Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form 9780226819396

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Josef Albers, Late Modernis m , and Pedagogic Form

Jeffrey Saletnik

T h e U n iv e r s it y of C h ic ago P r e s s C h ic ago a n d L on d on

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in China 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­69917-­2 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81939-­6 (e-­book) DOI: https://​doi​.org​/10​.7208​/chicago​/9780226819396​.001​.0001 This publication is made possible in part by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Saletnik, Jeffrey, author. Title: Josef Albers, late modernism, and pedagogic form / Jeffrey Saletnik. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021054315 | ISBN 9780226699172 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226819396 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Albers, Josef. | Albers, Josef—Influence. | Artists as teachers. | Art—Study and teaching—History—20th century. | Form (Aesthetics)—Study and teaching—History—20th century. | Art, Modern—20th century—History. | Modernism (Art) Classification: LCC N6888.A5 S25 2022 | DDC 709.04—dc23/eng/20211231 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054315

  ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Introduction: “Bye, bye, Bauhaus”  1 a

Linear Constructions  15

1

From Object to Process: On Albers’s Pedagogic Forms  27 Learning by Doing  28 Progressive Education  32 Educating Albers  38 Pedagogic Form  47

b Photography  67 2

Fold/Manifold: On Eva Hesse and Albers  81 Lightweight and Weighted Down  84 Folding and Unfolding  99

c Painting  119 3

Color Aid: On Richard Serra and Albers  127 Working Methods  130 Disciplined Disorientation  141 Epilogue: Playtime  155

Acknowledgments  157 Notes  161 Selected Bibliography  199 Image Credits  212 Index  213

“By e, by e, Bau h aus”

In the late 1960s proponents of the Bauhaus mounted a touring exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the design school’s founding. 50 Years Bauhaus, presented at venues in Stuttgart, London, Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Pasadena, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires between 1968 and 1971, was intended to “[trace] the history of the Bauhaus and [show] how the teachings of the Bauhaus are being perpetuated.”1 To the astonishment of Walter Gropius and the exhibition’s principal organizer, Ludwig Grote, Josef Albers refused to participate. He rebuffed requests to lend work and other materials to the exhibition and went so far as to write to select museums asking that they too deny loan requests for works by him in their collections.2 He referred to his nonparticipation as a “protest.”3 Albers objected to what he saw as the distortion of the school’s history in service of “Bauhaus propaganda.”4 More to the point, he was displeased both by the portrayal of his own position in accounts of the school and by the notion that his work and teaching since emigrating to the United States in 1933 were derivative of the Bauhaus.5 His competing desires—­to be acknowledged as a vital presence at the Bauhaus, and for his current practice to be viewed apart from the school—­are clear in his response to an invitation to participate in a symposium planned to coincide with the Chicago installation of 50 Years Bauhaus. “As is well known,” Anni Albers wrote the organizers, “Josef Albers, from the very start of the 50 year program did not wish to be involved in it.” Nonetheless, she continued, “We are wondering why the Chicago [exhibition] announcement leaves out [Albers’s] name and thus adds to the distortion that for years has plagued the Bauhaus history.”6 Among the reasons for these dueling desires was Albers’s determination to have his work and teaching appreciated as relevant to contemporary artistic practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s—­which, as this book elaborates, it certainly was.7 Albers’s life spanned the entire historical arc of modernism. Having taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University, he partook in the development of modernist tropes

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on both sides of the Atlantic and witnessed their decline.8 Yet, despite Albers’s far-­reaching career, his close association with perceptual abstraction and the modernist aesthetics and educational traditions affiliated with the Bauhaus have occluded his importance to artists like Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Hesse, Serra, and many lesser-­known artists who had experienced Albers’s curriculum faced the challenge of making art in modernism’s wake—­as the terms of discourse used to contextualize ever more broadly defined artistic practices shifted and as learning structures were reconfigured in light of postmodern educational thought. For his part, Albers remained a steadfast abstract modernist throughout his career, avoiding personal expression and explicit reference to content beyond that generated by a work’s form. Indeed, once he determined—­ nearly two decades after departing the Bauhaus—­that a composition of three or four nested squares was best suited for demonstrating the interaction of color, he used this format almost exclusively for the rest of his life, in his Homage to the Square series of over two thousand paintings and prints (fig. 0.1). He was similarly consistent in examining how various combinations of lines produced destabilizing visual effects in his linear constructions, a series of drawings, engravings, and prints that also number in the thousands (fig. 0.2). Albers’s post-­Bauhaus pedagogy—­which

Fig. 0.1. Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1952. Oil on Masonite, 40.6 × 40.6 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Introduction

included material study (fig. 0.3), matière (haptic collage; fig. 0.4), color study (fig. 0.5), drawing (fig. 0.6), and painting—­functioned similarly insofar as its exercises provided opportunities for productive disorientation as students created (or attempted to resolve) unstable visual circumstances through measured material inquiry. Yet, although obsessive in its regularity, Albers’s practice was positioned erratically in critical discourse.9 And the Bauhaus dogged the artist-­educator. Clement Greenberg (in 1949) considered Albers to be doctrinaire, a “victim of Bauhaus modernism” and thus an outlier to his own modernist doctrine; the school lay in wait as Albers belatedly found popular recognition in the 1960s.10 William C. Seitz made Albers central to his 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye, in which he prioritized the optical power of the artist’s practice, referring to him as a “master of perceptual abstraction” and devoting one room—­contiguous to but separate from the hang—­to Albers’s work. Albers, Victor Vasarely, and, although not exhibited, Giacomo Balla, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian, were cast as old masters, in which role they legitimized the current trends Seitz observed in perceptual art.11 For Seitz, the absence of personal marks on the surfaces of works shown in The Responsive Eye, as well as the new materials (like plastics) involved “B y e , b y e , Bau h au s”

Fig. 0.2. Josef Albers, Structural Constellation IV, ca. 1955–­1960. Ink on paper, 45.7 × 58.4 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.3.363. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 0.3. Material studies (paper, bent; metal, cut), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 12.1 × 16.3 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.133. Fig. 0.4. Matière (fabric, feathers, rag lichen), Black Mountain College, ca. 1940. Photographic negative by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.3923. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 0.5. Color study (collection of violets), Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, 1955. Photographic color positive by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.35.1. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 0.6. Boatwright, “Coats,” Yale University, ca. 1950–­1960. Pen and blue pencil on newsprint, 41.3 × 29.8 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.26.778.

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in their crafting, constituted a visual economy that—­following Abstract Expressionism—­drew ­attention away from artistic subjectivity. Rather, the surfaces of so-­called Op Art objects directed viewers toward their own psychophysical responses. Albers enjoyed the attention brought by the well-­publicized exhibition. In a film about The Responsive Eye produced by the Museum of Modern Art, he remarked, “I had to wait fifty years until people finally looked to me as if they look with my eyes. Finally, this is acceptable. That took fifty years.”12 The exhibition confirmed the currency of Albers’s unyielding belief that art exists as a dialectic between the “physical fact” of the object and its “psychic effect.”13 It also brought the dynamic functioning of the medium of color to the fore of discourse on painting. In some circles public recognition followed, with Albers lauded as “prophet and presiding genius of American Op Art.”14 However, Albers’s association with perceptual abstraction, of which his students Richard Anuszkiewicz and Julian Stanczak were key proponents, played into mounting hostility toward the Bauhaus.15 Sidney Tillim observed how the quasi-­scientific “Bauhaus orientation” of progressive art instruction led to “optical-­t ype” art, some of which appeared to be no more than academic studies writ large.16 Dismissing The Responsive Eye, Rosalind E. Krauss claimed that the museum simply could have shown “objects taken from the workshops of the Bauhaus or the diagrams of Gestalt psychologists” to demonstrate how static forms can elicit a psychological response.17 The exhibition may have brought institutional legitimacy to Albers’s perceptual abstraction, but the Op Art with which he became associated as father figure had negligible critical traction.18 Although Theodor W. Adorno did not refer to Albers by name, the artist-­educator’s perceptual abstraction is precisely the kind of work against which Adorno rails in his posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie (1970). If “art . . . posits itself blindly as sorcery,” he writes, “it degrades itself to an act of illusion in opposition to its own claim to truth and undermines itself with a vengeance.”19 It is not an intellective but rather—­in its empty immediacy—­a kind of bourgeois entertainment. While The Responsive Eye did much for Albers’s career, it did little to assert his contemporary consequence; as John Coplans observed, in 1968, the fact that one of Albers’s Homage to the Square paintings was installed alongside work by Mondrian (who died in 1944) at the Museum of Modern Art was an “indication of the degree of apartheid which Albers has suffered.”20 Albers’s isolation in discourse on advanced art became even more pronounced as ever-­increasing pressure came to bear upon the legacy of the Bauhaus. Jane Fiske McCullough wrote in 1966: The name “Bauhaus” has emerged as a kind of two-­pronged myth. Offsetting the myth of omnipotence—­the Bauhaus as a creative umbrella covering everything valid in the design of our time—­there is a Mephistophelean counter myth that prevails among younger designers and critIntroduction

ics today, blaming the Bauhaus . . . for all the current failures of design and of education. Hardly a design conference these days escapes a few pronouncements using “Bauhaus” as a pejorative if not a swear word.21

