PREFACE

I n November of 1933 Anni and Josef Albers left Germany for an unknown world. He was forty-five years old, she thirty- three. Both had been associ­

ated with the renowned Bauhaus School almost since its inception in Weimar. Anni , who had entered the Bauhaus in 1922 and received her diploma in 1930, was a textile artist who wove both practical materials and large abstract compositions in which fiber was the basis of a bold and reassuring geometry. Josef, who had been with the Bauhaus since 1920 and was one of its important meisters in both Dessau and Berlin, had made h is mark as a creator of glass constructions, first from broken bottle fragments and later in geometrically pre­cise sandblasted compositions, as well as in the fields of typography, metalwork, and woodwork; he was con­sidered innovative in the study of color and of optical law. But early in 1933 the Gestapo had forced the clos­ing of the Bauhaus, and the Alberses were without jobs or any sense of the future. Their pioneering art and ideas were out of favor with the new government, and Anni sensed the impending dangers of her Jewish background. A chance meeting with the American architectural student Philip Johnson on a Berlin street in the summer of 1933 led to his going to their flat for tea and asking if they would like to go to America. They answered yes but expected nothing. Six weeks later came an invitation for them both to teach at a newly formed college in Black Mountain, North Car­olina, where art was to be the center of the curriculum and Josef its primary instructor. They cabled back a warning that Josef spoke no English but were told to come anyway. Visas and other paperwork taken care of, they arrived at Black Mountain College in time for their first American Thanksgiving later that year.

It was all uncharted territory for them. A notice thumbtacked to an Ionic column at Black Mountain's Robert E. Lee Hall was a startling sight; the Alberses came from a world where columns were of marble. Fel­low facul ty members whose social position would have caused them to act as aloof aristocrats back in Ger-

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many here went backpacking and joined the road crew. There was both a new informality and a new intimacy. Compared with the rather structured society they had left behind, the two emigres were now in a sett ing in which friendliness and playfulness permeated the air. And nowhere were these traits to be so readily appar­ent , and so enchanting to them, as in that aspect of the Americas that they were to discover in the art and life of various regions in Mexico.

Anni Albers had first had a glimpse of pre-Columbian art when as a young woman she frequented the muse­ums of her native Berlin. The sight of about a dozen small Mexican heads in the Kunstgewerbemuseum had suggested to her that some of the majesty and grace she formerly associated only with Egyptian art-far better known to the young Berl inerin because of the collections of the _Pergamon Museum-existed in the remains of a culture on the far side of the A tlantic. When in 1934 the Alberses drove through Florida with their new good friends Theodore and Barbara Dreier (among the fo unders of Black Mountain and the A lberses' housemates) en route to a conference in Havana, it occurred to Anni that the two couples might venture toward the source of that art and travel to Mexico the following year.

It was on that first trip to Mexico, when the Alberses and the Dreiers traveled together during summer vaca­t ion in the Dreiers' secondhand Model A convertiblet that Anni Albers acquired the first object in what was to become a collection of over one thousand pieces of pre-Columbian art. They had taken the one road avail­able and gone to Laredo and then straight south to­ward Mexico City and Oaxaca. One day, while Anni waited in the car as the three others viewed the inside of a church, a little boy came up to her with some things for sale. He asked if she wanted to buy the baby goat under his arm or possibly the small figurine head wrapped in a handkerchief. "I couldn't imagine that there was anything like that piece still available," Anni Albers said in a recent conversation. "But it cost only

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a few pesos, and so I bought it." Shortly thereafter, she and Josef went to see George C. Vaillant, a noted ar­chaeologist, to whom Anni showed her acquisition. "I was just amazed at what could be found," she related. "From George Vaillant I learned that what I had there was a genuine little Mexican treasure. From that time forward, my husband and I became very interested in Mexican culture, and that first trip was followed by thirteen others."

