® Open Eyes and Clear Vision: Utopia Is Where We See It

Nicholas Fox Weber

On Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Piet Mondrian

When Josef Albers began working in sandblasted glass, he enjoyed the way that the technique and the medium avoided "personal handwriting." The idea of a singular object made by a singular individual was not part of his conception of art.

Rather, he thought of himself in a similar capacity to the craftspeople who worked on Gothic cathedrals. They constructed for everyone who walked on the stone floors where they created their mosaic patterns; they assembled windows to inform a public that was illiterate; they carved stone sculptures

to move people of every background and taste. They remained anonymous; they had a message to transmit, a service to provide for humanity.

182 - JOSEF ALBERS

And this is what we find in Josef's pieces in this exhi-bition. DominatinB White is meant to create rhythm, to provide a sense of clarity, to allow white and black and red to sing in relation to one another; not to reveal anything of Josef Albers himself. Fact01y [182] may have something of windows and smokestacks, but mainly it is about squares and rectangles, and light and color: themes that are univer-sal, timeless, that have nothing to do with class distinction, Factory, 1925 or economic status. The idea of manufacturing, evident in

the technique as in the title, was appealing: it suggested quality for everybody.

And then there is FuBue [393]. Of course the title is musical, mainly associated with Johann Sebastian Bach. Josef was more than aware of Bach, who once lived right next to the location of the Weimar Bauhaus. He knew of him as the organ master in Leipzig, where Josef made his largest window commission. A fugue has the grace, the appeal to everyone, the lightness, which Josef cherished. No personal expression, no drumming in of a theme: rather, 183 - JOSEF ALBERS

Frontal, 1927 a wonderful visual ramble.

And F1·ontal [183]: here was Josef using lines and color to establish a presence, a form of art that is celebrative, rich, and referential to nothing but itself. Art is enough! Art is all it takes to transform the human mood.

For Josef to have made these pieces, which have a look of victory, was in itself a personal victory. When he had arrived at the Bauhaus in 1920, he

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184- WALTER GROPIUS and ADOLF MEYER Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1920- 21

was too poor for art supplies. And so in the town dump in Weimar he found bottle frag-ments, which he hacked up with an axe and then assembled. The way light went through the pure colors of the broken shards thrilled him. Soon he worked with glassmakers' samples. But the Bauhaus Masters were not satisfied with these forays ofJosef, who was still a student, relatively young, trained only as a schoolteacher and state-school art teacher. They insisted that he work in other media, or else he would have to leave the school. Ever the rebel, he worked away in

glass, and glass alone, and invited them to a solo show in the glass workshop. They recanted. They were so impressed that they made him a Bauhaus Master; he was among the first students to be so elevated in position.

And so he made these works that skip forward, that show confidence. FuBue would-in another era, in another country-become the basis of a large mural under which a quarter of a million people walked every day. This was Manhattan, which Josef made for Walter Gropius's Pan

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Am Building. The mural was over the escalators used for 185 _ JOSEF A LBERS people entering or leaving Grand Central Station. Stained-glass w indow for t he

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It fulfilled Josef's dream. A design he made could Sommerfeld House, Berli n, 1920-21

penetrate the lives of masses of people; could contribute to everyday joy. Most people did not know the name of the artist; he did not care. They felt the power of red, black and white; they intuited the rhythm; they imbibed the sheer sense oflife. The Bauhaus had succeeded! Its designs ser-vice humankind in a very broad way.

In the last years of his life, Josef Albers had a running argument with his wife Anni. The two of them, having met at the Bauhaus in 1922, were a remarkable pair. They agreed on most subjects, so their opposite views were a surprise. 186 - JOSEF ALBERS

Each had devoted his or her life to the making of art Stained -g lass window for the Otte House, Berlin, 1921-22

as the priority of existence. They shared a rigorous belief system, with inviolate ideas of right and wrong, artistically as well as mor-ally. They concurred that technical inadequacy or any form of"Expression-ism" was unaccep table in art; extra-marital love affairs were one's own business. They agreed that Giotto was one of the greatest artists of all times, and Max Beckmann one of the worst (they were adamant about this.) They thought it was never necessary to go out in the evening or to attend events like weddings and funerals, but they treated everyone they knew with con-summate respect and kindness. But for all of this concord about the fun-damental issues of their lives, when they were at loggerheads, neither would budge an inch.

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The subject about which they so strongly disagreed concerned unsigned, unnumbered, unofficial copies of Josef's HomaBe to the Square [190, 191] prints. Josef, when he was in his eighties, was having a lot of them published by lves Sillman, a part-nership formed by the artists Norman lves and Sewell Sillman to produce fine print editions. They were printed at Sirocco, an excellent screen print workshop near where the Albers' lived in Connecticut. It was known

187 - JACOBUS JOHANNES PIETER OUD Worker housing in Spangen, Rotterdam, 1918

that Ives Sillman was selling the extras-the proofs or the prints which came out of a run but exceeded the size of the numbered edition-for ten dollars each. They were unsigned and unnum-bered, but otherwise identical to the signed "artists' proofs" or "h .c." or numbered prints in the official edition.

