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A beautiful confluence Nicholas Fox Weber

To understand the reasons for this exhibition devoted to the passionate connection between Anni and Josef Albers and anonymous art made in distant and remote locations centuries before they were born, please picture a tennis lesson on an isolated court in the mountains. It makes sense, because it was a tennis court in the mountains that, half a century ago, caused me to meet these extraordinary people.

It is 7:00a.m., a good hour to play before the sunlight is too strong on Majorca in summer. Rain and sunshine and the earth's nutrients are the ruling forces here, and the mountain peaks reach heavenward. Nightingales are singing tO celebrate the recent dawn, and wild mountain goats, skipping along the jagged cl iff face from which they might observe the intense exchange of forehands and back­hands, bleat loudly, communicating in a language we do not understand. The air is as pure as the clean white spaces Anni and Josef always lived in.

Majorca is a place where visitors fr om all over the world converge because they love natural beaury and the pleasures of life, and the pro, Miguel, half-English, half-Spanish, a strong and wiry player and first-class teacher, makes some observations about German clients. I hate generalizations about nationalities, but listen. Miguel opines that one would expect Germans to do as told, to follow instructions. "But they do not. They have it in their heads that their way is the right way, and they don't listen. They won't change, and don't want to

challenge what they think has been good enough until now. I tell Jurgen, who is two meters tall, to come tO net, but he has always played at the baseline with his unwieldy strokes, and won't consider anything new. He is afraid tO switch his approach."

Since the Alberses made similar statements about their childhood worlds, I am all ears. They did not hesitate to speak of what they considered indigenous tO the people of Germany, where they were both born. Class or financial situation were never the issue; the sense of inviolable rules pervaded. Anni and Josef spoke of the people and institutions they deemed the exemplars of Miguel's cliches because they were so determinedly the opposite. These two individuals devoted to making art and redesigning the visible world were always searching, responding to the new, and delighting in being open-eyed and open-eared.

And how they relished the panoply of human existence, so that, on this summer morning nearly forty years after Josef's death, and over twenty since Anni's, they are, as ever, whether considering national traits or imbibing the sort of a ir they loved at Machu Picchu when they trekked there in the 1950s, whether smiling at a little clay Aztec image of a ball player or applying deep black ink to white paper, designing at every moment, alive still.

8 A BEAUTIFUL CONFLUENCE

For Anni and Josef Albers were, in their thinking, always young, as were the artists they loved when they immersed themselves in the lively, free, imaginative objects of civilizations long gone.

Anni was brought up, wealthy, in Berlin. She was raised to follow social rules and traditions, and to meet precise expectations. In the industrial Ruhr valley, choked in coal smoke, Josef was trained by his father, an impecunious laborer skilled with wood and paint and stone, to apply known techniques and familiar tools to work his materials, to copy the old rather than search for the new. Both of them, over many marvelous conversations with me in the house I thought of as the American­ized Bauhaus, in Connecticut, in the early 1970s, would characterize such hidebound rigor as "the old German way, and all we wanted to get away from." They loved some aspects of the culture in which they were raised-we were eating their preferred apple strudel, from Mrs. Herbst, a gifted baker of German classics in New York; it was the only strudel they felt was light enough in the pastry and sufficiently tart in the apple filling, with the raisins offering just the right staccato-but, they told me, "We were always happy to move on. We liked adventure: new ways."

Miguel's observations made the memories flow. Martin Brandenberg, Anni's art teacher, was like a father figure to her during World War I. He forbade her, as a teenager, from using black pigment in her painting. It was inadmissible in Impressionism, his preferred method. She argued and insisted otherwise. That night, she cried when her mother instructed her that she had to obey or stop lessons with him. Anni did as told, but only briefly. In little time, she told her parents she would not assume the expected role of homemaker in their world of bourgeois luxury but was going to a new school, with unprecedented ideas, called the Bauhaus. Off she went, to a small room on the outskirts of Weimar, alone in the world until she met "the lean, half-starved, ascetic looking Westfalian"-Josef-whom she would marry three years later. She immediately put bold expanses of black in her minimalist, geometrically abstract wall hangings. They extolled their physical components, using threads and knots as a source of beauty, avoiding any of the floral patterns or decorative motifs of the draperies and upholstery materials of her childhood. For the rest of her life she sought new ways of doing things, listening to the loom as she made pioneering textiles, letting the thread guide her as much as she guided it. She learned and expanded on what the machinery could do before she embarked on a printmaking project in which she used techniques-acid bath lithography, photo-offset and silkscreen mixtures-no one had ever before considered.

