Anni made necklaces out of little beads and sold them in Weimar in order to earn some money beyond her modest allowance. She used her earnings to take Josef to a good tailor to have a conventional suit made. His typical outfit was a khaki corduroy jacket, with a hint of white scarf showing beneath it. She adored it, but observed that, in combination with his bangs, it made him look so bohemian that the waiters in Weimar restaurants invariably served him more slowly than other customers. The new suit was essential if she was to present the young man from Bottrop to her parents in such a way that they would not be put off. It was a success. This was the occasion they both loved recalling, when Anni’s mother told Josef that the house would always be open to him.
LUXURIOUS AS THE ALBERSES’ wedding lunch at the Adlon was, the only people there besides the bride and groom were Anni’s parents and siblings and her sister’s husband. Anni explained to me that big celebrations were for “people who do things like that”—not individuals like her and Josef, who had other priorities.
She had enjoyed her involvement in Klee’s fiftieth birthday celebration, and often referred to the large parties at the Bauhaus, but she and Josef never wanted to expend energy on events; any distraction from work was a waste. After they moved to America, they never attended celebrations given by family or friends, much to the annoyance of some of their relatives and acquaintances. They streamlined their existences to conserve their time and strength for making and writing about art, and getting their message and their creations out into the world.
The Alberses were extreme in their lack of sociability, but the Klees and the Kandinskys were certainly similar in the priority they accorded to work, such that any socializing they did was with colleagues whose goals were the same as theirs, or with museum curators or publishers or gallery owners; they had few friends with ordinary jobs, and they had no interest in “bourgeois” social life.
In the years I knew the Alberses, they never once left home in the evening; nothing justified the unnecessary disruption to their schedules. Nonetheless, in spring of 1975, when I became aware that their fiftieth wedding anniversary was approaching, I suggested to Anni that some of their relatives and work associates would like to celebrate. Perhaps she would let me organize a lunch?
“Out of the question,” she said. She and Josef had not even acknowledged the upcoming date to each other. They did, however, agree—without saying why—that on the ninth of May they would drive to Litchfield, Connecticut, a colonial town where the grand wooden houses and churches are painted an identical regulation white. The drive was mostly on a numbered route and was therefore unconfusing. It took almost exactly an hour; Anni told me this last fact as if the roundness of the number were part of the suitability of the destination. And, very important, there was a good restaurant for lunch.
The following day, I asked how the outing had gone. Anni smiled and said that it had been exceedingly nice: “We didn’t shout at each other once all day.” This was the only way she and Josef acknowledged that it was their golden wedding anniversary. Anni knew, however, that Josef was aware of the significance of the date, because she had snuck a look at his desk calendar and seen that he had circled it.
WHEN THE NEWLY MARRIED Alberses moved to Dessau in 1925, they took, as their first home together, “a small, two-room apartment, neither sensible nor attractive.” The crack under a door to the adjoining apartment was so gaping that Anni had to stuffit with a mixture of mothballs and crumpled newspaper. Then the main Bauhaus building was completed, at which point they moved into the only accommodations available: studios with sleeping alcoves, each for single occupancy, on separate floors. There was only one community bathroom on each hallway. Yet, even as she described this to me some fifty years later, Anni emphasized that to the townspeople of Dessau, who were suffering from a housing shortage, that dormitory was an enviable luxury. She did not mention the splendor she might have had in Berlin, if she had wanted—only how comfortable the dormitory rooms were compared to the way the local population lived.
Josef and Anni Albers on the grounds of the future masters’ houses in Dessau, ca. 1925. The Alberses were the only couple at the Bauhaus who were both esteemed artists. From totally different backgrounds, they were strikingly similar in some ways.
The Alberses went to Florence together for a sort of wedding trip in the summer of 1925. They would never have used the term “late honeymoon,” with its suggestion of the way more ordinary people celebrated their weddings, but that was the idea behind the journey to Italy. What Josef did in glass and Anni did in textiles after returning showed, in her opinion, the impact of the geometric façades of San Marco and Santa Croce and the stripes on the Duomo. When I mentioned this to Josef, thinking it would evoke fond recollections of the trip and of those early Renaissance buildings, he pooh-poohed the idea; as always, the concept of direct influence was unacceptable to him. Afterward, Anni confided to me that she was certain: they had both been so moved by the boldly patterned buildings that they worked accordingly back in Dessau, which is why their art from about 1925 to 1928 is so remarkably similar in appearance.
The extant gouaches, as well as a rug and a tapestry lost in the war, all done in 1925, show the subtle effects of the trip to Florence. Anni was quick to admit to me that she was also influenced by the work of another student in the weaving workshop. If Josef refused, always, to acknowledge anyone else’s influence on him, she made no bones about what she considered to be the wonderful exchange of ideas, the mutual give-and-take, that was essential to the Bauhaus community.
Still uncertain of her own direction, she followed her colleague in using a reverse mirror image. A tapestry in red, yellow, black, and gray silk follows this pattern: areas above and below the three central horizontal stripes are the same, only turned 180 degrees from one another. The result in each case is a satisfyingly crisp geometric composition, with distinct positive-negative relationships.
They were, however, Anni’s last forays into panaceas for solving design problems. Again she ventured beyond symmetry, this time never to return. While her red and black rug of the same year has an overall equilibrium, it is a constantly dynamic whole in which no sequence is repeated, or even restated—thanks to an almost centrifugal force around the bold bars of red and black in the center (see color plate 17). Each visual phrase is allotted the precise amount of space Anni determined with a sense of scale she felt could never be explained. Anni pointed out to me that the rug gets narrower toward the top, an imperfection that shows her unfamiliarity with the ancient Smyrna knotting technique. Nonetheless, it has her trademark precision and boldness along with a new element of high-speed movement.