Anni Albers had two great love affairs in her life. The first was with Josef, and it lasted for fifty-four years, from the time they met in 1922 until he died in 1976. But not long after his death something switched inside her. She began to remember, above all, the fights, the times he was annoyed with her prolonged coughing spasms, his failure to praise her work. At times she looked at some of his artwork worshipfully, or grew sentimental and said how much she wished she could still buy him socks, but the woman whose art was uniformly serene (so that even Six Prayers, her memorial to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, has an overriding beauty and grace in spite of its tragic theme) was haunted by a mix of classic grief—she desperately missed the only really close companion of her lifetime—and some form of fury.
It was not long after Josef died that Anni became obsessed with the powerfully handsome Maximilian Schell, the friend who had been there when Josef was hospitalized on his eighty-eighth birthday. The Austrian actor-director was extraordinarily seductive toward her.
In that relationship, too, she could not bear the idea that her money and power were part of her attraction. By then, she had lost almost every penny of Ullstein and Fleischmann wealth—both families had had all of their property taken by the Nazis—but had, late in her life, become newly affluent once Josef’s paintings began to sell in the art boom of the 1960s. After Josef’s death, she inherited a collection of his artwork that was worth many millions of dollars, and some of the most important art dealers in the world were eager to represent it, just as museums wanted gifts; Anni lived modestly, and seemed loath to acknowledge her fortune and consequent position, but they were no secret.
For many years, Schell would phone or visit her periodically, and invite her to come see him play Jedermann in the summers at the Salzburg Festival, a trip she loved to make, and which would be followed by time with him on his farm in the Austrian Alps. The most that he received in return, materially, was, every year or so, an important painting by Josef, at the time worth as much as two hundred thousand dollars. Anni would labor over the selection, giving him a spectacular Homage to the Square for his fiftieth birthday, picking out just the right oil on paper for his stepson, but she always ended up feeling that he was slightly disappointed. He, meanwhile, often complained to her about his need for “pennies,” saying that in spite of an Academy Award (in 1962 for Judgment at Nuremberg) and the success of his films, he never had enough money, especially because he liked to produce and direct his own work, which was far less commercial than the blockbusters in which he took roles.
On one of his visits, Anni presented Maximilian with an exquisite painting from Josef’s Variant series—a rectangular arrangement in which five solid colors, in a geometric layout that resembled the façades of adobe architecture in the American Southwest, interacted so as to create an endless pulsating movement. Maximilian, with his usual long black cashmere scarf draped around his neck, his shock of thick graying black hair swept off his dramatically furrowed brow, looked at the painting as if he were seeing things no one else in the world saw, and Anni looked at him as if she were seeing a beauty she had never seen before either. Then Maximilian studied the back of the painting and saw its title: Light in the Dark. Josef’s name for his work succinctly summed up the effect of glowing orange and dawnlike pink surrounded by much deeper tones, a burnt umber and a brown that appear almost the same.
“How perfect this is,” Maximilian said in his “I am about to utter something amazingly profound” voice. Then he turned to Anni and said, as if it were as original as a dictum of Kant’s, “Because always in my darkness is there a little bit of light.”
Anni—who, because she was such an outsider to the things people say all the time, was surprisingly unaware of clichés—looked at him as if she were about to implode in ecstasy. “Ach, Maximilian, du bist der light in my darkness!” she exclaimed.
Maximilian Schell and Anni Albers at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, 1978
But even then, as soon as he left that day, Anni worried that her light in the darkness was not as happy and bright as she wanted him to be. The next day, when he phoned from his usual suite at the Essex House in New York and said he had an idea that would bring him great joy, she was relieved that she might be given the chance to make him as happy as he deserved to be—while at the same time helping Josef. Maximilian proposed that, in his large and relatively empty house in Munich, he could have an Albers museum. That way, the public could really see Josef’s work, while he, Maximilian, would be able to explain the art to visitors. If Anni just gave him fifty or so paintings, this beautiful idea could become a reality.
