Albers the austere

The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was asked why — in the early 1960s — he had suddenly increased the size of works in his long-standing abstract series, ‘Homage to the Square’, from 16×16 inches to 48×48. Was it a response to the vastness of his adopted homeland, the United States? A reaction to the huge canvases used by the abstract expressionist painters in New York? ‘No, no,’ Albers replied. ‘It was just when we got a station wagon.’

In Charles Darwent’s new biography, Albers (1888–1976) comes across as a man as frill-free as the art for which he’s famous. Apparently, he held — and all too often shared — strong views about matters such as how beer must be drunk (hitting the back of one’s throat) and hot dogs be cooked (on a stick over a fire). Robert Rauschenberg, a pupil of Albers’s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, called him ‘an impossible person’.

Not the most promising subject for a biography, perhaps. But that is to overlook two important factors. First, that Darwent (for many years critic on the Independent on Sunday) is a highly engaging writer on the visual arts. And second, that Albers lived through a remarkable period, mixing with some extraordinary people.

The first son of a painter-decorator, he was born in Bottrop, a country town in the north-west German region of Westphalia. Tuberculosis kept him from fighting in the first world war, but not long after it, he took up a place at the Bauhaus — where by 1923 he was appointed to the teaching staff.

Giving 20 hours of classes a week (compared to László Moholy-Nagy’s eight, Paul Klee’s five and Wassily Kandinsky’s three), he was the school’s busiest teacher.