That Anni had been uniquely attuned to the visual had been clear from the start. Born on June 12, 1899, her earliest childhood memory was of waking up on her third birthday to a garland of flowers strung around the bedposts; she never forgot the joy of the brightly colored assortment of shapes suspended above her. She would remember for the rest of her life how as a child, whenever she went to the family box at the Berlin opera, she and her younger sister wore black velvet dresses with white Irish lace collars and cuffs made by the dressmaker who came to the house. That crisp counterpoint of black and white and the play of textures retained their charm for her forever.
What Anni considered most telling in her recall of those opera performances was that her favorite moment had always been when the orchestra was tuning up. Later in life she recognized this as a sign of her fascination with process, with how components join to achieve the end results, even more than with the finished product. Anni would become as intrigued by thread and its interlacing, and by the processes of printmaking, as she had been by the sound of the violinists tightening their strings and testing the results with their bows.
Transformation and the working of components were Anni’s nectar. When her parents gave costume parties in their Berlin apartment, she was riveted to the sight of the usual furniture being taken away and the painted scenery brought in, just as she was fascinated by the return to the norm after the party. For the family’s formal flat to become the Grunewald, the vast area of parks on the outskirts of Berlin, large canvases of landscapes were installed. The idea was to make the cushy interior a relaxed setting for a picnic. Guests entering the verdant paradise were met by a simulated boat, constructed on a bed frame on wheels, which ferried them a few feet through the entryway, as if they were crossing one of the lakes of the Grunewald. For another party, with a railroad station motif, Anni’s parents installed murals of sausage stands, ticket booths, and information desks. Young Anni was mesmerized by the possibilities of the imagination and the way these fantasies heightened human spirits. She also had a feeling for the bizarre, such as her mother’s behavior at the make-believe train station; Mrs. Fleischmann arrived at her own party screaming because she had lost her child, and then ran out the door pretending to be a child looking desperately for her mother.
When Anni told me this, I had the impression that she had never discussed these memories with another soul—except possibly Josef, who would not have shared her amusement. She did not consider her personal history noteworthy. On some level, she must have recognized that the events of her childhood and the nature of her memories were of a piece with her extraordinary life as an artist, that there was a consistency to her passion for imagination and her fondness for metamorphosis and change, in whatever guise, but until we met, she had not encountered anyone who was quite so fascinated with her or her life story—or who loved her the particular way I did. At last she felt secure—with good reason.
ANNI WAS COMPLETELY unusual as a child in bourgeois, early-twentieth-century Berlin. She disliked the paintings her parents had at home, almost as much as she disapproved of the Biedermeyer furniture. She scowled when she told me this. It was not simply that her parents’ style was counter to her taste; in her eyes it represented wastefulness.
Josef, who was present at the time, explained to me what Biedermeyer was, since I clearly had no idea. He, unlike Anni, had a certain fond nostalgia for the heavy and ornate nineteenth-century style, because at least the construction of the pieces had required considerable skill. But Anni would have nothing of his enthusiasm. While he described Biedermeyer, she grimaced, not even waiting for him to finish his brief summary before she said, “No, no, you’re wrong, Juppi.”
She did, however, like what she saw when her father took her to the Secession shows. This was not, she realized later in life, because the art had great merit; rather, it was because she was the only child at the exhibition, and her instinctive reaction to the shocked crowds turning their heads disapprovingly was to think, “Why not?” Remembering this at age seventy-five, she said that for the rest of her life she generally considered herself the youngest person in the room. It was only when my children became teenagers and had their friends around that I understood what she meant; she was correct that she was more open-minded, and adventurous, even than most adolescents, and she was more receptive to visual beauty, and to the quirks of human behavior. This openness and longing for the extremes of existence is why she had gone to the Bauhaus and embraced its opportunities, and half a century later embodied its legacy.