While she entertained the prospect, I phoned the Alberses’ lawyer, Lee Eastman. I explained that I thought I could get Anni to face reality and not go along with the idea, but that I was worried that she would be devastated if she realized that the man she adored was interested in her in part because she owned a gold mine of art. I well remember Lee’s voice on the phone saying, “The fox has stepped out of the den, Nicholas Fox Weber.”
It took some gentle cajoling from me, and a phone call from Lee, for Anni to consider that transferring a multimillion-dollar collection of Josef’s work to Maximilian was not so wise after all. I suggested to her that she simply tell him she would discuss it with Lee, whom he knew. She did so, and Maximilian dropped the idea.
THAT ANNI’S POSITION in the world, and her money, mattered to both Josef and Maximilian was something she knew and also denied. Artistic passion was the consuming issue for her, as was charisma, and she liked to feel that spiritual and personal issues were the sources of the attraction that underlay the two relationships that preoccupied her day and night. But Anni often said to me, “Don’t trust anyone who says money isn’t important.” On some level she recognized that both her lost fortune, the one from her family, and the one she came into unexpectedly late in her life, from Josef’s success, were pivotal elements in her existence.
Yet in this period when a movie star became her obsession, when although she continued to forge ahead with her printmaking, she lived mostly for Maximilian’s phone calls and potential visits (often planned and cancelled) or her possible trips to see him, the one thing she could not bear was the idea that he was primarily interested in Josef’s art. Not only did any consideration of that possibility raise the issue of money, but it put her, and her own work, in second place. Contradictorily, Anni knew that Maximilian’s fondness for Josef’s work went deep—he had bought a number of works at the Sidney Janis Gallery during Josef’s lifetime—and was a point in common between them, and she continued to give him a valuable work almost every time he came to visit, as it represented their spiritual connection, even if on some level she knew, and resented, that this was what got him up to Connecticut.
At one point Maximilian began to discuss her will with her. She very much liked a painting he owned by Jean Dubuffet, The Geologist. During one of her visits to him in Munich, where she had seen the Dubuffet for a second time and expressed surprise at how engrossing she found this complex canvas by someone so far outside the Bauhaus canon, Maximilian told her he would leave it to her in his will. He then explained to her that this was a wonderful thing to do: to leave art to the people you knew who loved that art, and that a will was a good way to do this. He suggested, as an example, that just as he was leaving her the Dubuffet, she might leave him some of Josef’s paintings: what could be better, in Josef’s memory, and for everybody’s happiness?
When Anni returned to Connecticut, she told me about this: Wasn’t it touching that Maximilian was leaving her the Dubuffet? Shouldn’t she do something along the same lines? He had told her that the Dubuffet might be worth half a million dollars; she should be just as generous in her own will.
Then I pointed out to Anni that, much as I hated to say it, she was ninety-one years old to his sixty-one. I explained the concept of the actuarial table, new to her, and suggested that in all likelihood she would die before he did; I hoped she would forgive my indelicacy in saying so.
An hour later, Anni told me how brilliant I had been to call this to her attention, that it had not occurred to her. She was smiling; she liked catching someone being naughty, even if the someone was Maximilian. She relished the feeling of coming to her senses and having the upper hand. It was the same sense of triumph she had when she left behind the milieu of her parents and went to the Bauhaus. But then she looked at me with a very serious expression on her face and, again alluding to Maximilian, said, “You know, I need the obsession to live.”
THE WAY THAT OBSESSION sustained Anni was evidence that, much as she would make the case for art as a constant in her life and would claim textiles as her source of fulfillment and meaning, the love of another person, and the strength of a connection with a man who was independent and powerful, was essential. Indeed, it had been so ever since she met Josef.
In 1980, I took Anni to the blockbuster Picasso exhibition that filled almost the entire Museum of Modern Art in New York. I wasn’t sure whether she would like it or not, but I felt that she had to see it. Anni was by then totally dependent on a wheelchair. As I wheeled her through the show, she was totally riveted. She connected viscerally to the early work from Barcelona, the Blue and Rose Period figure paintings, the cubist portraits. When we reached the monumental, neoclassical figures Picasso painted in the early 1920s, she turned to me and said, “You know, we were wrong at the Bauhaus. He was the genius. Finally, nothing is more important, or exciting, than man.”