Also by Nicholas Fox Weber
The Drawings of Josef Albers
Louisa Mathiasdottir: The Small Paintings (with Jed Perl and Deborah Rosenthal)
The Woven and Graphic Art of Anni Albers (with Mary Jane Jacob
and Richard S. Field)
Leland Bell
Warren Brandt
Josef Albers: A Retrospective
The Art of Babar
Patron Saints
Cleve Gray
Anni Albers
Balthus: A Biography
Marc Klionsky (with Elie Wiesel and John Russell)
Josef & Anni Albers / Designs for Living
The Clarks of Cooperstown
Le Corbusier: A Life
Anni Albers: Print Catalogue Raisonné (with Brenda Danilowitz)
For Charlotte
Contents
List of Illustrations
Klee’s Birthday Party
Walter Gropius
Paul Klee
Wassily Kandinsky
Josef Albers
Photo Section
Anni Albers
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
The Bauhaus Lives
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustrations
Paul Klee, 1924
Josef Albers, photo of Anni Albers
Josef Albers, photo collage of Klee in his studio at the Dessau Bauhaus
Josef and Anni Albers wth Wassily Kandinsky on the grounds of the Dessau masters’ houses, ca. 1928
Alma Mahler, 1909
Walter Gropius in the uniform of a cavalry officer
Walter Gropius, 1905
Entrance of the Fagus factory
Alma Mahler at the time of her marriage to Gropius
Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest, 1913
Franz Werfel, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1940
Lyonel Feininger, cover of the program for the Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar, 1919
Johannes Itten, 1921
Walter and Ise Gropius shortly after their marriage on October 16, 1923
Entrance to the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition
Haus am Horn, Weimar, 1923
The Bauhaus in Dessau, built by Gropius, 1926, in a photo annotated by Josef Albers
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, Georg Muche, Paul Klee, and Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1926
Postcard from Lily, Felix, and Paul Klee, sent 1928
Walter Gropius with Paul Klee and Béla Bartók, Dessau, 1927
Walter Gropius in Arizona, 1928
Paul Klee in his studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, 1922
Photograph of Paul Klee taken by his son, Felix, at their house in Weimar on April 1, 1925
Paul Klee with son, Felix, cat Fritz, and sister Mathilde in Weimar in the autumn of 1922
Paul Klee, Window Display for Lingerie, 1922
Klee and Kandinsky posing as Goethe and Schiller
Statue of Goethe and Schiller by Ernst Rietschel
Paul Klee, Man-Fish-Man-Eater, 1920
Paul Klee and Galka Scheyer in Weimar, 1922
Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the masters’ houses in Dessau
Lily and Paul Klee in the English garden at Wörlitz, near Dessau, 1927
Paul Klee, Bird Pep, 1925
Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee on vacation in Guéthary, 1929
Paul and Lily Klee in Guéthary, near Biarritz, 1929; photo collage by Josef Albers
Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, 1906
Photograph of Wassily Kandinsky with his son, Vsevolod, 1918
Wassily Kandinsky, Small Worlds VII, 1922
Wassily Kandinsky, questionnaire from the wall-painting workshop, 1923
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky with Arnold Schoenberg and his wife, ca. 1927
Serge Chekhonine, sketch for a magazine cover with a portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1923
The Kandinskys’ living room in Dessau
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in the dining room of their masters’ house at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1927
Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Pictures at an Exhibition: Gnomes, 1928
Celebration at the house of Nina and Wassily Kandinsky, 1928
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in Dessau, 1929
Josef Albers, Perdekamp, 1917–18
Josef Albers, Self-Portrait III, ca. 1917
The glass workshop at the Weimar Bauhaus, ca. 1923
Lucia Moholy-Nagy, photograph showing a table designed by Josef Albers for the reception room to Walter Gropius’s office, ca. 1923
A chair that Albers designed in 1929, which could be broken down for easy shipping, was featured in an exhibition of the latest Bauhaus products.
