He’s an artist in his own right

Anni and Josef Albers, Musée d’art Moderne de Paris

A Josef Albers’ aphorism:

"To distribute material possessions is to divide them

To distribute spiritual possessions is to multiply them”

The last time we talked about Anni Albers, we were at the Pompidou, for the exhibition ‘Women in Abstraction.’ This time, we are at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) and we are talking about Anni and her husband Josef (an artist in his own right). Anni had been a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus. Ditto for Josef.

The Bauhaus, (Figure 1) to refresh your memories, was the German art school that opened in Weimar with such high hopes in 1919, moved next to Dassau before the Nazis closed it permanently in 1933 at its third location, Berlin. Several guiding principals defined the Bauhaus. One was ‘form follows function’. Which I always associate with the American architect Louis Sullivan because he is the one who said it first. Walter Gropius, the head of the Bauhaus, was among the many architects and designers at the turn of the 20th century who thought that design could be a function of, well, function. The Bauhaus also embraced mass production. There was a belief, perhaps more a hope, that mass produced, utilitarian designs could incorporate craft and emphasize beauty.

The Bauhaus was founded during the Weimar republic, when women supposedly had the same civil rights and responsibilities as men. So the Bauhaus encouraged women to apply. But when more women than men did just that, Walter Gropius worried that all those women would make the school seem less credible, less serious. So he 'unofficially restricted the number of women students’. And he found ways to restrict women once they were accepted into the school, too. How? Well, one example - no women architecture students. Why not? Men think in three dimensions. Women think in two. Oh right. Wait, what?

But then, what was to be done with all those girls at the Bauhaus. (Figure 2) Textiles, anyone? And that’s where women went after the first semester. Were they forced or encouraged to weave? Well, with the other disciplines denied them, does it really matter? The upside to all that discrimination was that the weaving workshop became a laboratory for experimentation. And ironically, the textiles the women wove were big sellers. The financial survival of the Bauhaus depended on them.

Anni Albers (1889–1994) née Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was born into a Protestant bourgeois family that had converted from Judaism. She came to the Bauhaus planning to study painting. When she was denied admittance to that department, she tried for glass blowing. Also denied. She reluctantly went into weaving. (Figure 3) Her real choice was the same choice that all the other women who came to the Bauhaus had. Weaving or leaving. Fleischmann didn’t know the first thing about weaving and besides that, she thought it was a “sissy" craft.

Figure 3. Anni Albers at the Bauhaus

Figure 4. Josef Albers as a young teacher

Josef Albers (Figure 4) was from a working class, Catholic family. He initially trained to be an elementary school teacher. And was for 5 years. But art beckoned and he began formal studies in painting at age 31 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He transferred to the Bauhaus the following year and after three years as a student, he was hired to teach the preliminary course. When the Dessau school closed in 1932, Albers, with Anni, (now married), moved to Berlin, where they both taught.

When the Nazis closed the school permanently in 1933, they were out of jobs, but they were in the sight lines of the Nazis. Because of course, to them, Anni was Jewish. The laws defining who was a Jew and how much of a Jew someone had to be for all the discriminatory laws to take effect, makes for very unpleasant reading.

They had to get out of town. And they did with help of the American architect Philip Johnson, who had just become head of the architect department of the newly created Museum of Modern Art in New York. He recommended Josef for head of the art department at a newly founded liberal arts college in North Carolina. And so at age 44 and 33 respectively, Josef and Anni traveled from Berlin to Black Mountain, (Figure 5) from Germany to North Carolina, neither speaking a word of English.

Figure 5. Black Mountain School, North Carolina

Black Mountain was an experimental college committed to interdisciplinary education. A school that considered art an important element of that education. Josef and Anni were a perfect fit with their Bauhaus background. Like the Bauhaus, Black Mountain’s aim was to bring art into everyday life. All the arts were important, including architecture, performing arts and applied arts.

When Josef Albers led Black Mountain’s art department, there were two requirements, a course on materials and form which he taught. And a course on Plato. With Albers as head, the school flourished. Buckminster Fuller built his first large-scale geodesic dome there, (Figure 6) Merce Cunningham formed his dance company there and John Cage staged his first musical happening there. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning spent time there, and so did Ruth Asawa and Jacob Lawrence.

Figure 6. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain School, North Carolina

The school’s intellectual roots may have been the Bauhaus, but Black Mountain went further, much further. The school’s goal was to be a community, one that eschewed the traditional teacher-pupil relationship. For example, students participated in decision making about the institution and about their own educations. They decided when they were ready to graduate. Not surprisingly, not many students wanted to leave so not many thought they were ready to graduate. With no course requirements or grades, who could argue with them. Well, maybe their parents who were paying for it.

Anni taught at Black Mountain the entire time that Josef did, from 1933 until 1949. At the Bauhaus, the weaving workshop had been virtually ‘women only’ by default. But at Black Mountain, things were different. Lots of students, no matter what they else they were studying, wanted to check out what Anni was teaching and how she was teaching it. (Figure 7) Under Anni’s leadership, the weaving workshop was a hub of creativity where students wove functional objects as well as experimental pieces, exploring the properties of different materials. Her experimentation with color and shape, scale and rhythm, abstract and geometric patterns began here and remained a constant throughout her life.