Until Anni was thirteen, she and a few other children were educated together by tutors. Her first art teacher was a Miss Violet; Anni adored the name. Her watercolors of delicate autumn leaves were well received, and when Anni went on to the lyceum, her parents saw to it that she had a private art teacher, Toni Mayer. For Anni, the only problem was that Mayer had the same first name as her mother, and therefore in her mind seemed overweight and intrusive. Anni was delighted that when she added a Russian flourish to “Toni,” it took on a completely different character. Moreover, “Tonuschka” brought a nude model into the house for the fourteen-year-old girl to draw. This made her feel very professional, even if she, like Josef, later claimed that such training was pointless.
ANNI WAS BOTH star pupil and bête noir in her art studies. She attended a lyceum, where there was a competition for posters to give to children orphaned by the world war that had broken out the previous year. Fifteen-year-old Anni made as her entry a picture of short-haired little girls sitting behind each other in a row. The girls were all shown knitting, and each wore a skirt with a hem slightly above her knees. Her teacher declared the work immodest. A poster of a more acceptable subject, which Anni considered artistically inferior, received first prize. Although hers garnered an honorable mention in spite of its scandalous imagery, a sort of fury began to burn.
The Anni I knew saw her life as a series of hard challenges in which she was perpetually butting her head against disapproval. By the time she was in her seventies, she had had considerable success—major exhibitions, glowing press, attention from devoted collectors—but her memory generally dwelled on the swipes against her.
Even though she described the Bauhaus as “the place” and a form of paradise, her specific recollections of the school ranged from feeling that no one knew who she was to the pain she felt when Mies van der Rohe deprecated “rich Jewish girls” in her presence. When I asked her about the retrospective of her textile work held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, the first thing she told me was that her younger brother had asked her why it had not received more attention in the media. The reason, she explained, was that there had been a newspaper strike; the strike itself, which worked against the show, and her brother’s quips were what she recalled—not having the first solo exhibition ever given a textile artist at the Modern, or the dramatic and effective installation by Philip Johnson.
That sense of hardship inflicted on Anni was part of her self-definition. The energy required by battle fueled her, almost as much as her love for beautiful art and determination to work as she wanted. When she recalled her childhood, she showed no gratitude that her parents had been so forward-thinking compared to most of the people in their milieu that they hired tutors and art instructors for her and supported her unusual desires. Her inability to credit her mother for encouraging her interests was almost pathological.
Anni went from the lyceum to study art full-time with the post-impressionist Martin Brandenburg, who had a studio on the floor above Lovis Corinth’s. This, too, was with her parents’ support. She liked Brandenburg, and felt that she benefited from the strict discipline he imposed by having his students work on precise figure drawings, about half life-size. Especially with her father away in the war, she regarded Brandenburg “as a strong manly figure. His word had weight.” Brandenburg once told her mother that Anni had worked so hard that she should be taken as a treat to a winter resort, and Mrs. Fleischmann happily complied—although Anni remembered the trip only for the burden of being with the overweight mother whose company she did not enjoy.
What animated Anni far more than her teacher’s admiration were her conflicts with Brandenburg as an authority figure. When Anni, having seen a beautiful Lucas Cranach Eve painted against a black background, started to use black in her painting, he told her its use was forbidden. She broke down in tears, and when he said that if she continued to use black she could not return to his classes, she left.
Her mother engineered a reconciliation between her willful daughter and the tradition-bound instructor. Anni promised never again to use black, and resumed her studies. When she told me the story, she blamed herself for not having expected this reaction from a teacher of classic impressionism. This mix of self-criticism and annoyance with the forces arrayed against her was her norm.
But she had found a solution to her angst. She reported this dispute about black with the satisfaction of someone who, following that encounter, had managed continuously to make black—in bold, solid units—one of the major elements of her textile and graphic art.
BRANDENBURG DIED IN 1918, which was when Anni decided she would try to work with Kokoschka. She had recently bought as her first art acquisition a Kokoschka lithograph of a woman’s head—this was in the period when he was preparing images for his Alma Mahler doll—and her mother went with her to Dresden to seek him out. Again, she gave no credit to her intrepid parent, although Mrs. Fleischmann did considerable detective work to find the painter, who was deliberately elusive. Kokoschka regularly changed hotels, and Mrs. Fleischmann had done a lot of tracking down leads by the time she and her daughter finally knocked on the door—all for an encounter that lasted five minutes at most. Kokoschka glanced at the portfolio that included an oil portrait of Anni’s mother, but then, as Anni would tell Josef a few years hence, sent her on her way.
