Toward the end of September 2008, I was riding my bicycle on the Avenue Gabriel in Paris one morning when a movement on the other side of the road caught my eye. The sun was bright, but the air crisp and cool; it was one of those days when every sight sparkled. A powerfully built black man, about age forty, was unloading cargo from the back of a large truck. To shoulder his load, he had his torso twisted, with his forward shoulder lowered. His knees were bent, and his weight was clearly concentrated in his legs rather than his back. The way he was managing the large, and presumably heavy, wooden box showed a complete knowledge of his methods, a consummate grace and professionalism.
As I pedaled along the tree-lined avenue, past the spectacular and ornate structures that line it, I realized that this was what the Bauhaus intended. The goal of its guiding lights was to get us to see things, to notice what is allegedly ordinary but is in fact totally extraordinary. My mind flashed to an occasion thirty-three years earlier when I was driving Josef and Anni Albers to New York. Josef was obsessed with a structure then going up alongside the Cross County Parkway, because of the way it was being sheathed from the top down once the scaffolding was in place. Other people I knew would have focused on the traffic jam we were entering, or might have had their minds far from where we were; he was riveted to what was right there, and to what many people would not have perceived.
Sport at the Bauhaus, ca. 1928. Photograph by T. Lux Feininger. Skill and pleasure were revered at the school.
Anni, too, was very excited about the way the walls were going on to this building, and explained, in her soft voice, “You see, I always love the process; it’s more exciting now, with the bricks getting placed, than it will be when it’s finished.”
The man unloading the box on the Avenue Gabriel recalled Josef’s drawing of electrical workers—a sketch he made before going to the Bauhaus, and that I had found in his basement storage in New Haven. What had intrigued him was the way those workers high on a pole had angled their bodies, the act of balancing, the know-how and the coordination.
The sight of the trucker managing his cargo also made me remember one of the last times I had seen Josef, on a bitter January day in 1976. When I turned into the driveway of the Alberses’ house—where, every time I went there, I was struck anew by how nondescript it was, as if I still could not reconcile the blandness of the contractor’s design with the power within—Josef was standing in front of the open garage door with a snow shovel in his hand. He had on a Viyella tattersall shirt, the neck button closed, and khakis. Looking rugged yet boyish, and somehow innocent, the handsome eighty-seven-year-old came to greet me, transferring the wooden handle of the shovel from the right hand to the left. With a smile, as if he enjoyed the problem he was solving with the icy driveway, Josef explained that the northern exposure and the angles of the asphalt caused ice to melt into puddles that then refroze.
He was about to break up some sheets of ice when I tried to persuade him to let me take the shovel. He protested, but I prevailed and began to attack the ice. Not wanting to be rude by leaving me on my own, he stood at the open garage door and watched. Josef’s presence had the impact on me it had had on generations of students; it always made people want to do their very best. I knew that here was a man who preferred good shoveling to bad painting, and I shoveled as if my life depended on it.
“Marvelous … wunderbar,” he told me. Smiling and animated, he went on, “You know, Nick, you have very mature shoveling strokes. The little schoolboys who usually shovel here are half your height.” He indicated this with his hands. “And their shovel throws go only half as far as yours. They have young boys’ strokes. You have a man’s.”
The exaggeration and the symmetry of his comparison belonged to the side of Albers that invested ordinary reality with poetry. Beyond that, what was especially striking was the way Josef was a connoisseur of daily moments. He cared about effective methods and pertinent details, whether the slope of a driveway, the reach of a shovel stroke, or the thickness and texture of a pen nib; it all fascinated him. Above all, he observed things astutely and responded to what he saw in unexpected, original ways.
The Bauhaus was so much more than a place or an artistic movement. Yes, there were the realities of its history and of the individuals who were there, but the heart of the school, for its truest practitioners, had to do with the most universal and timeless issues. Above all, the teachers implored their students to look at things, to observe carefully, to proceed from investigating with the eyes to seeing. With keen observation comes a sense of the miracle of existence.
As I continued to ride along the Parisian street, I thought of Josef’s obsession with bicycles. He did drawings of them and wrote about them; to his mind, a bicycle, with the simple functioning of the pedals, the chains, and the wheels with their many spokes, was a perfect example of form following function. That issue has become a cliché in discussions of design, but its familiarity does not make it any less significant. The architecture along the Avenue Gabriel represents exactly the opposite values, with the profusion of ornament, the unnecessary flourishes on each façade, the emphasis on décor. The Bauhauslers did not oppose that past with all of its filigree and add-ons, but they exulted more in objects like bicycles. It was the use of tubular steel in a bike that led Marcel Breuer to many of his most innovative designs in strong, lightweight furniture.
I was also aware of the leaves that had fallen on the street, and of nature’s seasons. As I delved into the lives of my six Bauhaus characters, one of the elements I found the most striking was the way Klee took daily walks in the great parks of Weimar and Dessau and focused on natural growth. Botany as a source of knowledge was a fundamental of the school. The respect for nature was of paramount importance.
THE DESTINATION of my bike ride was a sports facility that is part of a club in what was once a very grand house. The garden at its entrance was, on this early autumn day, rich in orange and yellow flowers. I thought for a moment of the way that Le Corbusier—among the people most admired at the Bauhaus, and the subject of one of the school’s finest publications as well as a participant in its exhibitions—was more concerned with the choice of trees and flowers in the courtyards of his houses than with many other elements (including some that would have benefited from more attention, like the issue of leaking roofs). The form of those flowers made me think of Klee, and the vibrant colors conjured Kandinsky. I was reminded of their love for the bounty and inventiveness of nature, and their awareness that visual pleasure—color on its own, abstract shapes—can directly impart intense emotional pleasure.
I entered my club, and my thoughts were sent in a totally different direction when I signed in the register and saw that the person ahead of me had put down his name as “Comte de Rochefoucault.” As I wrote my name underneath, I was aware that this, too, had to do strongly with the Bauhaus. The grandson of a glasscutter whose parents immigrated to America, I have very little interest in titles and the concept of nobility, and as an American I am largely ignorant on the subject, but I am intrigued by the way in which those distinctions do and don’t matter to many people. The Bauhaus was established thanks to the interest of a prince, and its first home had once been a royal academy, but it was a place where Jews and Catholics and Protestants, some from aristocratic families and others from humble working-class backgrounds, were engaged side by side in the same effort. The issues of background and family were by no means erased—they were too embedded in German history—but the passion for seeing and for making art, the wish to establish design standards of universal application, rendered them relatively unimportant.
In a bike ride in Paris in 2008, one could readily fathom the real meaning of the Bauhaus. It was a place where life was celebrated, where the visual was accorded supreme importance, where people from any world whatsoever were given the chance to explore and savor the wonders of life and art. Its legacy is not the perpetuation of one particular style; it is, rather, the extension of those larger values all over the world.
Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Nina Kandinsky in Wörlitzer Park, Dessau, 1932. The park in Dessau was a favorite haunt of Kandinsky and Klee.