Josef violated the norm as a young grade school teacher, near his hometown of Bottrop, by emphasizing experimentation rather than the accumulation of knowledge. He advocated independent thinking rather than learning by rote. Then he, too, "threw everything out the window and started life all over again"-his words to me­by going to the Bauhaus. At age thirty-two, he was so broke when he got to Weimar that he could not afford art supplies. At the town dump, he hacked up bottle fragments, and then in the school's glass workshop he assembled them as glorious, radiant, abstract artworks of a type never before imagined. The Masters told him he would be thrown out if he did not try other media. He defied them, gave himself a solo show of his glass compositions, and invited the vaunted gentlemen responsible for his future . Rather than expel Josef, Gropius and Muche and Kandinsky and Klee invited him to join their ranks as a Master.

No, they were not Miguel's typical Germans, and they took conscious delight in their revolution. For they were more interested, always, in what was universal and timeless. In spring of 1933, the SS padlocked the doors of the Bauhaus. The Third Reich proposed that the school reopen in compliance with them; Josef was one of the seven masters to decide to close the Bauhaus forever rather than submit the school to totalitarian rule. The Alberses went to America, quickly, a surprise even to themselves because the founders of Black Mountain College invited Josef to make art the focal point of the curriculum. Rather than bemoan the change, they embraced the benefits of exile, and immersed themselves in Latin American culture. They started in Cuba. Then they went to Mexico, where they would make fourteen journeys, and, in later years, to Peru and Chile and Argentina. New worlds opened to them.

On the first trip to Mexico, a road journey from Black Mountain College, taken with their friends Ted and Bobbie Dreier in the Dreiers' Model "A" Ford, a child standing on the side of the road tried to sell Anni a goat wrapped in a blanket. She said no to the goat, but wondered about the blanket. The little boy showed her an old clay figurine he would also sell her. She bought the blanket and the little figurine for a few pesos. Soon, with little money, truly no more than a pittance, Anni and Josef were acquiring Maya pots and Tlatilco figures. They acquired them because they felt at home with them. These earlier civilizations were inhabited by people like them. The Alberses felt complete camaraderie with everyone, everywhere, who loved the pleasures of seeing, who delighted in manipulating form, who saw color as a direct source of human well-being.

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10 A BEAUT IFU L CO NFLU ENCE

"Art is everywhere," they said of Mexico. There and elsewhere, so long as people were true to their instincts and savored the feasts of the eyes, celebrating universal wonders rather than indulging in needs too selfish or personal, Anni and Josef were happy.

I had gone to Majorca in part to visit friends who have become passionate devotees of the Alberses' art, feeling its unique radiance and warmth, and in part to work with Petro Kohut. Perro is a massage therapist and expert on the human body, whose essay linking Josef and Anni's artistic approach with that of pre-Columbian potters appears in this catalogue. Anni used to say "You can go anywhere from anywhere," and liked to quote Kandinsky saying, "There is always an and." Josef was passionate about "thinking in situations" and "minimal means for maximum effect. " Those precepts apply to every corner of the globe, at any period of rime, for all human beings. It is these universal points-evident in the objects Anni and Josef collected, as in a well-played tennis point, as in the work of Perro Kohut-rhar link all people, and that are revealed, we hope, in this exhibition.