Indeed, by the early 1970s Albers had come to represent a monotonous tradition aligned with so-­called Bauhaus modernism. In his review of Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Canaday scathingly declared that Albers’s Homages were “so superficially repetitious (the important word there is ‘superficially’) that it would be possible to summarize his career in half a dozen examples of his work without serious omissions.”22 Meanwhile, the pithy headline “Bye, bye, Bauhaus” announced a review of the exhibition The Work of Venturi and Rauch: Architects and Planners at the Whitney Museum of American Art.23 It was in a context hostile to the Bauhaus and hard-­edge abstraction that Hesse, Serra, and artists of their generation who were educated through Albers’s curricula at Yale and elsewhere began to make and exhibit artwork.24 Hesse earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale in 1959; Serra earned bachelor of fine arts and master of fine arts degrees in 1962 and 1964 respectively. Both artists—­now known primarily for their work in sculpture—­ were painting students. In their subsequent practices, they evinced the intrinsic investigatory freedom conveyed through Albers’s disciplined pedagogy insofar as both employ material counterintuitively. Many of Hesse’s ­sculptures convey a delicate, translucent quality that contradicts the industrial materials with which she worked, like fiberglass and polyester resins (fig. 0.7). Serra often creates circumstances in which a viewer’s relation to his lead and steel sculptures is unclear, even seemingly unstable (fig. 0.8). Yet the tenacity with which art critics, historians, and curators have tethered Albers to (sometimes mistaken) notions of Bauhaus principles has largely precluded our seeing the relevance of Albers’s pedagogy. As McCullough observed, the modernist educational tenets of the Bauhaus were held responsible for the perceived failures of design and fine arts education, especially as postmodern educational thought gained sway.25 Albers had been instrumental in introducing these tenets—­in modified and expanded form—­to the United States through his curriculum in basic design, drawing, and color, which became the model for several college and university art and design programs.26 Indeed, the design school’s educational legacy was central to Gropius’s mission to maintain the relevance of the Bauhaus, perhaps first articulated as an “idea” by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: the Bauhaus, Mies remarked, “‘was not an institution with a clear program—­it was an idea, and Gropius formulated this idea with great precision. . . . The fact that it was an idea . . . is the cause of this enormous influence the Bauhaus had on every progressive school around the globe. You cannot do that with organization, you cannot do that with propaganda. Only an idea spreads so far.’”27 This conceptual turn was strategic; by emphasizing the fluidity of the Bauhaus as a creative or ­educational “B y e , b y e , Bau h au s”

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Fig. 0.7. Cheesecloth, ­latex, and fiberglass panels for Contingent (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), in Eva Hesse’s Bowery studio, 1969. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 17.9 × 12.5 cm. Eva Hesse Archive, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1977.52.75.51. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

idea, Bauhaus proponents could combat popular misunderstandings of the Bauhaus as a collection of objects or—­even worse in Gropius’s view—­a style.28 All the more reason, then, that Albers’s participation in 50 Years Bauhaus was crucial to the exhibition’s organizers. In accordance with Albers’s wishes, however, only passing reference was made to him in the exhibition catalogue as an “outstanding pedagogue” who introduced the preliminary course in the United States and as the “originator of op-­art.”29 He was not afforded an entry in the section of the text devoted to the “con-

Introduction

tinuation of the teaching,” the focus also of one room of the exhibition. This aspect of 50 Years Bauhaus was met with skepticism. Norbert Lynton wrote, “A large part of the exhibition is devoted to post-­Bauhaus activities of the more famous Bauhaus teachers and some of the students. . . . The implications seem to be offered that this work continues the principles of the Bauhaus and that all this work is very honourable; both would be arguable.”30 Lynton appears to have recognized that the school’s educational program—­which, even if he was not well represented in the exhibition, was strongly associated with Albers—­was out of sync with contemporary educational theory that articulated the explicit and implicit power relations inherent to educational dynamics. Without consideration of the educational thought that underscored Albers’s own pedagogy, let alone the actual mechanisms he employed, Albers’s “Bauhaus pedagogy” was ruled unsuitably ideological. 50 Years Bauhaus coincided with the apparent exhaustion of modernist pedagogic models associated with Albers. Many critics—­then, as now—­ sought to distance Hesse and Serra from the former Bauhaus master explicitly; others did so implicitly as a consequence of closely held critical paradigms. Krauss, for instance, makes clear her intention to avoid questions of origin in order to open the study of modernist art to structuralist

“B y e , b y e , Bau h au s”

Fig. 0.8. Richard Serra, Circuit, 1972. Hot-­rolled steel, four plates, each 2.4 m × 7.3 m × 2.5 cm. Photograph by Balthasar Burkhard. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist in honor of Harald Szeeman. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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and poststructuralist critical concerns that emphasize how objects mean, with little regard to temporal-­historical location and narrative.31 The reorganized curricula of the influential Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD) and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) reflected similar poststructuralist concerns.32 The curriculum at CalArts, although not explicitly anti-­Bauhaus, was intended to be a flexible educational structure able to change in accordance with artistic trends rather than to establish artistic trends. It eschewed the deliberate sequence of exercises for which Albers’s pedagogy was known. Unlike the skills-­based models practiced at the Bauhaus, the CalArts program emphasized technical skill only as needed; students were considered artists upon entering the program, thereby blurring hierarchies between student and teacher.33 This corresponded with contemporary educational theory. In the broad socioeducational nexus defined by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, “pedagogic action” was a form of symbolic violence perpetrated by the agents of arbitrary power structures designed to replicate inequality. As they observed, people and things that transmitted dominant systems of thought must be uniform in order to replicate the desired habitus in perpetuity.34 Ivan Illich questioned the very notion of universal education, which led students “to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The institutionalization of learning, in his view, was a corrupting force that contributed to “global degradation and modernized misery.”35 And Paulo Freire sought to resolve the long-­standing “teacher-­student contradiction” by accepting that both parties are student and teacher simultaneously. He regarded educational systems in which a teacher serves as absolute authority as oppressive régimes, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”36 In a system in which education is seen as a form of liberation, however, “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-­invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” Such “mutual humanization” is necessary in order to break the prescriptive, domesticating power structure of education.37 In this context, it is neither surprising—­nor necessarily inaccurate—­ that Albers’s teaching came to symbolize a medium-­centric, hierarchical educational methodology.38 His was a “systematic step-­by-­step training of observation and articulation.”39 He demanded restraint, promoted material-­based teaching, and had little patience with students’ personal expression. However, as the example of Hesse and Serra show, despite the strict parameters of Albers’s methodology and his insistence upon disciplined artistic output, his pedagogy afforded students significant—­and productive—­exploratory freedoms within established bounds. “Deliberate

