Plastics, synthetics, new and useful practical materials, shaking up the bourgeoisie: these were everyday joys at the Bauhaus. The essential element of the 1926 wall hanging, as of all of Anni’s work intended to be viewed purely as abstract art, is the way it wakes you up and keeps you on your toes. Anni was immensely satisfied when, following an exhibition of her work at the Hayden Gallery at MIT, a guard told her that the technology students used to spend their lunchtimes sitting on the floor and eating sandwiches—she liked these details, and admired the practicality of sandwiches—as they tried to solve the puzzle of how this multi-ply weaving was done on a twelve-harness loom. What would have been easy on a Jacquard loom was much harder to achieve on the one she had used; to get the clearly defined, solid color areas she wanted, rather than the effect of interweaving indigenous to the process, Anni had trickily, and meticulously, calculated which threads to lift at which points. She enjoyed having baffled the technology students, just as she delighted in my surprise at the shifts in format and hence in tempo with the bottom three rows, a twist that had nothing to do with weaving technique, about which she realized I knew nothing, and was mainly aesthetic. Working within the rules, she dedicated herself to unpredictability.
ANNI WAS AGAIN EMPHATIC: there had been little response to this wall hanging when she made it. This was Bauhaus reality; while Klee and Kandinsky sold some work and had some attention from the outside world, they mainly worked away with little feedback, and the rest of the artists and designers were even more alone. Josef was respected, and had the occasional commission for a window, but he rarely received kudos. They all depended on their teaching salaries. What I and the people at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the owner of Anni’s wall hanging, and numerous experts had come to regard as a textile classic by the time that she and I were discussing it—and which, since Anni’s lifetime, has become considered such a masterpiece that it is perpetually in demand for exhibitions all over the world, although Harvard rarely permits it to travel, or even be exhibited, because of both its fragility and their institutional capriciousness—was ignored when it came off the loom. It was only because Anni gave the hanging to her parents that it even survived the war; most of her best pieces did not. After her solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, when she hoped MoMA would buy the hanging at a very low price, they turned it down. The Busch-Reisinger acquired it shortly thereafter, thanks to one curator with an unusually adventurous vision.
“The parents didn’t know what to make of it, either,” Anni told me. “I gave it to them as a form of thanks. I thought it was the best thing I had done to date. They put it on the grand piano, as a sort of cover. And then they put a vase of flowers on top, with water in it so that the vase made a ring, which is still there.”
When I visited the Busch-Reisinger to see the work in storage, the curator then in charge—not the one who had acquired it—told me that she and the conservator wondered how Anni had created the circular form. They also remarked on the carefulness of its positioning, and when I told them it was the inadvertent result of a damp vase having been placed on the piece, they were initially incredulous. When I told Anni the story, she replied, “Yes, you see, museum people cannot see.”
She then looked off into space before continuing: “They can’t dress, either. Greta Daniel was curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art, yet she wore the most horrible dresses. I said to Arthur Drexler, ‘How can she think she understands everyday design and wear those sacks?’”
ANNI’S SENSE of her own rightness, and her tactlessness, were not always easy to take. Fortunately, my wife had a better sense of humor than Joe Maloney. Katharine, who didn’t care a lot about clothing when we first met, and generally was most comfortable in jeans and turtlenecks, had an elegant dress made for the opening of the Josef Albers retrospective at the Yale Art Gallery in 1977, the year after we were married. She was then twenty-one years old. When my very pretty wife and I arrived to pick Anni up to drive into New Haven for the opening, Anni looked her up and down and then asked, “Is that dress new?”
“Yes,” replied Katharine, smiling. I had told her how becoming it was, and she had every reason to feel confident.
“Can you still return it?” asked Anni.
It was remarkably similar to an incident that had occurred during a 1962 exhibition of Josef Albers’s work at the Pace Gallery, then still in Boston. At the opening, the gallery owner’s mother said to Anni, “I have a hairbrush in my handbag, and you need it.” It would be many years before Josef’s work was again represented by the Pace Gallery.
If she never forgot, or forgave, these putdowns, no one could issue them more harshly than Anni herself.
THE PERSON who could be so difficult was as an artist immensely generous. Her goal was not just to find some form of satisfaction in her own troubled life, but to provide calm and diversion and pleasure for her fellow human beings. She really meant to serve humankind, whether by gracing their experience of going into the synagogue in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, with the richly soothing panels she wove for the Torah ark at the end of the sanctuary, or by using the saturated inks and engaging, intelligent designs of her prints to entertain people she would never meet. Abstract art was her music, and she wanted others to benefit from it.
