Anni’s descriptions of the key players at the Bauhaus—and the anecdotes she told with a good novelist’s feel for the details that matter most—made me see life in Weimar and Dessau as if I had lived there. In addition, both of the Alberses exemplified the unusual world that had lasted for little more than a decade but had such a powerful effect on the appearance of buildings and objects, and on attitudes toward design, all over the world—an impact that is still growing. Knowing them, I saw firsthand the true spirit of rebellion, as well as the consuming love for beauty, that were fundamental to the Bauhaus. I witnessed the energy fueled by passion, and the rigor, that united the school’s reigning figures. I also saw the enthusiasm for a way of life outside the norm, and the concomitant irreverence for the usual hierarchies, of these aficionados of everyday living.
With the passion for what he loved, Josef deplored everything he considered fraudulent. He particularly loathed self-importance. One day, when he joined us in the kitchen at the end of an afternoon when I was working with Anni, he was consumed by rage. His pale skin turned lobster red as he explained why. In The New York Times that morning, there had been an interview with Robert Motherwell. “And do you know what Motherwell said he achieved in his work, Nick?” Albers asked me in a rant. Raising both hands in disbelief, he answered: “‘Eternity!’ Eternity! Motherwell dares to think he has achieved eternity. Not even Michelangelo, not even Leonardo, would claim that! Who says it? Motherwell!”
Five Bauhaus masters in Klee’s studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, ca. 1925 (from left: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche, and Paul Klee). When the great artists of the Bauhaus assembled for social occasions other than costume parties, they looked like bankers or schoolteachers; they deliberately avoided self-conscious bohemianism.
Josef suddenly rose from his seat at the kitchen table and charged over to the sink. From the windowsill behind it, he picked up a small, hand-painted clay bird. “You see this bird, Nick? Anni and I bought it in a market in Mexico. For only a few pesos. There are birds like it in markets all over Mexico. We don’t know who the artist is—of this or any other of those birds. But look at the color. Look at the joy, the wish to celebrate, the nice form. There’s more of eternity in this bird than anything that Motherwell, or that crowd of Clement Greenberg and all those critics, ever dreamed of.”
He then sat down, somewhat calmer, and ate his strudel.
WHAT BOTHERED JOSEF about Robert Motherwell was both his work and his jockeying for power within the art world. Josef considered Motherwell’s collages derivative of better French art, mainly Matisse’s, and the large canvases too personally expressive, while lacking in visual merit. He deplored what he deemed an attitude toward life that perpetually called for figuring out who was important for the future. “Career,” Anni often said, “is one of the ugliest words there is. It has nothing to do with art.”
The Alberses’ views seem harsh to many people, but they were fundamental to the credo that unified the cast of characters of this book. Gropius had created the Bauhaus with the idea that the purpose of art and design is the improvement of human life. That goal was what counted; the personal advancement of individual creators did not. And strong opinions were a given. Art was too serious a matter for people to be polite if they didn’t like what someone had done, or for people to accept popular notions of what was important. Passion allowed no compromise.
JOSEF’S DISDAIN for self-aggrandizement was particularly vivid one day in 1974 when I drove him and Anni to New York. They had chosen the location of their house in Orange in part because it was less than a mile from an entrance to the Merritt Parkway, thus making such trips as easy as possible both for them and for visitors, but they had reached the age where they could not contend with New York parking on their own, and I was delighted to be asked to be their chauffeur for the day. Any chance just to listen to Josef and Anni together was full of promise.
The Alberses had meetings scheduled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I now realize that these were to discuss a substantial gift to the museum, which included two of the assemblages of glass bottle fragments Josef had made from detritus from the local dump when he was still an impoverished student at the Weimar Bauhaus. But at the time all that I knew was that they had been invited for lunch in the museum’s executive dining room, and while they could easily have proposed that I go off for lunch in a coffee shop and meet them afterward, they had instead nicely arranged for me to be included.
We were a small group at lunch. Josef enjoyed Henry Geldzahler, who had curated the Met’s Albers exhibition, but they disagreed completely about artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella—Josef liked the work of neither—and the conversation was lively. This was also the occasion when, during an especially heated moment in the debate about the New York School, Josef interrupted his own discourse on the evils of too much self-expression in painting to taunt Geldzahler about his rings; it was as if the issues of real masculinity and artistic integrity were related.
Shortly after the quips about Geldzahler’s jewelry, Josef lowered his head suddenly, as if something dreadful had happened to him. I was sitting next to him, on his left, and thought that he might be choking on a bone from the trout, a food he adored, that he was having for lunch. My panic was palpable when I asked, “Mr. Albers, are you all right?”
He tilted his head, which was still practically in his plate, and made a mischievous smile. His eyes sparkling, he said, “Yes, I’m fine. It’s only that that schwein Hoving has just come in, and if he sees me he will come over and give himself credit for everything I have ever done.”
Once Thomas Hoving, the Met’s renowned director, was seated, Josef sat up and continued with his lunch and the conversation. Geldzahler, who had taken in the incident, simply grinned.