Introduction

detours and allowing oneself to become lost in a controlled fashion,” he wrote, “sharpen one’s critical faculties.”40 There always were multiple solutions to Albers’s prompts; there was not a right answer but rather a more efficient or innovative solution or, as Albers put it, a solution with a better “ratio of effort to effect.”41 In articulating the importance of Albers’s pedagogy to Hesse and Serra, I advance a new narrative of Albers’s role in shaping artistic practice in the United States that challenges the standard art historiography. I complicate our understanding of the former Bauhaus master’s position relative to the history of modernism by drawing out continuities between modernist pedagogy and late modernist creative practices and by applying pressure to overdetermined critical distinctions between modernism and postmodernism. Furthermore, by attending to Albers’s training to become a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer) and a drawing instructor (Zeichenlehrer) in Wilhelmine Germany (1890–­1918), I show how Albers’s practice and pedagogy were informed—­well before arriving at the Bauhaus—­by his explicit and implicit understanding of late nineteenth-­ and early twentieth-­century aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought. In bringing these relationships to light, I expose a through line between German educational practices and late modernist American art and, as significantly, show how (Albers’s contribution to) the creative or educational idea Gropius and others would have liked to believe sprang fully formed from the Bauhaus actually was part of a long-­standing pedagogic tradition—­a tradition concerned with the education of children. Finally, my hope is that this book, as a study of relationships between pedagogy and art practice, challenges its reader to consider carefully how the mechanisms through which artists are introduced to fundamental problems of form and sensory understanding are internalized, transformed, and manifested in individual practices. The examples of Hesse and Serra show, for example, how it can be productive for an artist to return to the fundamentals of earlier training, perhaps unconsciously, when working through a practical problem—­like negotiating a move from two-­to three-­ dimensional work, as both Hesse and Serra did in the 1960s. Educational forms function surreptitiously; we rarely think about how the curricula and tools through which we learn actually teach us—­how they are agents for the circulation of knowledge. We should think critically about these mechanisms, in terms of both how they have communicated historically and how they communicate today. By casting Albers as a central figure in the history of modernism, I also expose the limitations of “posthistorical” discursive structures to account for relationships between pedagogy and art practice, which inevitably involve what, in conversing with Serra, Annette Michelson described as the “touchy, delicate, and not very interesting subject” of influence.42 In a more

“B y e , b y e , Bau h au s”

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broadly significant sense, this reflects disciplinary assumptions about the shape of history. Georges Didi-­Huberman has observed, for example, how the critical neglect of Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben (afterlife) in Anglo-­American discourse has affected the terms of art historical debate.43 This lack is especially pronounced in understandings of the historical avant-­garde as constituted by radical breaks and thus opposed to continuity, and in understandings of the condition of modernity as insisting upon disjunction.44 Rather, in writing about Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas as montage, Didi-­Huberman asserts that rupture and memory are not mutually exclusive: “we must expect to find ‘shock’ with ‘historical memory’ and ‘rupture’ with ‘cultural transmission.’”45 Something similar can be said about art made in the third quarter of the twentieth century. When Hesse and Serra began to work in ways that appeared to be radically new, their actions did not necessarily exclude continuities with the immediate past.46 This is not to say that they were influenced by Albers per se or that their work resonates with Albers’s practice iconographically.47 Yet one presumes that students learn something from their teachers and from the curricula through which they are educated—­something other than developing the will to destroy (or ignore) whatever it is they think their teachers and these curricula represent. But how does one write about these relationships without returning to evolutionary narratives? In a gesture toward this end, I draw attention to the actual teaching materials Albers employed, so as to show how these seemingly benign, normalized instructional forms were agents through which students developed their own postures of material inquiry and, more generally, attitudes about art making. Following Michel Foucault, I assume a dialectical view of schooling as subjecting a student to power structures while also introducing mechanisms that aid in constituting a student’s subjectivity.48 The exercises of Albers’s pedagogy were these kinds of mechanisms. Furthermore, I contend that these exercises were part of a discourse network akin to those Friedrich Kittler identifies as having conditioned our basic expectation to gain understanding through language.49 As David Wellbery deduces, Kittler shows that “far from being our natural or human condition, hermeneutics merely results from a specifically trained coordination of children’s eyes, ears, and vocal organs” or via discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme) that prioritize language.50 Like the primers Kittler identifies, used by mothers to teach their children to read, instructional forms establish frameworks within which meaning is possible.51 I explore the working of Albers’s pedagogy as this kind of framework, as a discourse network that prioritized the contingency of artistic material and visual understanding. The book is divided into three chapters, which are interspersed with vignettes about Albers’s linear constructions, photographs, and paintings. The vignettes can be read independently, as transitions between

Introduction

longer sections of the text, or consecutively, as an introduction to Albers’s creative practice. Chapter 1, “From Object to Process: On Albers’s Pedagogic Forms,” considers the instructional parameters and mechanisms of Albers’s pedagogy in relation to the educational thought of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and other figures known to Albers through his training to become a primary school teacher. Throughout the book, I draw upon sources specific to Albers’s experience in his native Westfalen (Westphalia), where he was educated and later taught, and to Prussian educational policy; here, I examine the regional curricula through which students were trained to become primary school teachers, the state certification requirements, and the model curricula teachers enacted in primary schools, as well as regional and confessional periodicals for teachers. I attend to how teaching aids (Lehrmittel) were theorized in this context and provide an overview of Albers’s instruction in design, drawing, and color that shows how he transformed the structures of his own education into an analytical subject. Chapters 2 and 3 elaborate Albers’s design, drawing, and color instruction, eliciting relationships between his pedagogy and the practices of Hesse and Serra. “Fold/Manifold: On Eva Hesse and Albers” demonstrates the extent to which Hesse managed her practice, working with malleable industrial materials, methodically and in a manner in keeping with Albers’s example and ambition. In particular, I narrate a history of Albers’s paper folding exercises as a pedagogic form to show how he activated the long-­ established social and educational traditions of folding to communicate material understanding in his instruction. “Color Aid: On Richard Serra and Albers” identifies ways in which exercises through which students discovered the perceptual-­material dynamics of color in Albers’s instruction resonate with Serra’s attitude toward material in his early work, his engagement with film and video, and his mining of the relationship between subject and object in his large-­scale sculpture. I reveal how the psychologically inflected pedagogy of Philipp Franck, who was Albers’s drawing instructor at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin (Royal Art School, Berlin), and concurrent research in applied educational psychology informed Albers’s famous color instruction and, by extension, Serra’s work. Three vignettes address Albers’s creative practice primarily during his tenure at Yale—­roughly between 1948 (when he was appointed to the Yale University Council’s Advisory Committee on Architecture Painting and Sculpture) and 1962 (when the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in fine arts). In aggregate, they show that the period during which Hesse and Serra first engaged Albers’s pedagogy was immensely significant in terms of the artist-­educator’s own work. He began two series that would occupy his attention for the remainder of his life: the linear constructions and Homages. In these works, the tension between Albers’s dynamic visual sensibility and his compulsion to find the most objective,

“B y e , b y e , Bau h au s”

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impersonal means through which to manifest his art is evident. As with his pedagogy, I contend that these works were informed by Albers’s explicit and implicit understanding of late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought, especially the art historical principles of Heinrich Wölfflin.52 As such, one sees how Albers’s training to become an educator informed his own practice, further underscoring the imperative to probe relationships between educational thought and artistic practices.

Introduction

The late 1940s were of tremendous professional and creative significance to Josef Albers. He resigned his position at Black Mountain College and assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Design in the School of Art at Yale University, an institution that diverged considerably from the progressive ethos of Black Mountain. During this pivotal period, he developed distinct compositional mechanisms through which to demonstrate the dialectic of freedom and control central to his aesthetics. Toward that end, he began ambitious series of drawings and engravings entitled Transformations of a Scheme and Structural Constellations, which, along with other similar drawings, engravings, and prints, are now known collectively as linear constructions (fig. A.1).1 He also began his Variants series, in which he first devoted attention entirely to instrumental color (fig. A.2), and in 1950 he completed the first of his Homage to the Square paintings (fig. A.3). In marked contrast to previous work, in which he had employed line and color simultaneously to establish compositional proportions and dynamics, in the late 1940s Albers separated linear and painterly elements from one another as the generative material of distinct bodies of work, each concerned with the dynamic perception of space and form. About a pairing of linear constructions, he wrote: Within a formal limitation of equal contours as mutual silhouette, these works show different but related plastic movements of lines, planes, volumes. Thus, they change in motion: from coming to going, in extension: from inward to outward, in grouping: from together to separated, in volume: from full to empty, or reversed. And all this, in order to show extended flexibility.2

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Fig. A.1. (facing, top) Josef Albers, Structural Constellation: Transformation of a Scheme no. 23, 1951. Machine-­engraved plastic laminate, 43.2 × 57.2 cm.