Anni objected. She told Josef that this practice devalued the signed prints, and, besides, he made nothing from such sales. She used the same publisher and printer, and would never permit it.

But Josef was unwavering. The sale of his richly hued HomaBes at ten bucks a shot appealed to him. I told him that I had bought one, as had my sister, and that we could not afford the real McCoy; he said this delighted him, assuring me that the quality was the same. Josef emphasized to me how important it was to him that college students and other people for whom even ten dollars was a lot of money could have the pleasure of observing the interaction of color as he had worked it out, could pick their preferred "color climates" in their choice of various prints he had made of his usual arrange-ments of nested squares.

Anni stuck to her position. What was the point of making a limited edition only to violate the rules?

But Josef wanted his achievement, which he saw as a source of service to humankind, to penetrate as many human lives as possible.

In 1975, Josef sent me on a mission for him. He had heard from two composers and music theorists, Pozzi Escot and Robert Cogan, living in Camb-ridge, Massachusetts, who wanted to incorporate his work in a book they were preparing on "sonic art." They had written him about the idea, and said that his structural constellation drawings seemed audible to them, and that they wanted to use one on the cover. He knew that I had friends in Cam-bridge- the people who had in fact introduced me to him and Anni-and that I visited them peri-odically; he asked ifl would go see Escot and Cogan.

This enchanting couple greeted me graciously and, once they discovered my fondness for Josef's work, showed me through their flat. My memory is of six rooms, or thereabout, each with spare fur-

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188-189 - THEO VAN DOESBURG Compositie VIII, 1918-19

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190 - JOSEF ALBERS Homage to the Square, Full, 1962

niture and plain walls painted a flat white. The only art hanging throughout was a single HomaBe to the Square screen print in each room. These were the unsigned and unofficial ones; Escot and Cogan had paid next to nothing for them. There was no question of the degree to which these beauti-ful "platters to serve color"-Josef's term for his Hom-aBes-enriched their lives. The absence of anything else on the walls meant that, even though the actual printed image was no more than 12"x n", each work dominated the room it was in, establishing a particular mood. One room there-fore seemed playful in tone, like a Mexican pinata; another seemed richly somber, somehow Pompeian; another seemed especially upbeat and sunny. The first had a pink and blue and violet HomaBe [190] , the second one of black and gray and a deep brick red, and the third a sequence ?f four saturated yellows [190] . The room with a green and gray print conjured verdant nature and the manmade at the same time; another space, with a HomaBe that was all light grays, brought me to a complete pause, a delicious reverie. And then there was the room with a print comprised of four reds: walking in there was like being confronted with a passionate love scene.

Josefloved my report on Escot's and Cogan's apart-ment. "This is the real thing, Nick. This is why it doesn't matter that I don't make money when they sell these prints

for next to nothing; that way, people who really know, and see, can enjoy what I have tried to do."

191 - JOSEF ALBERS Homage to the Square, Joy, 1962

He continued. This was better, he said, than "the one-of-everything rich collectors who get told by the auction houses what to buy. They have one Clifford Still, one Morris Louis, one Rothko, one Noland, one Albers! They don't see the difference! It is all about dollar signs, and they even have Warhol next to Pollock. This has nothing to do with what real art, or the love of seeing, is all about."

Anni Albers may have disapproved of the selling of unsigned prints, but she, too, wanted her work to exist in multiple forms and to permeate many people's lives. At the Bauhaus, starting in r922, Anni had been a textile art-ist. She made one-of-a-kind wallhangings [193, 194], intended to function in a role similar to the abstract paintings being done in the same place at the same time by her heroes Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, but she also wove upholstery fabrics and drapery materials that were meant for everyday use in a myriad of settings.

She was delighted when her design for a sound-absorbing, light-reflect-ing material for covering the walls of an auditorium being designed in Jena by Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer earned her her Bauhaus degree. It was, after all, one of her goals to have an impact on everyday life, and the idea that large audiences would benefit from the acoustical qualities of what she had done-by putting the velvet-like quality of the material on its back-and

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at the same time would feel emotionally elevated by the shimmer of the metallic thread she had included on the front: was of great satisfaction to her.

Anni believed, as did Josef, that every visible and tac-tile detail of our everyday existence has its impact. When she chose a food vessel, or a storage container, or a pair of socks for her husband, she looked for honesty in the use of materials, and she disdained gratuitous ornament. She was too modest to make enormous claims for her own work, but in the textiles she wove, many of which were mass-produced, many of which served multiple purposes all over the world, she hoped to better the lives of others. The jux-taposition of hemp and jute, oflinen and metallic thread;

193- ANNI ALBERS Decorative fabric, 1929

the way something was knotted; the qual-ities of gentleness or ingenuity: all of these aspects of textile design improved, and still improve, the existence of people whose lives are graced by her work.