Umbo, Josef Albers 28, 1928
Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer IV, ‘29; im Meisterrat ‘28; [Hans] Wittner, [Ernst] Kallai, Marianne Brandt, Vorkursausstellung ‘27/’28; Oskar & Tut Sommer 28, 1927–29
Josef Albers’s collage of photos of Gropius with Schifra Carnesi, taken in Ascona, 1930
Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Porto Ronco VIII, 1930
Anni and Josef Albers in the garden of their home at 8 North Forest Circle, New Haven, Connecticut, ca. 1967
Annelise Fleischmann, ca. 1923
Maximilian Schell and Anni Albers at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, 1978
The weaving workshop at the Weimar Bauhaus
On Annelise Fleischmann’s twenty-third birthday, which occurred shortly after she arrived at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers surprised her with this fine reproduction of a statue in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.
Josef and Anni Albers on the grounds of the future masters’ houses in Dessau, ca. 1925
Paul Klee, Zwei Kräfte [Two Forces], 1922–23 385 Anni Albers in the Dreiers’ car, 1935
Anni Albers and other Bauhauslers on the Preller house balconies at the Dessau Bauhaus, ca. 1927
Anni Albers’s bedroom in the masters’ house in Dessau, ca. 1928
Josef Albers, Anni, Sommer ‘28, 1928
Weaving workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1928
Nicholas Fox Weber and Anni Albers at the Royal College of Art graduation ceremony, London, June 29, 1990
Otti Berger, 1927–28
Josef Albers, Anni Albers, ca. 1940
Sergius Ruegenberg, Caricature of Mies with Model of Glass Skyscraper, ca. 1925
Ludwig Mies in the doorway of the Riehl house, ca. 1912
Ludwig Mies, Perls house, Berlin, 1912
Ludwig Mies, Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, ca. 1921
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, concrete country house project, 1923
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, brick country house project, 1924
Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, view of principal façade of German Pavilion, Barcelona, 1928–29
Entrance of Barcelona Pavilion, with Kolbe sculpture
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat house, 1928–30
Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, ca. 1930
A dance at the Dessau Bauhaus, with Nina Kandinsky and Josef Albers in the foreground, ca. 1926
Josef Albers and Nina and Wassily Kandinsky, ca. 1930–31
Five Bauhaus masters in Klee’s studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, ca. 1925
Farewell party for Georg and El Muche, Haus Scheper, Dessau, February 7, 1927
Sport at the Bauhaus, ca. 1928
Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Nina Kandinsky in Wörlitzer Park, Dessau, 1932
COLOR INSERT I
Paul Klee, Gifts for J, 1929
Paul Klee, The Potter, 1921
Paul Klee, Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition
Paul Klee, Battle Scene from the Comic-Fantastic Opera The Seafarer
, 1923
Paul Klee, Individualized Measurement of Strata, 1930
Paul Klee, Fish Magic (Large Fish Picture), 1925
Wassily Kandinsky, Theory of Three Primary Colors Applied to the Three Elementary Forms, 1923
Wassily Kandinsky, Small Worlds IV, 1922
Wassily Kandinsky, study for the mural painting of the Juryfreie Kunstschau, 1922
Wassily Kandinsky, Too Green, 1928
Herbert Bayer, Poster for Kandinsky’s 60th Birthday Exhibition in Dessau, 1926
Wassily Kandinsky, Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition
Wassily Kandinsky, Little Black Bars, 1928
Paul Klee, Dance of the Red Skirts, 1924
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923
COLOR INSERT II
Annelise Albers, design for Smyrna rug, ca. 1925
Josef Albers, Mephisto Self-Portrait, 1918
Josef Albers, Untitled, 1921
Josef Albers, Bundled, 1925
Josef Albers, Red and White Window, ca. 1923
Anni Albers, design for a rug for a child’s room, 1928
The Alberses’ house at 808 Birchwood Drive, Orange, Connecticut
Annelise Fleischmann, wall hanging, ca. 1923
Annelise Albers, wall hanging, 1926
Anni Albers, Bauhaus diploma fabric, 1929
Anni Albers, Fox II, 1972
Anni Albers, Fox I, 1972
Anni Albers, Six Prayers, 1966–67
Paul Klee in his studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, 1924
Klee’s Birthday Party
It was the fall of 1972, and I was driving Anni Albers down the Wilbur Cross Parkway from my family’s printing company in Hartford, Connecticut, back to her and Josef’s house in the New Haven suburb of Orange. The Alberses—she was seventy-four, he eighty-five—were the last two surviving members of the Bauhaus faculty. I had been introduced to them two years earlier, and was now working with Anni on a limited edition print in which she was making ingenious use of photo-offset technique that was generally applied to commercial lithography rather than abstract art.