The linear constructions often have been viewed simplistically, as manifestations of the perceptual ambiguity associated with gestalt psychology, to which Albers had been introduced at the Bauhaus.3 But these works do not merely mimic psychological experiments, as E. H. Gombrich suggested.4 They are informed by Albers’s explicit and implicit understanding of the aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought of Wilhelmine Germany—­ including the psychology of art—­which he had absorbed through his training to become a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer) and a drawing instructor (Zeichenlehrer) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.5 While Albers’s decision to separate line and color—­or linear and painterly vision—­points to Heinrich Wölfflin’s psychologically inflected art historical writing,6 the pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi also informed how Albers composed his linear constructions, as well as the design of his earlier and less well known typefaces. In Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), Wölfflin’s distinction between linear style (which sees in outlines) and painterly style (which sees in masses) is chief among the five oppositions employed to demonstrate that a fundamental perceptive shift, associated with the Baroque, had occurred in Europe in the seventeenth century, and to propose an analytical apparatus for understanding visual representation more generally.7 The

Linear Constructions / a

Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.8.1891. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. A.2. (facing, bottom) Josef Albers, Southern Climate, 1948–­1953. Oil on Masonite, 31.1 × 57.2 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.1.1107. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. A.3. (above) Josef Albers, Homage to the Square (A), 1950. Oil on Masonite, 76.2. × 76.2 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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distinction between linear and painterly styles, he summarized thus: “In the former case, it is the solid figure, in the latter, the changing appearance: in the former, the enduring form, measurable, finite; in the latter, the movement, the form in function; in the former, the thing in itself; in the latter, the thing in its relations.”8 Painterly style, which could include work comprising drawn or engraved line, involved a kind of vision predicated upon the viewer’s capacity to assemble individual elements into a stable form in a psychological field.9 This also was an essential principle of gestalt theory—­that the viewer assembled an impression of an object’s structure by way of the unconscious grasping of disordered sensory stimuli, through which knowledge or understanding developed.10 Knowledge thus was a result not merely of received sense impressions but of the mind’s ability to filter and order competing sensory stimuli. Yet, as Mark Jarzombek has observed, Wölfflin’s desire to establish objective criteria with which to analyze a modern visual mode that was by definition unfixed and “passes over the sum of things” was contradictory.11 The same could be said of gestalt theory, which, for Mitchell G. Ash, is predicated upon the search for “objective order that lies not behind, but within the flux of experience.”12 This conundrum limited the applicability of Wölfflin’s proposed analytical method as well as the utility of gestalt theory per se, which, as the study of the conditions of understanding, did not have obvious value in the context of increasing interest in the applied psychology (angewandte Psychologie) of human behavior. For Albers, however, the challenge of objectifying flux proved fruitful; discrepancy between “physical fact” and “psychic effect” was, in his view, the origin of art.13 Understanding Albers’s linear constructions in light of the formal oppositions central to Wölfflin’s analytical apparatus allows for a view of these works as not merely artistic instrumentalizations of gestalt principles, but rather works that interrogate discourse on the psychology of art while remaining true to Albers’s interest in the dynamics of vision. They are antagonistic objects that indicate the limits of Wölfflin’s logic and, more broadly, reveal a skeptical edge in Albers’s practice. Albers pushed Wölfflin’s modern “painterly vision” to an extreme by exclusively and explicitly using line to define forms that do not “present things as they are” but “as they seem to be.”14 Line itself is not drawn in an imprecise manner such that, in aggregate, it enables a “painterly fusion of objects.”15 Rather, Albers’s lines are ruled, rigid, and precise. Their arrangement in different thicknesses and lengths produces the appearance of fluctuating three-­dimensional volume, which subverts Wölfflin’s claim that evenly and clearly delineated boundaries provide the viewer with “a feeling of security” that results from the perceived possibility of tracing an outlined form with one’s finger—­of grasping form. The linear constructions exhibit the capacity to indicate motion, extension, grouping, and volume; they are unambiguously the opposite of enduring, measurable, and finite forms.16

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Fig. A.4. Josef Albers, studies for Transformation of a Scheme engravings, ca. 1950–­1952. Pencil on paper, 17.5 × 17.8 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.3.998. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Albers met the challenge of objectifying flux in his linear constructions and, to a lesser extent, in his Homages by mining the structure of equiangular quadrilaterals to generate form. In doing so, he drew upon his experience as a primary school teacher. Both series are bound by proportions contained within and generated by squares and rectangles; indeed, drawings related to Albers’s linear constructions, which he began in 1948, include notes that suggest the series were conceived of in terms of a shared geometry.17 He notated one drawing with the words “owning a square” and “Square Dancer”; other drawings include the phrases “offering the square,” “promotion of the square,” and “adoration of the square.”18 In his linear constructions, he employed rectangles as formal limitations within which to explore the dynamics of line. A finished work derived from what Elaine de Kooning described as brittle freehand diagrams; within rectangles on plain or squared paper, she recalled, lines were “diminished here, lengthened there, made finer or heavier, juggled to yield up a constantly increasing number of relationships.”19 Albers made hundreds of these drawings (often in small notebooks while traveling) before selecting those he would further elaborate (fig. A.4). He then transferred the designs onto larger pieces of gridded paper, drawing lines with a ruler and using tracing paper placed over drawings to experiment with compositional modifications and to adjust scale. Some of the resulting drawings were finished works in pen and ink; others served as templates for the firm that manufactured Albers’s engravings in laminated plastic. The square had been a significant form for Albers for decades, as it would have been for all primary school teachers. The form was central to the pedagogic thought of Pestalozzi, who wrote in Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801), “If my life has any value, it is that I have raised the square to

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Fig. A.5. Second fraction table (Die zweite Bruch Tabelle), fig. 3 in Gottlieb Anton Gruner, Briefe aus Burgdorf, über Pestalozzi, seine Methode und Anstalt . . . (Hamburg, 1804). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF). Fig. A.6. Illustration from “Die Methode: Eine Denkschrift Pestalozzi’s,” in Johann H. Pestalozzi, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 13, Schriften aus der Zeit von 1799–­1801, compiled by Herbert Schönebaum and Kurt Schreinert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1932), 113. Image courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF). © Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

be the foundation of a system of teaching by sense-­impression, that the people never had before.”20 As a form that could be subdivided into individual parts that retained the character of the whole, the square simultaneously exhibited the fundamentals of Pestalozzi’s educational philosophy and served as a mechanism for its instrumentation in teaching students to observe, measure, draw, write, and calculate (fig. A.5). Central to his view was that one must study the constituent parts of nature in order to gain understanding of its order and formulate sound ideas; and this could be achieved only through direct observation of objects (Anschauungslehre). The square was essential to instilling this principle in children. A child could see how a square could be divided into smaller elements; how, through measurement, these elements were generated by the whole; and how they could be recombined while yet maintaining something of the character of the original form. The square was particularly significant to drawing and writing instruction: “Whoever could divide an angle ­accurately and draw an arc round it, has already the foundations for the accurate drawing of all letters in his hand” (fig. A.6).21 Thus, drawing was a prerequisite to ­writing: a / Linear Constructions

students who had learned to measure and draw lines accurately and precisely would apply this attentiveness and formal perfection to observing the individual elements of letters and copying their forms onto slate tablets. In time, they would develop facility in combining these elements into fully formed letters, which in turn they would combine to render words.22 Whereas the grid is implicit in Pestalozzi’s writing instruction, it became explicit in the educational systems of Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel and, more generally, in Netzzeichnen (grid drawing) and Stygmographie (dot drawing), which were popular forms of instruction in the second half of the nineteenth century.23 In both systems, students would replicate two-­dimensional forms accurately and uniformly with the aid of a grid of squares or dots. Franz Carl Hillardt outlines how the latter method could be applied to instruction in writing: students would first form the letters of an elementary alphabet by combining straight lines—­horizontal, vertical, and diagonal—­drawn in various directions and lengths between dots, and later, having internalized the letters’ proportions in relation to the grid, would draw them between parallel lines without the aid of dots (fig. A.7). This was to lead to handwriting that was regular and based upon an intelligent conception of form.24 Hillardt’s illustrations bear a remarkable resemblance to the “brittle diagrams” Albers made in preparation for his linear constructions and to his lesser-­known typographical studies. At the Bauhaus, Albers employed the grid in planning his so-­called glass paintings and his typeface designs, Linear Constructions / a

