Anni enjoyed the Bauhaus festivals in much the same way as her parents’ costume parties: as an observer of transformation more than a participant. For the White Festival of 1928, Josef used a curling iron to turn his straight blond hair into tight ringlets. “He looked absolutely appalling,” she recalled with a joyful lilt in her voice. She helped him look all the worse by working on his eye gear: white ping-pong balls, cut in half, with little holes so he could see, and held in place by a rubber band that she had twisted in a series of knots so it attached to his ears. For the Metallic Festival on February 9, 1929, in response to the invitations sent on metal-colored cards, Anni prepared a costume for which she sewed little brass bells close together into a tight-fitting knitted cap that she pulled onto her head like a wig. “I think it looked quite good, a bit like an Indian goddess or Buddha.” But there was nothing about the parties worth recalling other than how she and Josef looked.
TO OUTSIDERS, Anni was quiet and unknowable. But she was not reticent when she wanted something. Anni had made up her mind, she once told me, that if she wasn’t married by the age of twenty-five (which she was, by barely a month), she would “have an affair;” given the mores of her milieu in that time period, this was as radical as her decision to go to the Bauhaus. She was equally determined to travel. Besides the trips to Val Gardena and Florence, she was the main instigator behind a junket she and Josef took to Paris with the Breuers in 1926. What she recalled of that first trip to France was a visit the four of them made to a bordello. Unfortunately, when Anni told me this, I did not know her well enough to ask for further details. And it was only in 2009 that it was discovered from a guestbook entry that while they were in Paris the Alberses, along with some other German artists, visited Le Corbusier’s recently completed Villa La Roche. The Swiss banker Raoul La Roche had commissioned this innovative modernist pavilion to display his collection of paintings by Léger, Braque, Picasso, and the Purists Amadée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier’s real name, which he then used as a painter). It would have been wonderful to know what both Josef and Anni thought of Le Corbusier’s curved ramps and the balconies around the luminous atrium, as well as the boldly geometric façade of that building.
Anni Albers’s bedroom in the masters’ house in Dessau, ca. 1928. Anni always lived austerely, but she never failed to have Josef’s art in her line of vision from her bed. For her entire life she kept the Egyptian statuette near where she slept.
Anni also engineered a trip in 1929 to Barcelona and San Sebastian in Spain, followed by a holiday near Biarritz. This is where Josef took his amazing photographs of people frolicking on the beach, of the Klees in resort wear, and of the tracks left in the sand by the water. It was Anni’s instigating that got Josef to travel and hence to make this extraordinary visual record of how the Bauhauslers could enjoy themselves despite the constant onslaught of problems in their lives.
Anni planned trips for herself and Josef from Dessau to Belgium, to look at the masterpieces of Flemish art, and to England, where he photographed the houses of Parliament. But the gambol she liked above all was to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, which they visited via banana boat in 1930. Anni felt the boat looked sufficiently substantial when she first saw it, but, she delighted in telling me, it had not yet been loaded. When she and Josef returned to the dock to get on board, the boat had sunk considerably, and suddenly looked very small. It took a lot of persuading to get Josef on board. But he ended up enjoying himself almost as much as she did. The passengers, twelve in all, ate with the captain every night of their five-week trip, and they visited two islands, journeying on muleback up to the high plateau of Tenerife. When she described that adventure in the Canary Islands, and a trip in 1953 to Machu Picchu and some less accessible Inca sites, she was aglow.
Josef Albers, Anni, Sommer ‘28, 1928. Josef Albers made this collage of two photos he took of his wife wearing an old jacket of his, which she remembered fondly when she rediscovered this work half a century after it was made.
ANNI WAS EITHER impressed by important people or deemed them silly and worthless. Their position meant nothing to her; it was their attitude that was crucial.
When Josef participated in the symposium on the Bauhaus in Prague and they met Tomás Masaryk, she was deeply impressed by their host’s “knowledge about art and education, which is very unusual for a head of state.” Her other strong memory of Prague was that it was where she met Galka Scheyer, who also attended the symposium. What Anni most remembered was that Scheyer showed her how to put lipstick on. Using lipstick was almost as revolutionary as having an affair before marriage.
After their encounter with Masaryk, the attitude toward art, and details of physical appearance, generally determined the Alberses’s taste in politicians. They both liked Nelson Rockefeller because of a description they had read of him wearing a flannel shirt and standing on a ladder in the governor’s mansion when he was installing a Calder just before his inauguration, and because he was gracious when they met him at a dinner at the Museum of Modern Art, where most of the other trustees talked primarily to one another and to no one else. Gerald Ford was out of the question because “he had a face like a knee.” I often visited the Alberses during the Watergate hearings, with which Anni was obsessed, but more as if she were watching a soap opera than a tale of venality and corruption; she adored every appearance of Maureen Dean and regarded Martha Mitchell as a comedian. While Josef cared less about the whole procedure, he was enchanted by the name of John Ehrlichmann, wondering why no commentator pointed out that in German “ehrlich” means “honest.” This was comparable to the green highway sign on the Merritt Parkway near the Alberses’ house that said “This is Orange”: a landmark he adored pointing out as an example of verbal treachery.
AS FOR THE USE of lipstick: Anni never lost her fascination with female contrivances. In 1982, I accompanied her to an annual meeting of the College Art Association, where she was on a panel with, among others, the sculptor Louise Nevelson. During the question-and-answer session, Anni was asked more than once if she felt that she had played second fiddle to Josef, and if she had suffered as the wife of a more famous artist. She simply answered, “No.” Afterward, chatting with Nevelson, Anni said, “Now I have to ask you a question. Are those marvelous eyelashes your own, or did they come out of a jar?”
The exotic, Russian-born sculptor burst out laughing and answered, “Listen, darling, sometimes you have to give yourself what nature did not provide.” At that, Nevelson pointed with both hands to her breasts, making clear that she wore falsies, and continued to laugh. Anni always maintained that this moment was the highlight of the event, “much better than all that feminist nonsense about Josef’s and my marriage.”