At times, Anni reduced the components of her textiles to nothing but black and white thread, which she would use on their own or in combination to achieve a range of grays. She would pare her compositional elements to squares exclusively. She embraced the limitations with which she countermanded the excess of choices, the too much of everything, of her previous world; from her few chosen givens she was able to build great beauty. This use of “minimal means for maximum effect”—a precept of Josef’s—was intended to be both enjoyable and instructive for viewers.
Anni’s 1927 Black-White-Red is a triumph of its three colors and regimented structure; she told me that it was also one of the works that clearly showed the great impression Florentine architecture had made on her. Vibrant, celebratory, invariably upbeat, this testimony to the possibilities of thread and to the emotional impact of abstraction is today regarded as one of the triumphant works of its era, for even though the original was thought to have been destroyed in the war, it was reproduced in 1964 by Anni’s fellow Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stolzl. Stolzl did this with three of Anni’s images of which it was assumed that only gouaches remained, and the new versions were purchased by the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with all those institutions treating them as masterpieces. But when Anni made Black-White-Red in Dessau—and about this she was emphatic—”recognition was still distant.” When an interviewer who was researching the Bauhaus asked her, in my presence, if she and Josef had foreseen their eventual eminence, she replied, irritably, “You can’t think in those terms. Maybe the ambitious young ones today do, but we certainly never did.”
The point of the artwork was simply to add to the world’s beauty. Anni had no artistic grandiosity. She did not think her textiles were any more worthy than the anonymous blankets of the Navajos or the fragments of the pre-Columbian weaving from the Inca and Maya cultures she adored. She only hoped that she was adding a further voice of sanity, one more source of satisfaction, even pleasure, in a universal language that enabled it to be enjoyed anywhere in the world, at any time. This was what the Bauhaus had confirmed for her: that, in spite of all the weaknesses of humanity, everyday experience could be made better through the eyes. Purely visual events could provide a sense of logic and rightness.
SHE HAD EVERY REASON to believe that Black-White-Red had been destroyed after the closing of the Bauhaus and subsequent events in Germany. But in December 1989 the original work reemerged.
Anni and I were in Munich, where Maximilian Schell had organized a show of her and Josef’s work at the Villa von Stuck, an institution named for the teacher Klee and Kandinsky and Albers had all disparaged. At that time in her life, Anni would do anything that Schell asked, and she had agreed to the exhibition in spite of the inappropriateness of the setting; now it was the evening of the opening. Before the event, we were waiting in a back office of the museum, where, although she was the guest of honor, Anni was totally miserable. As usual, Schell had said he would be at her side at a certain time but was not there. I assured her it was only because he was making last-minute changes in the placement of the artworks, but she did not care; sitting in her wheelchair, looking at her watch every two minutes, she was inconsolable.
Anni and I had planned to meet, before the opening started, some collectors from Aachen who said they were eager to show Anni one of her original works thought to have been destroyed. In they walked, a pleasant couple, he an architect, she a teacher. The man explained that his father, also an architect, had bought Anni’s wall hanging, the original Black-White-Red, directly from the Bauhaus in the 1920s and had always kept it safe.
One of her greatest pieces had not disappeared after all! I was overjoyed, and was sure she would be.
Anni continued to look at her watch and over the collectors’ shoulders to see if Schell was coming. She also stared at the woman’s pointed, white, stiletto-heel shoes, which she disliked intensely. She had no interest in this miraculous resurrection.
The collectors unrolled the original wall hanging. It was threadbare in many places, faded in others, but some sections had retained their brilliant colors. Compared to the 1964 edition, it was in terrible condition, but there was no question that this was the real thing.
Anni, however, gave it a shorter glance than she had the shoes. “No, no. Thank you for coming. But, no, I never made that. It doesn’t count.”
I argued, perhaps as emphatically as I ever had with Anni. The owners, who were polite and tactful, again reminded her of the history of the piece, and apologized for its condition. “Thank you for coming,” Anni said, gesturing their dismissal with her right hand. They rolled the hanging and walked off.
I followed the couple out of the room and explained that Mrs. Albers was having a very difficult evening for personal reasons; of course this was her work. I assured them that I would talk with her about it. I did not allow that the woman’s shoes had been the clincher.
At the opening, surrounded by her and Josef’s work, receiving congratulations from an endless stream of people, Anni’s only happy moments were when Maximilian was holding her hand and looking directly at her and not at anyone else. There were times when art simply could not provide the balance and serenity with which she hoped to counter the tumult of human emotions.