Fig. A.7. Plates 1 and 2 in Franz Karl Hillardt, Stigmographie: Das Schreiben und Zeichnen nach Punkten (Vienna, 1846). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

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Fig. A.8. (facing, top) Josef Albers, design for stencil lettering, 1926. Published in Josef Albers, “Zur Schablonenschrift,” Offset, Buch-­und Weberkunst, Bauhaus-­Heft no. 7 (1926). Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights

including a stencil typeface meant to be used on billboards (fig. A.8). To ensure legibility at a distance, he designed the letterforms using just three basic elements: a square, a right isosceles triangle that corresponded to half of the square, and a quarter circle, the radius of which was equal to the side of the square (fig. A.9).25 Studies for a subsequent typeface intended for letterpress printing show how Albers worked the grid to derive the propositions for a design that similarly consists of three “symmetrical geometric planes: square, triangle, and circle,” which a printer could combine to produce what typically would have taken seventy-­t wo individual pieces of type: twenty-­six uppercase and twenty-­six lowercase letters, ten numerals, and ten punctuation marks (fig. A.10).26 Albers’s type was economical; as significantly, it provided the opportunity for graphic experimentation insofar as combinations of its elements afforded “rich variation in terms of form, height, width, size, [and] spacing, even within a single word.”27 This capacity was meant to enliven the expressive potential of advertisements and other forms of graphic design. In language that resembles descriptions of his linear constructions, Albers wrote, “Combination type makes it possible for the first time to set all characters, including variants, reversed, both horizontally and vertically. All words can thus be printed not only forward (left to right) but also backward (right to left), and also upside-­down in both directions, thus in every mirror-­image script.”28 Like the graphic elements used to compose his linear constructions, these basic forms could be arranged and rearranged to produce tremendous visual variety within a plane. It was essential, however, that this complexity be legible—­or regular—­and individually unexpressive. This desire for regularity and legibility was in keeping with the movement to reform German handwriting and blackletter typefaces in the early twentieth century, which led to the teaching of a simplified version Linear Constructions / a

Society (ARS), New York. Fig. A.9. (facing, bottom) Josef Albers, study for typography, ca. 1926. Pencil and black ink on orange graph paper, 21.1 × 29.8 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.3.143. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. A.10. (above) Offprint of Josef Albers, “Kombinationsschrift ‘3,’” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, no. 1 (1931). Images courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. A.11. Page from Deutsche Fibel, Der Schreiblese-­ Unterricht und die grundlegenden sprachlichen Übungen im ersten Schuljahre, a first-­year language primer compiled by Christoph Hering (Munich, 1910). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

of Kurrentschrift (running script) known as Sütterlinschrift (Sütterlin script) in primary schools (fig. A.11). Indeed, regularity was a broad aim of standardized writing instruction in the Kaiserreich (German Empire), which employed a curriculum in which students were afforded the opportunity to mature psychologically as individuals within strict parameters meant to maintain a social hierarchy. Albers’s use of squares, rectangles, and the grid in his designs resists individual expression and corresponds to his desire to eliminate personal marks from the linear constructions and Homages.29 In describing the latter, he emphasized that the juxtaposition of various colors from one painting to another allowed the “character and feeling” of the paintings to change without “additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-­called, texture.”30 That an edition of Ludwig Klages’s Handschrift und Charakter (1917) is among the books that likely were part of Albers’s library is tantalizing in light of this statement.31 For Klages, the rhythm and harmony of one’s handwriting offered insight into intellectual and emotional aspects of the writer—­exactly that which Albers’s hoped to suppress. Like his interest in Wölfflin, who attended Klages’s Seminar für Ausdruckskunde (Seminar on the Theory of Expression), Albers’s familiarity with Klages indicates the degree to which his practice engaged the psychology of art as well as the practice of education.32 a / Linear Constructions

Interestingly, Wölfflin drew upon knowledge of the psychology of child development in his formulation of the progression from linear to painterly vision in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. In observing children, he notes a natural move from tactile perception to wholly visual and mature perception. “A painterly representation,” he explains, “has its roots only in the eye and appeals only to the eye, and just as the child ceases to take hold of things in order to ‘grasp’ them, so mankind has ceased to test the picture for its tactile values. A more developed art has learned to surrender itself to mere appearance.”33 Albers ultimately designed his curricula at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University according to this principle. His adult students began by working with three-­dimensional form before beginning instruction in two-­dimensional design, which was predicated upon a translation of tactile values into wholly visual representations. Although not stated as such, the development of one’s “painterly vision” was among Albers’s educational goals. In order to understand how this was the case—­and to appreciate Albers’s pedagogy more generally—­it is crucial to examine how his education as a primary school teacher shaped his creative and pedagogic practices.

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O n Al b er s ’ s P e dag o g i c For ms

Josef Albers may have believed that he taught himself how to teach, but he developed the pedagogy he employed at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University against the backdrop of the German educative tradition in which he had been trained as a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer).1 The material rigor and philosophical underpinnings of Albers’s Ausbildung (education or formation) in Germany are often overlooked, due, in part, to his association with the American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey, who was a significant figure at Black Mountain.2 Albers’s pedagogy was, however, more than a mere corollary to Dewey’s understanding of “learning by doing.” It was indebted to a long-­standing tradition of Enlightenment and Romantic thought that prioritized active learning. Albers, Dewey, and others—­like Georg Kerschensteiner, who encouraged the creation of Arbeitsschulen (activity schools)—­relied upon this tradition in making their progressive formulations.3 Thus, in order to understand the significance of Albers’s pedagogy, it must be positioned relative to the pedagogic practices he enacted as a primary school teacher in Wilhelmine Germany, as well as the educational thought upon which progressive educationalists drew in calling for school reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this chapter, I consider the instructional parameters and mediating forms of Albers’s pedagogy, as well as the emphasis it placed upon activity in relation to the educational thought of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and others. A genealogy emerges that allows one to recognize the degree to which Albers’s pedagogy engaged an enduring German educative tradition. In particular, I attend to how Lehrmittel (teaching aids) were theorized in this context. I then provide an overview of Albers’s instruction in design, drawing, and color, which shows how the Volksschullehrer-­cum-­Bauhäusler transformed the structures of his own education into an analytical subject.

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Albers’s writing on education, most of which postdates his arrival in the United States, is aligned with John Dewey’s pragmatic ethos. For Dewey, education was tied to the environment in which “individuals have to act” and was a “continuous reconstruction of experience” grounded in the present.4 Albers similarly wrote that art instruction situated artists in their contemporary circumstances: “If art is an essential part of culture and life, then we must no longer educate our students . . . to be imitators of antiquities, but for artistic seeing, artistic working, and more, for artistic living.”5 Dewey disparaged the reduction of educational method to “cut and dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps.”6 In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916), he wrote, “No one can tell in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar are compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method, certain preordained verbal formulae.” The prescription of fixed educational methods separated mind from material and thus from experience: “Mechanical rigid woodenness [of thought] is an inevitable corollary of any theory which separates mind from activity motivated by a purpose.”7 This attitude extended to the employment of educational aids—­the mediating forms of a pedagogy. For Dewey, the reliance upon charts and taxidermy animals to teach natural science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that the mind was to be acted upon rather than actively developed (fig. 1.1). These objects were already molded by an intelligence and thus “mark[ed] out a consummation” of learning when they should instead be catalysts for building knowledge through activity. “Zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge,” wrote Dewey, “represents crude, scattered facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after they have been subjected to careful examination, to deliberate supplementation, and to arrangement to bring out connections which assist observation, memory, and further inquiry.”8 Albers agreed; in his essay “Art as Experience” (1935), its title repeating that of Dewey’s 1934 text, he asserts that “Linnaeus, the botanist, built his classifications after many experiences and much investigation. How could we have begun children’s botanical studies with his final results!”9 He reflected further upon the educational methods and aids he experienced and employed in Prussian primary schools: We as children had to learn natural history, which tried to classify or dissect the phenomena of nature. But soon we underwent the experience that pressed herbariums are not nature at all . . . or that anatomy has to do mostly with dead bodies. After this funereal experience with dried leaves and stuffed owls and squirrels we felt a deep need of going out of doors to get, instead of the