Anni and I were in my two-seater hatchback car, an MGB-GT which the Alberses praised as an exemplar of the Bauhaus ideals of impeccable functioning and no wasted space. “We prefer good machinery to bad art,” Josef had explained. But the torrential rain that afternoon was so intense that Anni was an anxious passenger. “Please pull over under that bridge until the downpour gets lighter,” she requested in her German-accented English, the controlled politeness barely masking an inner desperation. “In Mexico, when we would go there in the thirties with friends in their Model A, we often had to pull over during storms,” she added, to make it clear that she was not criticizing my driving.
The cascade of rain on the windshield was intensifying and the visibility was becoming dire as I stopped the car. Under one of the charming carved stone parkway bridges built by the WPA, Anni momentarily closed her eyes in relief. She was an adventurer—luring Josef from the Dessau Bauhaus to Tenerife for five weeks on a banana boat in the 1920s, getting them to Machu Picchu in the fifties—but she also was chronically anxious, which she directly attributed to the period in 1939 when she had to get her extended family out of Nazi Germany; her parents’ ship docked in Veracruz, in Mexico, where she and Josef had to scramble to bribe one person after another before Anni’s increasingly desperate mother and father finally managed to disembark. At twenty-four, I was soaking up Anni’s life experiences as if they had been my own, and was enchanted by the consuming dedication she and Josef had to the making of art and by the way their work enabled them to withstand anything. Now, in the sports car under the bridge, the woman who had become director of the Bauhaus weaving workshop assured me that our journey had been worth its challenges because of her thrill at supervising the presswork of her latest prints, and the importance of her being there to oversee the mechanical adjustments that intensified the tonality of the gray ink.
Josef Albers, photo of Anni Albers. Anni disparaged her own looks; others considered her a great beauty. This is one of the many pictures Josef took of her over the years.
I had switched the motor off. Anni turned to me and said with a smile, “You deserve a reward. I know you have been wanting to hear about Paul Klee for a long time.” Since our first meeting, I had badgered her with questions when either she or Josef mentioned Klee, Kandinsky, or their other colleagues. Both the Alberses, however, were so focused on their current work and uninclined to nostalgia that I had not been able to elicit more than a few cursory remarks. “I will tell you something I have never told anyone before—about his fiftieth birthday.” It was 1929. Klee, Anni told me, was her “god at the time;” he was also her next-door neighbor in the row of five superb new masters’ houses in the woods a short walk from the Dessau Bauhaus. Although the Swiss painter was, in her eyes, aloof and unapproachable—“like Saint Christopher carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders”—she admired him tremendously. She had even acquired one of his watercolors after being bowled over by an exhibition in which Klee tacked up his most recent work in a corridor of the Bauhaus when it was still in Weimar. The purchase had been a rare public admission of her family’s wealth, which she normally concealed: she told me that she had been so embarrassed by the appearance in Weimar of two of her uncles in a Hispano-Suiza that she had begged them to drive off immediately. But though her ability to buy the painting conspicuously set her apart from the other students in difficult economic times, she still could not resist acquiring Klee’s composition of arrows and abstract forms. Now, as her god approached his major birthday, Anni heard that three other students in the weaving workshop were hiring a small plane from the Junkers aircraft plant, not far away, so that they could have this mystical, otherworldly man’s birthday presents descend to him from above. He was, they had decided, beyond having gifts arrive on the earthly level where ordinary mortals live.