They scarcely had money to spare. Nor did they have the approval of others-the support required by so many collectors, often with far more money, who need the reassurance that what they are acquiring is both in fashion and worthwhile as an investment. But what Anni and Josef Albers were confronted with from the start in the art of ancient Mexico were the very quali­ties they pursued in their own art and stressed in their teaching: an eye for form, a knowledge of materials, a feeling for visual grace. They too sought balance and playfulness, technical proficiency alongside spontane­ity, in their own creations. Here was their own value system in a totally different world. The Indians of both ancient and, to a degree, contemporary Mexico seemed to share their faith that art has a spiritual life and can penetrate to the essence of our souls. They too made art without any of the constraints of an academic ap­proach or of traditional art instruction. In an era when the Alberses were dismayed by the increasing empha­sis on the cult of the artist and on personally revela­tory expressionism, here was the same diligence, the total anonymity of the creator and subjugation of the artist's personal emotions, to which both of them as­pired. So, without seeking to build "a collection" as such, they simply began to buy things. Anni Albers feels that even today it is possible to acquire first-rate art with limited means if only one is impervious to trends and follows Josef's mandate of "open eyes."

The piece sold by the little boy was an Olmec head six centimeters high. According to recent scholarship it is a type D-C, with a characteristic O lmec mouth and chin but with eyes that identify it as Middle Formative (900-400 B.C.). This head is strikingly simi­lar to the art Picasso was making in almost exactly the same year that the A lberses acquired it. The full nose, the exaggerated convexity of the form, the sex­ual suggestiveness of the deep little mouth, the off­balance eyes-all bear a resemblance to Picasso's paintings and sculpture for which his mistress Marie­T herese Walter was the primary model , in particular to his 1934 painting La N ageuse. The link is of course entirely coincidental, but what the A lberses were re-

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sponding to was not so different from aspects of Picas­so's creation: a valid evocation of human presence, a sequence of rich plastic rhythms, a highly spirited in­ventiveness, a total insouciance and visual wit. Anni and Josef Albers would in time become, to a degree, scholars and connoisseurs of this sort of object, but they were first and foremost artists, and in that lies the key to their response to their new ancient world. The appreciation of a figurine because of its historical significance and its relationship to other similar pieces came later.

They bought a number of little pieces on that first trip. When Anni, at age eighty-six, recollects the ac­quiring today, her face lights up with a sense of the magic and enchantment and with some of the best memories of a fifty-year-long marriage (Josef Albers died in 1976): "There is something about beginnings. You hold this little something in your hand and you feel, 'Now this was held by somebody a thousand years ago, or far earlier.' You feel a great awe, and that awe grows." She and Josef loved the adventure. "A passion needs fine ears," she explains. "For instance, when we went from Mexico C ity south to Oaxaca and stayed in Oaxaca overnight, we heard somebody say, 'Where the road makes a bend, and then you find the old church - there you have a fie ld with some old pieces.' So we would ask an Indian in a village and follow his lead. We would go into a hut and pay ten pesos for some­thing; it was probably a fortune to the recipient. A lot of the sites that were found later on weren't yet known, but we knew that if we went to a pyramid there were sure to be some local people around with handkerchiefs full of things." This foray into the little known, this love for untraveled ground, and a hunger that can be satisfied only by art that is at the same time mo.dest and magnificent is of course what both of the A lberses' lifework- weaving for her, painting for h im, print­making for both- as well as their collecting, has al­ways been about.

If each had shown a fierce independence in forsak­ing his childhood world for the Bauhaus, in leaving Germany at such an early date, in making some rather brave and startling art , the same free spirit was in force in their early years of collecting. While other artists and a small, knowing group shared the Alberses' en­thusiasm for the art of ancient Mexico, this art did not at that time have the large audience that it has since acquired. Anni says that "collecting at that time was considered nonsense. There was no interest in pre­Columbian art back then-except for Diego Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, and a few others.