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separated parts, the connection between them; instead of scientific systematizing, the events of life, the vital functions, the conditions essential to life—­in short, to get life.10

This is precisely what Albers achieved in the “free studies” he had students craft with leaves in the context of his color instruction. In one example (fig. 1.2), a student placed a slightly decayed leaf against a vertically lined gray ground; a fragment of magenta paper similar in shape to the leaf is visible beneath the left half of the leaf’s degraded surface. The student arranged magenta, purple, and blue paper chads along the leaf’s left edge. Their placement accentuates the appearance of the leaf’s decay. At the bottom of the composition, the student placed a leaf fragment (which presumably matches the color of the leaf it abuts) upon a purple ground. The value of the ground’s color appears to neutralize—­or perhaps even degrade—­the leaf’s color, which is evident when one compares the two leaves. Thus, unlike the “pressed herbariums” that were common in German classrooms and in which an organism’s development was arrested at different stages of its existence (fig. 1.3), Albers’s students activated organic material in their leaf studies—­they employed it as it existed in life.

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Fig. 1.1. Taxidermy workshop (Präparatorium), in Lehrmittelkatalog, Linnaea Naturhistorisches Institut (Berlin, 1910). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

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Fig. 1.2. Color study (free study with leaves), Black Mountain College, ca. 1945–­1948. Photographic color positive by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.35.290. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In so doing, they learned that understanding color—­like nature—­meant understanding that it existed “in-­between the facts” rather than as “facts themselves.” “Life,” Albers wrote, “is change.”11 While Albers’s pedagogy may have been sympathetic to Dewey’s philosophy, it was founded upon an explicit and implicit understanding of the aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought of Wilhelmine Germany.12 The emphasis on Dewey’s “learning by doing” in discourse on Albers and Black Mountain College is an oversimplification that belies the importance of the German educational tradition in the context of which Albers 1 / From Object to Process

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Fig. 1.3. Leaf biology (Biologie des Blattes), in Deutscher Lehrmittel-­Katalog (Hamburg, 1914). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

developed his pedagogy. Indeed, it is unlikely that Albers had read Dewey’s writing before his arrival at Black Mountain in 1933—­aged forty-­five years. Even if he had prior knowledge of Dewey, his understanding of the latter’s educational aims might have been distorted. While a German translation of The School and Society (1899) had appeared in 1905, the translated text was altered in ways that diminished Dewey’s democratic ideals.13 Furthermore, the notion that Dewey’s Democracy and Education was widely known in Germany, and specifically at the Bauhaus, and had “rallied progressive educators throughout Europe” has been overstated.14 The German translation of Democracy and Education was not published until 1930, although an erroneous—­significantly earlier—­publication date often appears in literature related to Albers.15 Dewey’s name is mentioned only in passing (if at all) in the pages of educational journals that Albers and other Catholic primary school teachers in Provinz Westfalen (the Prussian province of Westphalia) might have known.16 And Albers almost certainly would not have read Dewey as part of the curriculum of the Lehrerseminar (teacher’s college) he attended. Students completed coursework in Pädagogik (pedagogy) and read “major pedagogical works” with emphasis upon those written since the Reformation.17 But these texts were examined historically insofar as they corresponded to the culture of the era in which they were written and in terms of how they bore upon the current educational system.18 Significantly, in discussing contemporary pedagogy, the “educational tasks and aspirations of the new age” (i.e., those of the Kaiserreich or German empire) were stressed.19 The degree to which this was From Object to Process / 1

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the case is brought into high relief in context of the empire’s colonization efforts in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was imperative that German and white Europeans living in German colonies be educated in a manner that would maintain their allegiance to the Kaiserreich. A German curriculum, teaching staff, and educational objects—­including taxidermic animals native to Germany—­were imported to German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) to support this aim.20 Both abroad and in Germany, the educational system in which Albers participated as student and teacher underscored class distinctions in a manner antithetical to Dewey’s democratic ideals.21 Furthermore, whereas university education in Germany is known for its adherence to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of Bildung (individual self-­cultivation), the primary school curriculum that developed over the course of the nineteenth century—­in which the self was to be cultivated but not afforded real agency—­was aligned with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s understanding of the concept.22 Fichte’s pedagogical nationalism favored state interests. In 1807 he declared, “Education, and nothing else, is the only possible means of recovering German independence [from France.]”23 As David Sorkin has noted, Fichte “emphasized the product rather than the process of Bildung.”24 Albers, who was trained according to and later followed the standard primary school curriculum set by the Prussian state and administered locally by the Catholic diocese of Münster, would have had limited direct contact with progressive education in general, let alone with Dewey.25 Yet, through his training to become a primary school teacher, Albers knew—­ and sympathized with—­the Enlightenment and Romantic educational thought and pedagogies that many progressive educationalists, including Dewey, hoped to revive in formulations meant to reform the primary and secondary education system in Germany and elsewhere. Progressive Education

Well before the onset of progressive education (neue Pädagogik) in late nine­­teenth-­century Germany, the design of curricula and educational forms had been a topic for philosophers like Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, who built upon one another’s work to theorize the nature of education; statesmen like Humboldt and Fichte, who established national curricular standards and ideologies; and those who put educational theory into practice, like the pedagogues Johann Bernhard Basedow, Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. At his Lehrerseminar, Albers likely would have read texts by these figures, as well as those by Socrates, Plato, John Amos Comenius, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg, and others.26 In considering the instructional parameters and mediating forms of Albers’s pedagogy and the emphasis placed upon activity therein, key figures—­like Rousseau, Kant, Pestalozzi, and

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Herbart—­emerge in Albers’s educational genealogy that allow one to recognize the degree to which his pedagogy engaged a German educational tradition. In their respective writing on education, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant theorize the conditions and objects of education (including the materiality of play) in light of the natural or desired disposition of the child. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke contends that children’s toys and educational aids should convey essential moral lessons. “All the plays and diversions of children,” he writes, “should be directed toward good and useful habits, or else they will introduce ill ones.”27 If a child is to lead a virtuous life, then the mind need be made “obedient to discipline, and pliant to reason.”28 Toward this end, Locke is adamant that parents ought not to purchase toys for children. Rather, children should at least attempt to craft their own toys and games in order to encourage disciplined and directed attention as well as to moderate their desires; an abundance of readymade toys leads to distraction and covetousness.29 Learning, he felt, should take place through activities enjoyable to the child, and playthings should be designed to be entertainingly educational. So as to meet this aim, Locke describes a “method of teaching children by a repeated practice, and the same action done over and over again . . .” to develop habits of behavior.30 With respect to learning to read, he suggests that one render an ivory ball with twenty-­four triangular faces (a tetrakis hexahedron) and paste a different letter of the alphabet upon each face. In repeatedly throwing this object, as one would a die, a tutored child learns to equate the names and sounds of letters with their signs. Once the names and sounds have been mastered, they can be combined into syllables and later into words; thus, so Locke believed, the child will come to know how to read “without knowing how he did so.”31 Rousseau—­whose concept of natural education served as a foundation upon which many progressive educationalists built—­positioned himself in opposition to Locke’s assertion that one ought to employ reason in educating children, stipulating that this was contrary to a child’s nature. “If children were capable of reasoning,” Rousseau wrote in Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762), “they would have no need of being educated.”32 A child’s education should progress naturally from knowledge realized through basic sensory understanding (which all children are born with) to the formation of ideas and judgment; a child knows the difference between hot and cold sensations before being able—­or needing—­to evaluate and correctly articulate the distinction.33 Like Locke, he advocated that the tutor begin by observing the child’s personality; however, for Rousseau, it was essential that the tutor respect a child’s liberty and, in doing so, allow the child to guide the progress of his own education.34 Fostering self-­reliance through the experience of one’s environs was ideal; indeed, Rousseau wrote that he would rather a child “know nothing by heart, but much by