Anni went to the School for Applied Arts in Hamburg, but a two-month stint was all she could bear. In a class on wallpaper design, her drawing of a man was considered “unacceptable because it had too much expression.” Anni decided to stop wasting her time.
ANNELISE FLEISCHMANN had few personal friends, but one of the rare ones was Olga Redslob, the sister of Dr. Edwin Redslob, the liberal-minded arts commissioner of Germany who was a vital supporter of the Bauhaus. Edwin Redslob recommended to her that, given her disappointment with the teaching methods in Hamburg, she should consider the pioneering educational experiment started in Weimar three years earlier. One look at Feininger’s abstracted Gothic cathedral and a quick reading of Gropius’s manifesto, and she was determined to be on her way.
Her father was against the idea. “What are you talking about—a new style?” Siegfried Fleischmann asked after she described the Bauhaus to him. As a furniture manufacturer, he felt he knew what all the possibilities were. “There has been the Renaissance, there has been the Baroque—it has all been done already.” At least this was how she often cited his response, which was the canned recollection of her pre-Bauhaus life that she gave, always with a laugh, in interviews. Siegfried Fleischmann was probably too enlightened and sophisticated to have made the remark, unless he did so as a joking quip. But to Anni, later in life, it served a purpose by portraying both her own temerity and the mentality she was bucking with her exceptional willpower.
SINCE THE BAUHAUS provided no housing for its students, Anni rented a room in Weimar. For Josef, the move there had meant swapping hardship for relative comfort; for her, it was the reverse. Instead of the luxurious surroundings of her parents’ Berlin flat, she had willingly opted for a place where, when she wished to bathe, she had to go to the downtown bathhouse, where the hot water was so limited that she needed to make an appointment in advance. She was, however, gleeful to relinquish bourgeois norms; Anni relished the pride and superiority that came with voluntarily submitting herself to arduous conditions. With me, she was deliberately matter-of-fact about it: “Since there was no way of comparing it to any other situation, this was the way it was.”
Anni attended sessions of the Vorkurs under Itten before seeking full admission to the school with her entrance project. “Alone and shy and somewhat unsure”—for all her willingness to seek a new life—she felt herself to be very much of an outsider, full of doubts about her own worth. A sympathetic fellow student, somewhat older, Ise Bienert, whose background was similar to her own, reassured her that the new venture was worthwhile and that she was not completely alone. Ise’s mother, Ida Bienert, was a major art collector who lived in Dresden and was sufficiently avant-garde to buy work by Klee and Kandinsky. It was Ise, whose family gave her rare access to the more established Bauhauslers, who introduced Anni to Josef Albers. The “thin and ascetic-looking”—how Anni relished saying those words decades later as she remembered the first sight of him—hero of the glass workshop instantly exerted a strong magnetic force on her.
Besides being one of the oldest students, Josef was already greatly admired at the school, both by the faculty and by the other pupils, not just for his glass assemblages, but also for his success in a range of other disciplines. When Anni was among the eleven of sixteen newcomers to Weimar to be rejected for the upcoming Bauhaus semester, she was disappointed mainly because she “had had a second look at Josef Albers and was interested in possibly seeing a little more of him.” Anni’s understatement in telling me this, as she did while Josef was still alive, was deliberate, and she made this remark about the love of her life in a carefully modulated, soft voice, but she had a mischievous smile and a spark in her eyes when she said it.
Anni registered for a further six months of preparatory courses, with Josef now proffering advice on her entrance project. This project, which was constructed from interiors of thermos bottles, broken bits of glass, and metal, had a clear allegiance to his notion of utilizing detritus. Anni also made a highly naturalistic drawing of a piece of wood, and a color scale that went from black to white with a progression of grays in between. The three projects secured her acceptance at the Bauhaus on her second attempt.
In 1947, twenty-five years later, Anni Albers wrote—in the English she had begun to develop under the guidance of an Irish governess in her childhood and in which she had since become so eloquent at Black Mountain College, where she and Josef had by then been living for fourteen years:
I came to the Bauhaus at “its period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances.
Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energies, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no helplessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own kind of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim or distant purposes … [for] realizing sense and meaning in a world confused.2
Beyond that, there was Gropius. Anni always responded viscerally to confident, handsome men. When she was starting at the Bauhaus, she was in a state of uncertainty, with “a purpose I could not yet see and which I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me. Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead.”3
A quarter of a century after Gropius gave his talk, Anni could not recall the specifics, but she could vividly evoke the feeling inspired by the Bauhaus’s founder. “What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation.” She moved from her state of “hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective.” Following the hour in which Gropius explained the objectives of the Bauhaus, its emphasis on design based on function and the need to develop new materials, and the aim of spreading the new vision to all economic strata worldwide, Anni felt “purpose and direction from there on.” It was, she concluded, “the experience of finding one’s bearing.”4
ANNI’S NEXT STEP, after hearing Gropius, was to choose a workshop. She wanted stained glass, but the Bauhaus masters said no. Gropius explained that one person was enough in this field; as it was, he and the other faculty members had questioned the value of glass as an independent discipline until Josef had, only recently, convinced them otherwise. Anni then tried for carpentry, then wall painting, and finally metalwork. For all three workshops, she was refused on the basis that the work was too strenuous.
Feminist revisionist history has, in recent years, maintained that the reason Anni finally went into weaving was that nothing else was open to women.5 In fact, the other workshops had female students; the real issue is that Annelise Fleischmann was too frail for everything else. She never discussed her health issues, but the disability that had made it necessary for Josef to drag her up the mountaintop was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, an incurable genetic illness that causes muscular atrophy. Her difficulties, characteristic of the disease, were manifest primarily in her feet; she had unusually high arches as well as hammer toes, and diminished muscle function.
Many observers over the years would notice that Anni’s legs resembled stilts, and that she walked with difficulty. But no one at the Bauhaus—or, later, at Black Mountain—knew exactly why. There were rumors of various causes, but everything was hypothesis. I was with Anni in the 1980s when her oncologist (by then she had developed and been successfully treated for lymphoma) discussed her inherited neurological disorder with her. She seemed totally bemused, as if she had never even known the name. She acknowledged her lifelong need for custom-made shoes, her inability to dance “while Josef was a very good dancer.” She recalled that “people said I had had rickets, my legs were so thin, or that I had starved during the war, hardly the case.” By the 1980s, it was also evident in a pronounced weakness and trembling in her arms, but Anni’s response to these disabilities had been to utilize them in her art rather than to inquire about their cause or seek treatment (which would have been futile). She decided that instead of trying to draw straight lines, which she could no longer possibly do, she would let her tremor become a determining factor in the work. The inadvertent shaking caused a progression of small rises and dips in the shapes she was drawing, which were based on the typical Connecticut stone walls she saw out of her bedroom window, and the roughness of the contours was remarkably effective.
It was Charcot-Marie-Tooth, though not identified as such, that led her to weaving, as this allowed her to work seated. Although she had to operate the pedals on the looms, they did not require too much muscle. This was one of many occasions in which circumstances over which she had no control determined a major life decision for Anni, who, for all her insistence on mastering aspects of her own destiny, willingly accepted the things that were impossible to control.
The illness probably explained why Anni and Josef did not have children. Not only were they afraid of passing the malady on. Someone may have told Anni, correctly, that pregnancy can exacerbate the illness’s symptoms; that was one risk she would not take. But Anni’s sister-in-law, her brother Hans’s wife, told me that “everyone in the family assumed that the reason Jupp and Anni did not have children was because they were too interested in other things to focus on them. We always said that if Anni had had a baby, she would have put it away in a dresser drawer and forgotten where it was.”6
ANNI WOULD QUICKLY come to accept the idea of making textiles, although initially, regardless of the necessity, she begrudged it. “I was not at all enthusiastic about going into the weaving workshop, because I wanted to do a real man’s job and not something as sissy as working with threads.”7 She was willing, however, to be surprised. The medium she initially disdained immediately became the mainstay of her life, a source of fascination and, soon enough, of prodigious achievement.
