads in the cosmos. The central, or first, square is like a seed: the heart of the matter, the core from which everything emanates. The intervals underneath that first square, created by either two or three larger outlying squares, are doubled to the left and right of it and tripled above it. In the four-square format, for example, which is ten units wide and high, the middle square is four units wide, each of the outer squares is half a unit wide underneath the middle square, one unit wide at left and right, and one and a half units high above. In The Power of the Center, Rudolf Arnheim explores the ways this 1:2:3 ratio shifts the normal balance of earthly (horizontal) and heavenly (vertical) elements of a single square in favor of the heavenly. “This asymmetry produces the dynamics of the theme, a squeezing below, an expansion above. It promotes a depth effect, which should be counteracted if all the squares were grouped symmetrically around the same center.”81 The asymmetry is subtle—the squares are almost centered—so the upward thrust is gradual rather than pronounced. Thus the spiritual element is achieved with a soft voice rather than a loud shout. Albers’s spirituality transmitted in poignant, muted tones rather than with evangelical ardor.
In analyzing the ascendant quality of the Homages, Arnheim points out that if we follow the four diagonals created by the corners of the squares within squares, they converge on a point precisely one quarter of the way up the painting. The diagonals created by drawing lines through only the two bottom sets of corners and carrying those lines all the way across the panel make an X that demarcates the rectangle that is the lower half of the composition. “A solid base is thereby provided on which the sequence of squares can rise with confidence from step to step—not so different from the coffin in Piero’s Resurrection, from which the movement toward heaven takes off.”82
Like the image of a cathedral on the original Bauhaus brochure, Albers’s Homages to the Square have massive, sanctuary-like bodies and, simultaneously, the attributes of steeples. In buildings and paintings alike, there is a mix of solid craft with philosophical concerns. That blend of fact and spirit parallels the issues of mortality and immortality that loomed large for Albers in his later years. Determinedly anti-bohemian, in persona he was the honest craftsman, clean-shaven and well scrubbed, dressed in neat, almost uniform-like clothing (mostly permanent-press beige). In 1950, when he and Anni moved to New Haven so that he could take his teaching position at Yale, they chose a small Cape Cod—style house that looked like everyone else’s: a no-nonsense place good for living and working. Twenty years later, when they were more affluent and able to enjoy the rewards of the art boom of the 1960s, they moved to the slightly larger raised ranch where I met them. On a quiet suburban street a few miles from their former house, it was convenient to a cemetery plot they had selected so that after the first one died, the other could drive by on the way to the post office.
But as matter-of-fact as he tried to seem, Albers enjoyed the feeling that his achievement might have the immortality he knew his body lacked. Having reduced the trappings of his everyday existence, he thought often of the afterlife. The words of George Eliot describe his state of mind: “It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. … They look like fragments of heaven.”83
THE WORLD BEYOND our individual earthly existence was in Albers’s thoughts when he made a blue and green twenty-four-inch Homage in January 1976, some two months before his death. By the time he created this Homage, he was working on very few paintings—his hand was too unsteady, so he focused more on printmaking—but he did this panel as a study for an Aubusson tapestry that had been commissioned for a bank in Sydney, Australia.
I discussed the painting with Albers on several occasions. He told me that he had one problem with it. He had found a combination of his chosen colors that interacted perfectly in an Homage format when the central square was four units wide, but that did not work as well in the format with a larger (six units) central square. (All of the paintings were ten units by ten units, whatever their size.) Showing me studies of halves of these paintings (he often worked in half Homages, especially when designing prints or tapestries), he explained that in the version with the larger middle square, “downstairs” was fine, but “upstairs” was “hell.” He wanted both a spatial flow and a color “intersection.”
Albers describes this intersection in his book Interaction of Color. It is the process by which a correctly selected color lying between two other colors takes on the appearance of both. When colors properly intersect in a three-square Homage, the color of the innermost square will appear toward the outer boundary of the next square out. The color of the outermost square will also appear within the second square, toward its inner boundary. “The middle color plays the role of both mixture parents, presenting them in reversed placement.”84 This is illusory. The second square is not in fact a mixture, but is paint straight from the tube, applied flatly. But at a distance our perception tells us that it is modulated, and that some of the first and third colors are visible within it.
Albers then pointed to the version with the small central square. Here the intersection occurred, but he was not satisfied. Moving his hand over the sky blue center, and then over the more terrestrial forest green and the sealike aqua surrounding it, he explained that these colors were the earth and the cosmos, the cosmos being in the center. In the version with the smaller middle, the cosmos was too distant.
While the earlier Homages generally depend on sharp light-dark contrasts, the later ones are more subtle, with closely related hues. Here Albers’s development parallels that of Cézanne and Monet, who in their late work also moved toward hazy, atmospheric effects. In the version of this last blue-green painting with the larger middle, Albers wanted all boundaries and edges virtually to disappear. Additionally, there should be no sharp corners on the inner square. (He said that Cartier-Bresson once told him that he made “circular squares,” which delighted him.) To achieve these effects he needed to find colors with the identical light intensity. The cosmos should have neither sharp boundaries nor corners.
He said that even the supreme colorist J. M. W. Turner had never been able to match light intensities exactly. Yet by making studies with painted blotting paper, Albers found precisely the paint he needed for the middle square. With Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green, batch number 192, he could obtain both his desired intersection and the match of light intensities. At that moment, however, the only Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green available was from a newer batch, number 205. He admired the paint company for changing the code number to indicate a revision of the pigment, but he was frustrated at not being able to duplicate a paint that had been discontinued several years earlier.
I telephoned the American corporate headquarters of Winsor & Newton, an English company, in New Jersey. I managed to get the director on the phone and explained that I was trying desperately to locate some old tubes of Cobalt Green 192. He assured me that there was no perceptible difference between 192 and 205.
I then said that I was calling on behalf of Josef Albers. “Josef Albers!” the paint specialist exclaimed. Within a couple of days, a shallow box containing five tubes of Cobalt Green 192, packed tightly side by side like sardines in a tin, arrived. Josef went back to work.
The correct paint enabled him to make the painting exactly as he wanted. The Bauhaus-style insistence on the most apt material and the will to achieve his goals were crucial. The intersection he achieved is like magic. Looking at that Homage with me, Albers demonstrated the color penetration by interlocking all his fingers, and praised the ability of the outer and inner squares to span the middle color. He again spoke of the need of “the universe” (rather than “the cosmos”) to be immaterial and without boundaries. “And for me the cosmos is getting nearer, which is why I had to paint it larger,” he added. This was his last painting.