One day, in 1974, I arrived at the Alberses' house when Josef's face, often pink, was a florid red. I asked how he was. He was furious. A well-known American artist, a man reputed for the chic restaurants he went to and for his sequence of glamorous wives, had said, in an interview in The New York Times that morning, that "he achieved eternity in his art. " Josef was outraged. "Eternity?!" he shouted. "Not even Michelangelo, not even Piero, not even Leonardo would say he achieved it. Who claims it? That swine."

Suddenly Josef walked, full steam, to the windowsill of the kitchen. He picked up a small, hand-painted, Mexican folk art clay bird. "You see this bird, Nick. We bought it for a couple of pesos in a marketplace. It is no different from many of the objects you find in all marketplaces. But it has more of eternity than those fancy artists in New York and the Hamptons. For whoever made it, he or she, back then or now, loved color, and knew how to work clay. Look at that pink flower and the green background! Beautiful! We don 't know who the person is, but the person did not want to call attention to himself, or herself. Rather, it is about birds, and flying, and color, and art, and life."

The qualities ava ilable to all of us, everywhere, always.

I met the Alberses because, as a Columbia College undergraduate, happily studying art history with Meyer Schapiro and Rudolf Wittkower and others of those splendid teachers guiding us to the joys of art, I spent my summers working at a tennis

camp in the White Mountains of New H ampshire. I fancied a girl who taught with me; she did not return the feeling. But we could be "just friends," she said-the statement few men want to hear, even when stated kindly and warmly-and she introduced me to her parents. They collected Josef and Anni's art, and, a couple of years later, when I was at Yale Graduate School, they rook me to

meet the legendary artistic couple, by then the only surviving masters from the Bauhaus. An amazing friendship began.

After a couple of months of getting to

know one another, I showed Anni two Esmerelda pots I had bought in Ecuador when I was fifteen. I am sure I paid no more than a dollar each for them in 1962. They were, as was so much else, signs to her that we were soulmates. I had not thought myself unusual. She maintained, though, that for a boy brought up in the Connecticut suburbs to spend a summer, at that age, in Quito, when there was a coup d'etat, and to return merrily with these sublime objects, was a sign of looking with fresh eyes.

The same can be said for all people who adore good air, the pleasure of games, the marvels of seeing. On behalf of Anni and Josef, I thank, most especially, Nick Murphy, who has played an invaluable role at every stage of this endeavor, and in addition, the group of independent people who all appreciate what make human beings similar rather than different, which was so important to these two great a rtists. With their hard work and devotion to vision, this exhibition and its catalogue extend, in a new way, the Alberses' appreciation and perpetuation of earthly joy.

A beautiful confluence Nicholas Fox Weber

Per comprendere le ragioni di questa mostra dedicata alia passione che lego Annie Josef Albers all'arte anonima di luoghi lontani e remoti, risa­lente a secoli prima delloro tempo, vi invitiamo ad immaginare una lezione di tennis su un campo sperso tra le montagne. Si, perche fu grazie ad un campo da tennis tra le montagne che, mezzo secolo fa, conobbi queste due straordinarie persone.

Sono le 7 del mattino, abbiamo un'ora buona prima che il sole estivo di Maiorca sia troppo violento per poter giocare. La pioggia, Ia luce del sole e le sostanze nutrienti della terra sono le forze che regnano in questo luogo, dove le cime dei monti svettano verso l'alto dei cieli. Gli usignoli stanno cantando in omaggio dell'alba appena nata e le capre selvatiche, balzellando lungo Ia parete frastagliata della falesia da cui possono osservare l' imenso scambio di dritti e rovesci, belano sono­ramente, comunicando in un linguaggio che non comprendiamo. L'aria e pura come i limpidi spazi bianchi che Annie Josef han no sempre abitato.