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experience.”35 It thus was incumbent upon tutors to develop activities that arouse a child’s interest in learning and conform to his intellectual capacity at various stages of development from infancy to young adulthood. Rather than teaching subjects to children, they should give their pupils a “taste for them” by cultivating the child’s natural curiosity, which would serve as impetus for learning specific principles as needed.36 Rousseau considered toys to be “useless pernicious furniture.”37 All objects that distanced the child from or served as substitutions for his lived experience were to be avoided, even those used to measure natural phenomena. Whereas Locke described globes as effective educational aids in teaching geography, arithmetic, and geometry, Rousseau feared that maps and globes might lead the child to believe that the “world is a globe of pasteboard” rather than an environment in and from which one learns to navigate.38 And he was particularly critical of Locke’s tetrakis hexahedron and the “cabinets and charts” meant to teach children to read. Rousseau felt the child first must be given the desire to read, which he will learn to fulfill out of necessity. When, for instance, Rousseau’s ideal pupil Émile (namesake of his treatise on education) misses an enjoyable event because he is unable to read a written invitation, he will set himself the task of learning to read without the provocation of intermediary tools.39 On the topic of natural science instruction, Rousseau suggested that one could learn that air possessed weight through the mere act of lifting one’s arm horizontally from the water while in the bath. This “rude” experiment was preferable to demonstrating the associated principle with an apparatus found in a laboratory. “All this parade of instruments and machines displeases me,” he wrote; they “kill science” and distract the child’s attention.40 Rousseau’s Émile was significant to German educational theory. Indeed, Kant’s admiration for Rousseau is evident in his Über Pädagogik (1803), a publication derived from notes to his lectures on pedagogy at the university in Königsberg.41 Both philosophers viewed self-­cultivation as a moral necessity, which, as Kant claimed, was essential to the betterment of “humanity and its entire destiny.” “It’s not enough for children to be trained,” he wrote; rather, “they must learn to think.”42 This involved the cultivation of understanding (universal knowledge), judgment (the ability to apply universal knowledge in specific circumstances), and reason (realizing the relationship between universal knowledge and its specific application) through a child’s physical and moral education.43 One’s physical education—­which pertained to the faculties of body, mind, and soul—­was achieved through play and scholastic activities; it was dependent upon circumstances in which one was subject to the direction and thought of others so as to develop “practice and discipline.”44 Yet whereas Rousseau’s ideal pupil would be privately tutored, Kant saw the merits of the communal “forced culture” of the school as fostering discipline and providing a forum in which rationally derived educational methods could be enacted.45 For Kant, accustoming children to sitting still was a fundamental aspect 1 / From Object to Process

of schooling meant to dissuade them from their wildness.46 Only later, as the child matured, would instruction in skills like reading and writing begin so that he developed the requisite shared means to fulfill his purpose.47 Achieving balance between discipline and freedom was of the essence. Kant identified one of the most significant problems in education as learning how “subjection to lawful constraint [can] be combined with the ability to make use of one’s freedom.”48 Kant agreed with Rousseau that it is best for children to learn for them­ selves—­within parameters—­rather than through the aid of instruments that “ruin natural ability.”49 Sensory training was essential, especially for young children, whose games should be purposeful. Kant saw flying kites as “a faultless play” insomuch as it develops dexterity (fig. 1.4).50 In playing blind man’s bluff (a cruel game in which a blindfolded child is taunted by his peers) children challenge themselves to sense the position of their bodies in space without using sight.51 Such activities promoted agility. Exercises in balance that involved estimating (visually) the heights of natural forms to be traversed, Kant observed, afforded the child with the realization that he need not need use a string to measure distance—­he could do so with the eye.52 From Object to Process / 1

Fig. 1.4. Daniel Niklaus Chodowiecki, Other amusements for children: (a) the visiting game; (b) the blind woman; (c) the hoop, the humming-­top, the top, the kite; (d) the ball and the shuttlecock (Andere Vergnügungen der Kinder. a. Das Besuchspiel; b. Die blinde Frau; c. Der Reifen, der Brummkreisel, der Kreisel, der Drachen; d. Der Ball und der Federbal), ca. 1774. Fig. 6 in Johann Bernhard Basedow, Kupfersammlung zu J. B. Basedows Elementarwerke für die Jugend und ihre Freunde . . . (Leipzig, 1774). Stiftung Stadt­museum Berlin, Graphische Sammlung.

Fig. 1.5. Daniel Niklaus Chodowiecki, Teaching children for God’s sake, partly through the book of nature and morals, partly through the book of religion (Der Unterricht der Kinder um Gottes willen, teils durch das Buch der Natur und Sitten,

Although rules were necessary to the cultivation of understanding, Kant suggested that it was useful to expose children to these abstractly, “so that understanding may not proceed in a merely mechanical [i.e., physical] fashion.”53 Ideally, the rule and its application should be discovered in tandem. Visual aids were effective toward this end (fig. 1.5). “How many read and hear things without understanding them! Pictures and things are necessary to understanding.”54 The philosopher, who championed the study of geography, proclaimed:

teils durch das Buch der Religion), ca. 1774. Fig. 48 (detail) in Johann Bernhard Basedow, Kupfersammlung zu J. B. Basedows Elementarwerke für die Jugend und ihre Freunde . . . (Leipzig, 1774). Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Graphische Sammlung.

Geographical maps have something in them which charms all children, even the smallest. When they are tired of everything else, they still learn something when maps are used. And this is an excellent diversion for children, where their imagination is not allowed to wander, but must be fixed on a definite figure. . . . Pictures of animals, plants, etc., can be added . . . ; these will enliven geography. But history should not appear until later.55

Ultimately, however, Kant felt that a map was “best understood” if one drew it oneself. The best way to understand is to do. Yet few children were capable of such activities independently; hence, scholastic activities 1 / From Object to Process

through which “rational knowledge” could be drawn out of (rather than imposed upon) children were necessary.56 The utility of the physical and mental constraints associated with schooling may not be immediately apparent to children, but, he claimed, they would “become aware of its great benefits later.”57 One can discern the Rousseauian tradition of natural education as inflected by Kantian discipline in Albers’s pedagogy, which ultimately was meant to instill within students the capacity to establish parameters within which to mine the dialectics of freedom and control in their individual creative practices. The importance of crafting one’s own toys, drawing one’s own map, making and flying kites, and other forms of active learning are in keeping with the centrality of material experimentation in Albers’s instruction; Albers’s students crafted their own learning aids in the act of manipulating various materials. These kinds of activities were first put into practice by pedagogues like Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Fröbel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Fröbel attempted—­to varying degrees—­to ­materialize the natural education Rousseau theorized by establishing educational methods (primarily for young children) that focused upon indirect, playful learning activities. Kant, who felt that education should be a rational and purposeful system with methods subjected to scientific study at experimental schools, considered Basedow’s Philanthropinum in Dessau an exemplary institution.58 At the Philanthropinum, which was founded in 1774, French was taught through conversation and by performing plays rather than by memorizing grammatical rules. Students were drilled in Latin and Greek playfully. A visitor to the school recounted that they imitated various animals when their Latin names were announced, and were given small cookies in the shape of Greek letters upon their correct identification. Physical activity of various kinds was prioritized. All students learned basic carpentry. And drawing exercises and images were used to develop perception as well as memory; pictures of diverse scenes were shown to students who, after an image had been removed from view, were asked to describe what they had seen in detail.59 Pestalozzi, who founded his pedagogic institute in Yverdon, Switzerland, in 1805, developed an instructional system meant to “strengthen [the] influence of Nature in developing intelligence” by attending to the sensory aspects of “drawings, writing, reckoning, and measuring.”60 The Anschauungsunterricht (object or visual lessons) he employed were meant to develop and refine a child’s sense impressions so that one’s natural, preverbal means for understanding one’s world took precedence over lingual articulation.61 Fröbel (and, significantly, his followers) systematized Pestalozzi’s Anschauungsunterricht in the curriculum he developed in 1837 at the school for infants (the precursor to the Kindergarten) in Bad Blankenburg, Schwarzburg-­Rudolstadt.62 Among many other activities, such as singing, storytelling, movement exercises, and gardening, students were introduced to so-­called gifts and From Object to Process / 1