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But the risk taking is always interesting. We knew noth­ing to start, but gradually we were in Love with these pieces and thought it was a pity that this was not con­sidered art. We felt no hindrance from our lack of money. We knew we were amateurs-to this day I do the business of identification with a bit of hesitation -but that didn't keep our spark from quickly becom­ing a flame. Our collection is an amateur one, but I think that gives it a charm of its own, and it also shows that you can do interesting things with very little change in your pockets. We did in time go to some dealers, like Tannenbaum in Juarez, whom we visited in the 1930s, but for the most part what people were selling was china and European baroque pieces, with the less desirable pre-Columbian objects half hidden in the back of the shop; there wasn't enough money in them for people to specialize. And of course there were mar­kets, like Mezcala, in G~errero, and Chichen-Itza, which we went to on a iocal bus. I've never smelled human beings so beautiful as on that bus. They were looked down on , like cattle , but to me they were very polite, and if in fact they smelled a bit like cattle, to me it was a wonderful, wonderful smell.

"Art there is so daily, something you Live with. Grad­ually we came to recognize old friends among the ob­jects we were seeing. I fell in love with the light blue of the Maya. Josef was especially interested, as a teacher, In how things were directly built from the material -how they labored with stone on stone. We both loved many- of the sites-Uxmal was fantastically beautiful; I could hardly control myself when I saw it." - rn short, the effect of pre-Columbian art on Anni and Josef Albers was not unlike the effect of their art on many others for the past fifty-odd years. Like their pre-Columbian predecessors, they too were underap­preciated; especially in the 1930s the Alberses must have felt a kinship with the ancient potters and stone­cutters on this very po int. In 1934 Thornton Wilder wrote to Josef Albers: "So far my efforts have been met with disappointment. The approaches I made to in­·troduce your work ... were always met with the great­est interest, but with the word that one must wait . . .. It is only a matter of time and patience until you find the audiences and appreciation over here .... I shall continue to work on the matter in such ways as my contacts permit and hope someday to have a small share in the pride of having been useful to you." Wilder himself had bought one of A lbers's woodcut prints for thirty-five dollars. In admiring and championing pre­Columbian art, Albers may well have seen himself in a parallel role to the one Wilder hoped to have for him.

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As for Anni Albers, even when she was the first tex­tile artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949, she could not persuade MoMA to purchase her only extant Bauhaus wallhanging; she was pleased later on to con­vince the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard to ac­quire it for one hundred fifty dollars.

There are other parallels between the A lberses' work and the art of ancient Mexico. For one, Josef was fas­cinated by serial imagery both in what he collected and what he painted. One of h is greatest interests was in the small figurines of Chupkuaro, a Late Formative village; he acquired 283 of them, most ranging-in size from five to nine centimeters high, all very much of a type and for the most part variations on very similar themes. What he found here were different approaches to the same problem. That idea, of dealing with one theme with numerous subtly differing variations, rather than constantly looking for new subject matter and approaches, had long been present in his own work. Even as a student at the WlcrStuck in Munich, A lbers had approached the drawing of a single pose from vari­ous angles; at the Bauhaus, in some of his glass con­structions and in h is Treble Clef series (both in gouache and in glass), he had repeated identical forms time and again, differentiating them only by their internal shading. In the Variant series that he began in the late 1940s, toward the end of his t ime at Black Mountain College, he painted myriad oils in closely related for­mats where the sole change was through color. But nowhere did he produce as uniform a series, so like his Chupfcuaro collection in the way that it asks us to re­gard subtle differentiations, as in the Homages to the Square that he began in 1950. Here he made Q._Ver a thousand oil paintings and prints in four formats, those formats all based on identical grid systems. The Homages teach us the way in which everything changes with color. Made between 1950 and 1976, they reveal an artist who believed in rehearsal and repetition , who felt that a great theme was valid for as long as one wanted to pursue it. While the art world went from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Op to Photorealism and so on, Albers stuck to his one idea with a singular­ity and a faith that are unique in the art of our cen­tury. In his beloved Chupfcuaro figurines he must have found reassurance that an ancient culture also prized the idea of repetition, that subtle variations of a single theme have a particular value and richness.