And when, in 1962, Anni began to make prints, she was delighted by the idea of their being multiples-even if she was so determined that only the signed ones were released. Her wall hangings only existed as singles; just as she was intrigued

by various printmaking processes, she relished the idea that once she had made something there would be as many as a hundred pieces all the same. This meant, quite simply, that you could have your cake and eat it too.

192- BENITA KOCH-OTTE Tapestry, 1924

194- ANN I ALBERS Tapestry, 1924

Art was not about the creation of a single object for the Albers. Josef came to know Piet Mondrian when both of them were living in the United States and Josef asked Mondrian to send some works to Black Mountain College. Josef shared with Mondrian the view that art is not separate from the rest oflife, but must be integral to it. In Mondrian's case, this did not result in the making of multiple images, but, rather, in the way he organized his studios , in Paris and then London and then New York, with solid planes of color attached to the high white walls in such a way that they could be moved around. He was forever experimenting with mea-sure-with what happened if he increased the width of a black vertical in one ofhis compositions, perhaps by half a centimeter, or w ith the results if he raised one of the yellow rectangles on the wall so that it was nearer to a blue one. He made, for Michel Seuphor, a theater set where the backdrops, of which there were three and constructed so that they could be raised or lowered, had such force that he believed that the play to be performed on the stage required no human actors. Mondrian and Albers both

195- JOSEF ALBERS believed that what we take in with our eyes can transform Strukturale Konstellation s V-3, our states ofbeing, can lead us to the spiritual realm. Color 1959

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196 - Piet Mondrian's studio, Paris, 1920s

and shape and composition have the power to calm, elevate, soothe and excite us; this was true in the individual paintings to which they were so devoted, but also in the way they organized their own living spaces, their choice of simple furniture, and every other detail of the visible environment that it was part of their overall mission in life to make better.

This does not mean, however, that Mondrian would have approved of the redeployment of his paintings on women's dresses, hotel decor, or shop window displays . Solid colors and simple forms, yes: the misapplication of his painted compositions, no. He wore beautiful suits and subtle neckties; he would never have favored a tie based on Bmadway Booaie Wooaie. An essential ingredient to the utopia that the visual world can be is good judgment, a

MONDRIAN

sense of weight and proportion: not the attachment to any- 197 - Bauhausbucher 5, edited by Piet Mondrian, 1925

thing "iconic" -that overused word exemplifying exactly what Mondrian and the Albers' deliberately eschewed-or crying out with a famous artist's name. Mondrian adored his well-designed, functional gramophone; the Albers' often told me they preferred their Polaroid sx-70 camera "to bad art."

They all wanted their art out in the world, its qualities experienced by many people, but they did not for a moment endorse misappropriation.

When Josef Albers was eighty-seven years old, I arrived at his house one day to find him in a sort of rage. When he was upset, his normally pale skin turned reddish, which was particularly noticeable in contrast to the muted gray of his shirt and of his pale khaki trousers. He quickly explained what was troubling him.

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There had been an interview in The New York Times that morning with Robert Motherwell. "And do you know what he said, Nick? He said he had achieved ETERNITY in his art! "

Josef shook his head in dismay. "Not even Piero, not even Leonardo, not. even Michelangelo would say he had achieved eternity! Who says it? Motherwell."

Josef was in his kitchen , seated on a simple chair made of metal tubing and a white plastic seat, at the white Formica table. Suddenly he jumped up. He charged over to the win-dow sill, where there was a small, very colorful ceramic bird. He cupped it in his hands and returned to the table.

"You see this bird, Nick? It has eternity. We will never know who made it. It cost only a few pesos. There are birds like this in every marketplace in small towns and cities all over Mexico. But look at the love of the bright colors, the reverence for the little creature that can fly, the wish to give joy to the beholder. That is what art should be."

How perfect. An object that could be found all over, in all the different village markets, that was anonymous, that, rather than being rarified, was available to people of

198 - Bauhausbiicher 6, edited by Theo van Doesburg , 1925

every financial situation: this was Josef's ideal. Art, and well-designed objects, are there to enhance as many lives as possible. When they can be made by machinery-like the drip-dry synthetic materials Anni Albers (who thought that "natural fabrics" and "handmade" were two of the most over-rated concepts in the world) admired-so much the better. Or they could be made by hand, like that delicately painted folk art bird. What these artists cherished, in as many forms as possible-what gave Mondrian and the Albers' their sense oflife's richness every single day-was the art that surrounds us, that exists for everyone who has the eyes to appreciate and savor it.

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