Writing the biography of artist Anni Albers presents its challenges. Since Albers had few friends and limited family, there aren’t many anecdotes to flesh out her personality; the stories that have survived are more about people she turned away. Art historian Nicholas Fox Weber only befriended Albers in the last third of her life, but she did seem to consider him a sort of son. By the end of her life, he was one of the few people she trusted.
Weber covers Albers’s life chronologically, starting with her bourgeois German Jewish upbringing in Berlin, her training at the newly formed Bauhaus design school, her marriage to Josef Albers, their flight from Germany with the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, their welcome in America at the Black Mountain School, and finally their move to the New Haven area, where Josef became head of Yale’s design department. Her favorite artists — Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Klee — were nonrepresentational and fairly apolitical. She mocked contemporaries like Frankenthaler, Rothko, Pollock, and Duchamp for their excessive “self-expression.” To understand her own design aesthetic, Weber quotes from her writings and refers readers to over sixty examples of her works in the book’s three full-color inserts, a visual journey through her artistic development.
Despite Weber’s detailed exploration of his subject’s life and career, Anni Albers’s true feelings on many matters remain elusive. For instance, when she first entered the Bauhaus, she didn’t want to work in textiles, which she considered “sissy.” Did this attitude actually change? When asked her religion, she’d answer, “in the Hitler sense Jewish,” but at the same time she was inordinately pleased that she and Josef could get the Protestant burial plots they coveted thanks to her German baptism.
Albers’s casual rudeness also raises unanswered questions. On meeting Weber’s wife once, she asked if her dress was new — so maybe she could return it? When Anni first met Louise Nevelson, she asked if her eyelashes were fake. (Nevelson, cupping her breasts, replied that sometimes you had to buy what nature hadn’t provided.) Then there’s Anni’s relationship with her husband. While Anni joined all the others lauding Josef’s work, Josef hardly admired her work, at one point calling her printmaking “just doing wallpaper.” From time to time, he relied on her to extricate him from love affairs. Anni claimed she enjoyed playing housewife — doing all their laundry, fixing meals, grocery shopping — for her more “important” artist husband, but there’s a passive-aggressive tinge to her bluster. After Josef died, she formed a schoolgirl crush on the actor Maximilian Schell.
Weber, the longtime head of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, stays professional throughout, avoiding what he can’t verify and soft-pedaling the ugly bits. While readers probably won’t come away with warm feelings for Anni Albers, they’ll have a better understanding of her life’s work, which is all she might have wanted.
Bettina Berch, author of the recent biography, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Life and Work of Anzia Yezierska, teaches part-time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