Maiorca e un luogo in cui convergono visitatori da rutto il mondo, accomunati dall 'amore per Ia bellezza della natura e i piaceri della vita e iJ professionista, Miguel, mezzo inglese e mezzo spa­gnolo, giocatore forte dal fisico asciutto e istruttore di primissimo livello, decide di condividere le sue osservazioni sui clienti tedeschi. Detesto le genera­lizzazioni in base alia nazionalita, rna lo ascolto. Secondo Miguel, da un tedesco ti aspetteresti che faccia quanto gli viene detto, che segua le isrruzioni. "Manon e cos!. Sono cocciutamente convinti che il loro modo sia quello giusto e non ascoltano. Non cambieranno mai e non sono minimamente disposti a mettere in discussione cio che per loro ha funzio­nato fino ad ora. Continuo a dire a que! gigante di due merri che e Jurgen di andare a rete, rna lui ha sempre giocato sulla linea di base con i suoi tiri goffi e si rifiuta di considerare qualcosa di nuovo. Ha paura di cambiare approccio".

Dato che ho sentito gli Albers parlare in modo simile dei loro mondi d'infanzia, sono tutto orecchie. Josef e Anni si sono sempre espressi liberamente su quanto di autoctono ritenessero appartenere al popolo della Germania, il loro paese

natio. Non era mai una questione di classe sociale o di posizione economica; tutto aveva sempre e solo a che fare con un senso inviolabile delle regole. Se Annie Josef parlavano di persone ed istituzioni che consideravano esemplificativi dei cliche di Miguel era perche ne erano decisamente agli antipodi. Q uesti due individui dediti a creare arte e a ridisegnare il mondo visibile erano sempre alia ricerca del nuovo, viaggiavano in risposta al nuovo, e traevano piacere dall'essere di am pie vedute e di ascolto attento.

Quanto era grande illoro entusiasmo per il vasto e variegato spettacolo della vita umana! Tanto grande che, in questa mattina d'estate a circa quarant'anni dalla morre di lui e pili di venti da quella di lei, che stiano disquisendo di tratti nazionali o assaporando Ia qualira dell'aria di Machu Picchu, di cui si innamorarono durante le !oro escursioni negli anni '50, che stiano sorridendo ru una figurina azteca in terracotta raffigurante un giocatore di pallone o siano intenti ad applicare inchiostro nero ad un foglio di carta bianca, disegnando in ogni momenta, Anni e Josef Albers sono sempre e ancora vivi.

Sl, perche nelloro modo di pensare, sono sempre stati giovani, come lo erano gli artisti che adoravano quando si immergevano negli oggetti vivaci, liberi, e fantasiosi di civilizzazioni antiche.

Anni e cresciuta a Bertino. La famiglia, benestante, le insegno a rispettare regole sociali e tradizioni e a soddisfare aspettative precise. Nella valle indusrriale della Ruhr, soffocata dal fumo nero delle ciminiere, il giovane Josef imparo dal padre, un lavoratore indigente rna bravo con il legno, Ia pitrura e Ia pietra, a lavorare Ia materia con tecniche note e attrezzi comuni, a replicare il vecchio piuttosto che cercare il nuovo. Entrambi, durante le tante meravigliose conversazioni che abbiamo condiviso nei primi anni '70 nella !oro casa nel Connecticut, quella che io consideravo Ia Bauhaus Americanizzata, erano so liti caratterizzare que! rigore retrogrado come "Ia vecchia maniera tedesca, ovvero tutto cio da cui volevamo fuggire". C'erano aspetti della !oro cultura d'origine che adoravano- dopotutto, stavamo mangiando iJ loro strudel aile mele preferito, quello della Signora Herbst, talentuosa fornaia di prelibatezze tedesche di New York; er a l'unico strudel che ritenevano sufficientemente leggero nella sfoglia e aspro quanto basta nel ripieno alia mela, con le uvette a dare il giusto staccato-rna, come mi dicevano spesso, "Non abbiamo mai esitato a voltare pagina. Ci piaceva l'avventura: modi nuove".

Le osservazioni di Miguel fecero riaffio­rare i ricordi. Martin Brandenberg, il professore di arte di Anni, fu quasi una figura paterna per lei durante Ia prima guerra mondiale, quando era solo

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