Some rather specific references to ancient Mexico are evident in A lbers's paintings and prints of the late 1930s and early 1940s, which was the time when his

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traveling and collecting were at a peak. O il paintings like Mexico, Tierra Verde, To Mit/a, and Tenayuca, while totally abstract, have something of the mood and color of certain Mexican archaeological sites and the sur­rounding landscape. Their forms float free of gravita­tion. These paintings have spirituality; when we look at them we feel in an odd way some of Albers's mysticism, the sense of the other world that so strongly dominates a lot of pre-Columbian art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his 1944 woodcut Tlaloc. Only

Josef Albers. Tlaloc. 1944. Woodcut. 31.5 x 30.5 em. The Josef A lbers Foundation , Inc. , Orange, Connecticut

two years earlier Albers had made his Graphic Tectonic series of lithographs, works in which the tools of the engineer and scientist are elevated to the level of art , an art in which rationalism and hard facts, the preci­sion of parallel lines and sharp right angles, are at the fore. Tlaloc, on the other hand, has a wonderful im­precision about it, a sense of the unknowable, of forces far beyond our control. The woodgrain background ap­pears slightly different on each sheet of the edition. But in all cases it functions as a sort of sea or sky, an infinity that is both soothing and awesome. That back­ground has an endless depth and mystery, as well as a playfulness. The figure ofTlaloc- the ancient Mexican rain god-one of Albers's unique arrangements of inter­locking straight lines that suggest endless exchanges of void and countervoid, has a truly godlike presence: broad shouldered yet free-floating, all-powerful yet light as the wind. We feel the artist as believer here.

We need only consider the titles of many of Anni A lbers's major weavings of the 1940s and 1950s to see the extent to which Mexico was on her mind. They include To Monte Alban, Tikal, and South of the Border. Their concerns are by no means a reproduction of the Mexican experience, but they and other weavings of

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the period contain many of the visual motifs with which Anni had become acquainted in Mexico. And while South of the Border deals with Mexico only to the de­gree that it captures something of the mood of the

Anni Albers. South of the Border. 1958. Cotton and wool. 10.5 X38. 7 em. The Baltimore Museum of Art

Alberses' trips there, it really says a great deal about what America's southern neighbor meant to the two teachers at Black Mountain College. Measuring only 4 Ys by 15 1/4 inches, it seems enormous. It pulses with energy. A radiant spirit emerges from its colors, from the vigorous linking of thread; we feel all the joy of travel at its best, of exploration and discovery, of going to a land that represents harmony, activity, revitaliza­tion. Looking at the weaving, we move from place to place to place; we race about and encounter a diversity of experience. There is a virtual infinity of sights be­fore our eyes. T he visual world offers enterta inment and transformation. It deepens our breath and fills our soul with a sense of value.

Mastering the ir craft, feeling the power of knowing eyes-taking all the responsibility for a complex task while at the same time faithfully leaving themselves in the hands of destiny- the art ists of ancient Mexico produced an art of unique enchantment. Their indi­vidual personas remained outside of this art; it was the spiritualism of form, the magnificence of visual activity, that concerned them. Anni and Josef Albers fell under the spell of this achievement as surely as they were cap­tivated by their own attempts at creation. If they spent the pocket change from their schoolteachers' wages in those early years in Mexican marketplaces when it was all uncharted territory, later on they would willingly exchange some of their own best paintings and weav­ings with New York dealers for objects to which the rest of the world had now come around. What they could hold in their hands looked nothing like what they themselves would make, but nourished them to­tally. T heir own work- forma l yet spontaneous, poised yet vibrant-surely shares the spirit of the finest achieve­ments of pre-Columbian Mexico.

N icholas Fox Weber Executive Director Josef A lbers Foundation

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