Klee’s presents were to come down in a large package shaped like an angel. Anni fashioned its curled hair out of tiny, shimmering brass shavings. Other Bauhauslers made the gifts the angel would carry: a print from Lyonel Feininger, a lamp from Marianne Brandt, some small objects from the wood workshop.
Anni was not originally scheduled to be in the four-seater Junkers aircraft from which the angel would descend, but when she arrived at the airfield with her three friends, the pilot deemed her so light that he invited her to get on board. For all of them, it was their first flight. As the cold December air penetrated her coat and the pilot fooled with the young weavers by doing 360-degree turnabouts as they huddled together in the open cockpit, Anni became suddenly aware of new visual dimensions. She told me she had been living on one optical plane in her textiles and abstract gouaches. Now she was seeing from a very different vantage point, with the factor of time added in. She was too fascinated to be afraid.
She guided the pilot by identifying the house the Klees shared with the Kandinskys next door to her and Josef. Then he swooped the plane down and they released the gift. The angel’s parachute didn’t open fully, and it landed with a bit of a crash, but Klee was pleased nonetheless. He would memorialize the unusual presents and their delivery in a painting that shows a cornucopia of gifts on the ground in good condition, even if the angel looks a bit the worse for wear (see color plate I). James Thrall Soby, who owned the colorful canvas, told my wife and me that he thought it depicted “a woman passed out drunk at a cocktail party,” with the golden brushwork Klee used for Anni’s brass shavings representing the socialite’s blond hair, but Anni’s account revealed the actual facts.
Josef Albers’s photo collage of Klee in his studio at the Dessau Bauhaus. Albers’s portrait photos were scarcely known until after his death in 1976.
Josef Albers was less impressed than Klee was. Later that afternoon he asked Anni if she had seen “the idiots flying around overhead.” Anni smiled mischievously as sh
e recalled this. “I told him I was one of them,” she said with her usual tone of proud defiance.
The rain let up, and we resumed our drive. This was America in the heyday of Pop Art, a time when the newspapers reported daily about what parties Andy Warhol and Baby Jane Holzer had gone to the night before; while that sort of current gossip held no interest for me, every morsel about Bauhaus life had a glow. Listening to Anni in her newly expansive mood as we headed home, I began to see that the geniuses of the Bauhaus lived with the creativity and flair of their work.
Yet at the same time that these painters, architects, and designers were having extraordinary impact and leading unusual lives, they were subject to the same needs and fears and longings as most human beings. As I spent more time with Josef, too, he made clear both the pleasures and the struggles of his colleagues, so that I had at least a tiny glimpse of their everyday realities as well as their exceptional lust for improving the seeable world. A reverence for the universe, a profound dedication to adding to its beauty—these were constant, but so were the inescapable realities of money and family and health.
ANNI ALBERS WAS SOMEONE who was not used to confiding in another person, possibly not even in Josef, and she clearly had a lot bottled up that she wanted to say. Although she seemed full of certainty, there was much that made her uncomfortable. Once our friendship helped assuage her own feeling of inadequacy, Anni described a slight that had stung her nearly a half century earlier, but that, until she told me about it, she had kept to herself.
Shortly after the Alberses had moved into one of Walter Gropius’s splendid, flat-roofed masters’ houses at the Dessau Bauhaus, Josef, who by then had a high rank on the faculty, told her that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, Mies’s mistress, would be coming for dinner. Eleven years her husband’s junior, still a student in the weaving workshop, and not someone who was ever sure of herself socially, Anni wanted to do everything right. By then she and Josef had been married for three years, but she still felt like a new bride who wanted to make the right impression on her husband’s cohorts. Besides, Mies already had a reputation as one of Germany’s most important architects, and both Alberses admired his work immensely.