Figure 7. Anni Albers woven fabric and at the loom

Very early on in their tenure at Black Mountain, the Alberses discovered Mexico. They fell in love with the country, its people, its history, its artifacts. They visited 13 times between the winter of 1935–36 and the late 1960s. Josef became passionate about pre-Columbian art and architecture. It influenced his painting and prints and even his approach to photography. (Figure 8) Anni was fascinated by the traditional weaving styles and techniques of Mexico's indigenous artists. In Oaxaca, local weavers taught her how to use the Peruvian back strap loom, a simple, portable loom that was sophisticated enough to accommodate even her most complex designs. (Figure 9)

Figure 8. Josef Albers photographs in Mexico

Figure 9. Anni Albers in Mexico

Anni was so enamored with the back strap loom that she used it to teach her students at Black Mountain. This is how she explained it to an interviewer from the Smithsonian in 1968, almost 20 years after she and Josef had left Black Mountain. He asked her to describe her teaching method.

“Maybe it’s an exaggerated term to call it a ‘method’ at all. But I tried to put my students at the point of zero….And once they understand …basic elements, (they could see) that the Peruvian back strap loom has embedded in it everything that a high power machine loom today has. And they understand it in a completely different sense than walking into a factory and seeing these things operate because they know what is necessary and what kind of inventions have occurred in the course of history…”

It was while Josef Albers was teaching at Black Mountain that he began experimenting with the squares that were to obsess him for the rest of his career. (Figure 10) A career which took him to Yale, to be head of the Art Department in 1949.

Figure 10. Josef Albers ’Square’

Albers painted a lot of squares, over 1000. And a lot of them are on display in this exhibition. (Figure 11) Albers painted them to help his students understand color. The squares range in size from 12 to 48 square inches. Some have three different colored squares and some have four different colored squares. Albers’ squares were a continuation of his studies at the Bauhaus. Those studies were influenced by the Theory of Colors written in 1810 by the German poet Goethe.

Figure 11. Josef Albers Squares

I didn’t know about Goethe’s color theories because I studied 19th and 20th century French artists’ interest in the properties and qualities of color. And those artists were influenced by The Law of Simultaneous Color Contrast written in 1839 by the French industrial chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul.

As it turns out, these two studies bring together previous ideas about color theory. An interest that was rekindled at the Bauhaus, particularly by Johannes Itten (with whom Albers taught) whose own treatise was published in 1963. Albers’ followed with his squares and his own manual, Interaction of Color, which he wrote and illustrated to explain his color design principles to his students.

Figure 12. Anni Albers Weaving

While Josef was teaching at Yale and focusing on his squares, Anni’s career was flourishing. In 1950, the guy who kept her from studying painting and glass blowing at the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, came calling. By then, he was at Harvard, revamping the architecture department. He hired Anni to design soft furnishings - wall hangings, bed spreads and drapery. Which fit right in with what she was doing at the time, working on mass-producible fabric patterns. Simultaneously, she was creating "pictorial" weavings which were often constructed of both traditional materials like jute and horse hair and industrial materials, like cellophane. (Figure 12)

Somehow Anni was consistently underestimated or overlooked. She was the wife, the tag along. And she went along with it, using every experience as an opportunity. In 1963, for example, when Josef was invited to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, Anni tagged along. But she was the one who ‘got it,’ who understood the medium and what it could do. When she returned to Tamarind the following year, she had the fellowship. And just like that, she more or less abandoned weaving and began printmaking, primarily lithography and silk-screening. Her work in printmaking is every bit as experimental and exciting as her weaving. (Figure 13)

Figure 13. Anni Albers Silk Screen

Usually an exhibition about the Albers is an exhibition about Josef Albers. Anni is mentioned, as the wife, ‘an artist in her own right’. But here, at MAM in Paris, for the first time, both artists are celebrated. (Figures 14, 15) As one reviewer wrote, maybe now it will be difficult to pretend that Anni's textile works do not deserve as much attention as Josef's pictorial creation. That her silkscreens are not as significant as his squares.

Figure 14. Josef and Anni Albers

Figure 15. Josef and Anni Albers

This is an immersive exhibition. One that moves chronologically, from the Bauhaus (1920-1933) to Black Mountain (1933-1949) and on to Yale (1950-1976). There is a section on the importance of their frequent travels in and around Mexico, And another section devoted to their teaching. A simulated classroom permits museum visitors to get an idea of what it would have been like to have been taught by one of these inspired educators who sincerely, truly believed in the value of teaching.

At the end, we see some unexpected riffs, Anni’s religious commissions for synagogues (Figure 16) and Josef's record sleeves for Command Records. (Figure 17)

Figure 16. Six Prayers, Anni Albers

Figure 17. Command Records, album covers, Josef Albers

In addition to the works of art created by these two and the art they collected on their Mexican travels, there is archival material ranging from photos to footage of various moments of their careers. At various spots along the exhibition route, the current director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, Nicholas Fox Weber, speaks (in English) and explains the Alberses art and lives. Those who take the time to listen to his commentary are richly rewarded for their effort

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation was founded in 1971 just outside New Haven, funded by money from the restitution of Anni’s family property in East Berlin. (Her money, his name first, not complaining, just saying) What the Nazis stole, the Germans returned. It is comforting that something good and decent has come from that terrible indecency.

A final Josef Albers aphorism:

Easy to know that diamonds are precious,

Good to know that rubies have depth,

But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.

Amen. You should see this exhibition. It is really meaningful on so many levels. Two decent humanists and humanitarians who were also excellent artists - each in their own right!

Copyright © 2021 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved

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