On the way home, as we were driving up the West Side Highway, Josef in the front passenger seat, Anni in the back, I said, “Mr. Albers, I have to say, I was really alarmed when I saw you lower your head when Thomas Hoving came into the dining room.”
He smiled like a little boy who had gotten away with something. He had, after all, succeeded in his goal of avoiding the director. But then Josef grew serious. “Just remember, all museum directors are SCHWEIN!”
AT THE DESSAU BAUHAUS, in fact, one museum director—Ludwig Grote, director of the local public art gallery—had been a great friend and supporter. Josef’s attitude, however, was another essential element of what the Bauhaus was all about. Politicians, officials who knew how to jockey within the power structure, and people in the art world who were more concerned with money and administrative matters than with the ultimate significance of art, were not to be trusted.
I thought of his “schwein” remark six years later in relation to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art I was trying to organize with John Elderfield. I had been delighted when the exhibition was put on MoMA’s schedule and the plans confirmed with a handshake between Richard Oldenburg, MoMA’s director, and me. Then the show was rescheduled when a trustee insisted on an exhibition of an artist in whose work he had invested heavily. After that, as other priorities came to the fore, this exhibition that would have been groundbreaking for being interdepartmental was pushed so far ahead on the calendar that it no longer existed. Elderfield told me that this prompted him to say to Oldenburg, “But I was there when you assured Nick Weber the Albers show would take place.” Oldenburg, according to Elderfield, replied, “‘The agreement wasn’t on paper, it was only a handshake.’”
Josef described the administrators and bureaucrats associated with the Bauhaus as being no more dependable than these American museum directors, even if there were exceptions like Redslob, Hesse, Masaryk, and Grote. He made clear that at the Bauhaus it was a given that artists and museum people were, by definition, foes. To think that “the authorities” might have the same interests as creative geniuses was naïve. I thought of this again in 1988 when, thrilled as I was to curate a centenary retrospective of Josef’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, shortly before it opened, I was coerced into including a painting belonging to a museum trustee even though it had to be shown under Plexiglas, making it essentially impossible to see.
IN NOVEMBER 1975, I drove the Alberses to New York a second time. They had a morning meeting with a dealer in pre-Columbian art—they were swapping an Homage to the Square for a particularly fine Inca pot—and had, yet again, asked me to join them for lunch in the exclusive precincts of the Metropolitan Museum. Following lunch, Anni and I were to look at a group of her textile samples from the Bauhaus workshops in Weimar and Dessau—she had given these to the Met many years earlier.
With her frail, emaciated hands, Anni picked up, one after another, swatches of materials she had made at the Bauhaus. In her parents’ apartment, she said, the materials had been mostly silk and velvet. Their appearance masked rather than celebrated their structure; instead of letting yarn and its construction into fabric be patently visible, the everyday fabrics of pre-Bauhaus Germany were covered with ornamental flower patterns, images of women on swings, and decorative motifs that had nothing to do with process or function. Disguise and embellishment had been the goal not just of the living room curtains and tablecloths and armchair coverings in her parents’ universe, but of everything else in their way of life. At the Bauhaus, however, she had, blessedly, learned that there were other people who, like her, wanted to face the truth squarely—and who even thought that the truth could be beautiful.
While she was holding an evening dress material in which shimmering metallic thread was intertwined with a matte black linen, Anni suddenly shifted subjects. She told me that Josef had had an attack of dizziness in the morning. She thought he was now fine, but she wanted me to know about it.
Farewell party for Georg and El Muche, Haus Scheper, Dessau, February 7, 1927. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Walter Gropius are among those in the group. The Bauhauslers always celebrated events with great style.
Later in the afternoon, we met Josef in the lobby of the museum at the appointed time. We were about to head toward the car when he suddenly felt very faint. He sat down on a bench in the lobby, and Anni, who positioned herself next to him, had him rest his head on her shoulder. I went to bring the Alberses’ dark green (Josef loved the idea that the color was called “British racing green”) Mercedes around to the front of the building. A Met staff member watched the car while Anni and I slowly helped Josef down the steps of the museum, Anni supporting him on one side while I took the other.
As I drove this chivalrous elderly couple out of the city, Josef looked pale in the seat next to me. He was, in fact, suffering from the undiagnosed heart ailment that would, five months later, kill him. But as we drove up the West Side Highway, going past the Cloisters, with the windows open and the air over the Hudson replacing the pollution of the city, the eighty-seven-year-old began to perk up. He started to talk about Romanesque architecture and sculpture, which he loved, and then to discuss aspects of the current art scene and the “museum World,” which he detested.
From there the conversation shifted to Giotto, about whom I asked him some questions relating to what he said he admired in the Romanesque. I knew, of course, that when he had given Annelise Fleischmann, shortly after they met at the Weimar Bauhaus, a reproduction of Giotto’s Flight into Egypt, it embodied the grace and equilibrium they both considered vital to all great art and design.
Josef began to gesture animatedly with his right forefinger. “You know, Nick, finally I prefer Duccio. There is a tension in his line—an excitement—an energy.” He outlined a Duccio Virgin Mary with his finger. He was flushed, and his eyes sparkled. Discussing line, making shapes with his finger, he was alive again.
