Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee

In 1921, Paul Klee joined the faculty of the recently established Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, as a “form master,” one of the senior instructors at the school. The previous year, Josef Albers had arrived as a student, followed by Anni Albers in 1922. Though Klee was quite reserved, Anni in particular expressed reverence for his art and instruction, stating that he “had more influence on my work and my thinking by just looking at what he did with a line or a dot or a brush stroke.”

This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see works by all three artists in dialogue. What comes through is the rich humor and perpetual wish for experimentation, the playfulness and profundity of their exuberant art.

Nördlich-winterlich (Northern-wintry) by Klee features a vibrantly colored gridlike field whose appearance vacillates between landscape and pure abstraction. Made in 1923—two years after Klee began teaching at the newly founded Bauhaus—this work exemplifies the artist's coloristic explorations during this time.

Here, Klee breaks up the picture planes into cubist-style arrangements of rectilinear fragments that visually mirror Josef’s own gridded forms. As Josef explained, the colors in his paintings "are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or to oppose one another.... Such action, reaction, interaction—or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other; that the same color, for instance—with different grounds or neighbors—looks different."

Anni was deeply influenced by pre-Columbian art and textiles, which she encountered on trips to Mexico during her time teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina between 1933 and 1949, after the closure of the Bauhaus. She went on to employ long-forgotten techniques discovered through her in-depth study and collection of these works, leading eventually to the creation of her pictorial weavings of the 1950s, such as Red and Blue Layers (1954).

As Jenny Anger wrote, “Klee taught Albers at least one other design principle that stayed with her long after she left for the Americas. Polyphony, derived from music, is the overlapping of two or more independent voices, e.g., melody and harmony.... Many Klee paintings exhibit this same principle.... Interestingly, Albers’s medium brings polyphony closer to its musical state. The voices can be differentiated visually, just as in painting, but in weaving, as in music, the components remain forever joinable and separable; threads and melodies, unlike paint, only appear to mix, after all.”

For Anni, triangles such as those found in Study for Triangulated Intaglio III (1976) became a dominant motif during this period, in part due to the difficulty of including triangular forms in the gridded structure of textiles. Built from minimal and reiterated elements, her complex compositions were greatly informed by the work and teachings of Klee. Here, the stark use of black and white creates an ambivalent fluctuation between figure and ground.

Today, Josef is best known for his tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of color and spatial relationships. Working with simple geometric forms, he sought to produce the effects of chromatic interaction, in which the visual perception of a color is affected by those adjacent to it. His precise application of color also created plays of space and depth, as the planar colored shapes that make up the majority of his works appear to either recede into or protrude out of the picture plane.

In 1950, Albers began his seminal Homage to the Square series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976. Based on a nested square format, the Homage works allowed him to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects. The studies for these works—which include different combinations of paint and color on paper, often accompanied by notations in graphite—reveal much about the artist’s singular attention to materials and to how colors react and interact with one another.

Throughout his career, Klee complemented his high-modernist style drawings and paintings with his unique and varied approaches to representing the human figure. Blaubetonter Kopf (Portrait with blue emphasis) (1933) reveals Klee’s interest in signification: how simple shapes and forms can be read as the features of a face based on their relation to one another. He often mounted his work to board, which he considered part of the final composition, making for a collage-like quality that he prized.

Using a similar reliance on geometric elements, Josef employed a narrow color palette of blue and white for Becher (Beakers) (1929), modulating the transparency of the surface and producing a range of textures and tonal densities. His sand-blasted glass pictures from this time mark the artist’s first investigations into the perception of color—an obsession he shared with Klee. As Josef explained, “The unusual color intensity ... and the required precision and flatness of the design elements present an unusual and special material and form effect.”

Works on paper played a significant role in Anni’s practice, particularly in relation to her design work as a means of establishing her motifs and color schemes. As in the present work, she often created designs from conglomerations of knotted or tangled lines that recall the intertwined threads of her weavings.

Her design recalls the simple curling and looping lines in Klee’s works on paper, which create a dynamic composition that is at once abstract and seemingly representational, depicting—as the title implies—”paths” to making knots. Klee once described the act of drawing as “an active line on a walk, moving freely, without a goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.”

The way each of these three artists integrated theory with practice—be it in design, craft, or abstract composition—reflects the Bauhaus ideal of creating art that is both beautiful and functional. Whether it’s Josef’s methodical color trials, Anni’s experimental textiles, or Klee’s imaginative abstractions, all pushed the boundaries of traditional art to explore new visual languages, and each artist’s work is marked by a deliberate reduction to essential forms and colors, a key tenet of Bauhaus aesthetics.

Though Klee and the Alberses have been exhibited together in thematic and historical shows on the Bauhaus, the three of them together have never before been the direct focus of an exhibition. Taken together, the selection of works reveals how each artist’s work continued to evolve while still retaining formal and compositional elements that extend back to their time together in Weimar and Dessau.