In both her wall hangings and the functional materials she soon began to make, Anni became a pioneer. In time, her work would change the look of upholsteries and draperies all over the world, she would invent a new form of abstract art, and she would write articulate essays that have had great impact on textile design. Once she accepted a verdict about which she had no choice, she then went as far as possible with it.
ANNI ADMITTED THAT at that moment when she agreed to take up textile work “the freedom of painting was bewildering” to her. “There were worlds of styles and periods and cultures all open to you; I didn’t know where I was.” Her efforts with her private instructors and Brandenburg in her youth showed her that she liked the processes of making art, but she remained uncertain what direction to turn in. Necessity provided a solution. “I had to enter a workshop if I wanted to stay, and I wanted to stay. Weaving quickly became a kind of railing to me—the limitations that come with a craft, so long as you, at the same time, are concerned with breaking through it.”8
Whether it was the possibilities as well as the frailties of thread, the reality of being Jewish in Nazi Germany, or the exigencies of a life where one could hardly afford string after having owned diamonds, this was how Anni lived: by responding to the givens and making the most of them. Once she was officially in the weaving workshop, she took filaments of jute, cotton, silk, gold leaf, and cellophane in previously unexplored directions and extracted a haunting beauty from them.
At first she made only swatches. The largest piece was a pillowcase. But she quickly discovered that the selection of thread and its manipulation to produce materials that served their future functions and added aesthetic pleasure to life both thrilled her and afforded her an inner harmony.
ANNI WAS SO EAGER to make the point that what is unexpected and undesirable can be beneficial that later in life she took to saying, “This Hitler business worked out rather well for us.”9 My wife eventually convinced her that the statement might offend others who had suffered more directly, but until then Anni saw it only as indicating a harmless willingness to accept the unavoidable. This was the spirit with which, in 1941, after she and everyone else in her family had been forced to sell all of their expensive jewelry or use it for bribes, Anni used paper clips, sink strainers, bobby pins, and other staples of stationery and hardware stores to make and exhibit necklaces of astonishing originality and panache.
The only circumstances she ever seemed to find really difficult were when financial wealth and artistic status came her and Josef’s way. Anni never could spend money comfortably, and prosperity troubled her. She continued to buy day-old bread and pastries at a bakery thrift shop (she considered both “Pepperidge” and “Entenmann’s” modern marvels, examples of the Bauhaus ideal of mass production yielding uniformly impressive results), even after Lee Eastman told her, “Anni, you can eat caviar every day.” She always acted as if Josef had never really had the success he merited, as if his solo show at the Met and the television documentaries and high prices his works garnered were an aberration, since there was no possibility that genius might be recognized in its own time. Suffering and limitation spurred you on; confidence, ease, or, worse yet, self-congratulation guaranteed disaster.
GIVEN HER NEVER-DISCUSSED and possibly undiagnosed medical disorder, Anni had no need to invent difficulties. But the main issue for both her and Josef was not so much what life presented them with as what they did with it. For Josef’s sisters and most of the people with whom he grew up, working-class life in Bottrop was perfectly fine, suitable for the rest of their lives. For Anni’s sister Lotte, only a year and a half younger, the plenitude of their childhood was a wonderful thing; the family was not merely rich, but they were immensely intelligent, and the idea of remaining in the milieu in which she had been raised was a happy one. Lotte married a Jewish judge, quite a bit older than herself, and although the realities imposed by the Third Reich brought the easy existence of both families to an abrupt halt (although without a single death), Lotte thought what they had was marvelous even as Anni despaired of it all.
The only luxury of her childhood about which I ever heard Anni enthuse was a gold cigarette holder one of her Ullstein uncles had received as a Christmas present. She liked that object because it ultimately saved her uncle’s life when he used it to bribe a border guard.
The Bauhaus offered her a chance to grapple with reality, to replace fluff with toughness. The need to live simply and fight for a position invigorated her. How often she would say to me, “At least once in life, it’s good to start at zero.” When she had to do so for a second time, after the Bauhaus was closed, she mainly looked forward, without lament.