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occupations in a sequence loosely based upon their ages and abilities. The principle of directed or disciplined play, particularly through tasks that came naturally to children insofar as they mirrored domestic activities, guided the curriculum. With the earlier gifts (like colorful worsted balls, wooden spheres, cylinders, and cubes), the child developed their manual dexterity, knowledge of color, shape, and so on; as the child aged, the gifts became more complicated, ultimately introducing basic geometry, counting, the outlining of forms through a kind of mechanical drawing, and simple construction projects.63 The cultivation of curiosity was a primary goal insofar as the gifts fostered the development of a child’s ability to observe, examine, and compare. Although Pestalozzi’s Anschauungsunterricht became closely associated with primary and secondary education in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century (in part through the work of philosopher and pedagogue Johann Friedrich Herbart, who adapted Pestalozzi’s educational scheme for use in primary schools), the self-­activity associated with Rousseauian naturalism (and Pestalozzi) was theoretically opposed to the neo-­humanistic, non-­naturalistic, and subjective concept of Bildung that took hold in Germany in the nineteenth century.64 This contributed to a distortion of the educational principles theorized by Rousseau, which, as Kerschensteiner observed, had become systematized in the primary schools of Wilhelmine Germany; their curricula, he declared, merely paid lip service to Pestalozzian “self-­activity,” which he characterized as “more like the self-­activity of a machine than that of a productive worker,” insofar as it was tied to a prescribed curricular outcome rather than creative work.65 The curriculum Albers experienced in his youth and enacted as a primary school teacher stressed curricular outcomes—­products rather than processes. Educating Albers

A distaste for pedagogic reductivism was a factor that motivated Albers’s criticism of the German education system. In an uncharacteristically political essay for a special issue of Junge Menschen devoted to the Bauhaus, he questioned the emphasis placed upon the cultivation of the individual at the expense of the community and the prioritization of historical knowledge at the expense of contemporary innovation in German education. With respect to the latter, he asserted that the German education system produced “managers, not creators” (Verwalter, keine Gestalter). Rather, using language reminiscent of Kerschensteiner, Albers declared that schools should train students to meet the needs of contemporary life: “a little history [and] a lot of work, is what we’re after.”66 For Albers and most children in Wilhelmine Germany, formal education ended upon completing the primary school curriculum at age fourteen; secondary schools, which were reliant upon student tuition, were largely inaccessible, as was the Abitur (A-­levels), a qualification required for university admission.67 Albers 1 / From Object to Process

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Fig. 1.6. Classroom (Klassenzimmer), in Albert Wehrhahn, ed., Deutsche Hilfsschulen in Wort und

attended an eight-­year Catholic primary school in Bottrop between 1894 and 1902.68 The Preußisches Ministerium der geistlichen, Unterrichts-­und Medizinalangelegenheiten (Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs) dictated its curriculum, the teacher-­to-­student ratio, in what manner the school building should be appointed, and the kinds of learning aids to be used (fig. 1.6).69 All of this was monitored by school inspectors appointed by the conservative Katholischer Lehrerverband des Deutschen Reiches (Catholic Teacher’s Association of Germany).70 At his primary school, Albers experienced a three-­tiered program of instruction in religion, German language, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, natural science, geography, regional history (Heimatkunde), singing, and ­movement (Turnen). He later enacted this program himself, between 1908 and 1913 as well as between 1915 and 1918, when he held teaching posts at primary schools in Bottrop, near Dülmen in the village of Weddern, and in ­Stadtlohn. Prior to his first teaching appointment, Albers participated in a six-­year training program for prospective primary school teachers. In 1902 he enrolled in a three-­year Catholic Präparandenschule (preparatory school) in Langenhorst, where he completed a course of study in general education in preparation for the exam required for admittance to a Lehrerseminar.71 The curriculum consisted of courses in the Catholic religion, German, a foreign language (French or English), history, mathematics (arithmetic and spatial understanding), natural history, geography, lettering (Schreiben), drawing, movement, and music (singing, violin, piano, organ, and music theory).72 Albers then attended a Catholic Lehrerseminar in Büren between 1905 and 1908, at which he continued to develop competencies in the above subjects (with the exception of lettering); studied psychology, the history of education, logic, and ethics; practiced teaching skills; and developed teaching methodologies.73 He later held a probational teaching From Object to Process / 1

Bild (Halle, 1913). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

Fig. 1.7. Showroom (Musterzimmer), in Lehrmittelkatalog, Linnaea Naturhistorisches Institut (Berlin, 1910). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

appointment at a regional primary school and completed a state examination with oral and written components, for which he would have written an essay about teaching and learning, the history of pedagogy, or German literature; been examined on his handling of an assignment in religion and history; and translated a text from a foreign language into German.74 In the second year of study at his Lehrerseminar, Albers began his training in teaching practices; faculty presented the various subjects taught at primary schools through model lectures (Musterlektionen) followed by discussion of the methodologies employed.75 Through these lectures Albers was tutored in how to convey basic curricular principles in his own classroom. The natural history (Erdkunde) curriculum was distinctive; it emphasized observation and experimentation. Toward that end, it was essential that students learn to use their own intuition and observation rather than “merely appropriate material by memory.”76 Indeed, the Prussian state recommended that “special care” be taken to insure that students were trained in “making observations and experiments” at all levels of the curriculum, and especially in advanced instruction in teaching methodologies.77 As Albers progressed through the Lerhrerseminar curriculum, he presented sample lessons in different subject areas; in doing so, he rehearsed standard instructional methodologies and increased his familiarity with 1 / From Object to Process

the teaching objects used to mediate lessons.78 With respect to the latter, it was essential that students “be made aware of the most important teaching and learning resources.”79 At his Lehrerseminar, Albers was introduced to the kinds of books and visual aids—­like arithmetic books (Rechenbücher) and calculation machines (Rechenmaschinen)—­that he later would employ in a primary school (fig. 1.7).80 Images and objects were essential tools. The Prussian state mandated that, in teaching the history of pedagogy, the faculty employ “vivid images” (lebenstvolle Bilder) of the most important examples and personalities in the development thereof.81 Images were used in religious instruction to illustrate the most important moments in the history of the Catholic church, including the victory of Christianity under Constantine the Great and his followers, the conversion of the Germanic tribes, the church separation of the sixteenth century and its consequences for Germany and Europe, the French Revolution, and the spread of the Christian religion in the foreign territories.82 And in the natural history curriculum, Lehrerseminar students familiarized themselves with “good teaching aids” (guten Lehrmitteln), including “atlases, wall maps, globes, apparatuses, [and] illustrative images” (fig. 1.8).83 These objects also could be viewed in local school museums, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to allow teachers to access the latest educational media (fig. 1.9).84 However, and significantly for progressive educationalists, the curricula Albers learned to enact at his Lehrerseminar—­even those aspects of it that might appear to have been progressive, like a natural history curriculum that prioritized observation and experimentation rather than learning by rote—­were ­directed toward predetermined ends; the forms used to mediate instruction, to use Dewey’s language, were those that already had been subjected to an intelligence. The educational methods and learning aids Albers employed as a primary school teacher in Wilhelmine Germany largely mirrored the concern

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Fig. 1.8. Geography and astronomy collection (Erd-­ und Himmelskunde), in Max Hübner, Unser Schulmuseum in Wort und Bild (Breslau, 1916). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

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Fig. 1.9. Teaching material collection, ­Westphalian School Museum, Dort­ mund (Lehrmittelsammlung, Westfälisches Schulmuseum in Dortmund), in Festbuch zum 32. Westfälischen Provinzial-­ Lehrertag . . . (Dortmund, 1910). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

for product over process that motivated the primary school curriculum more generally; the natural history curriculum, for instance, developed a student’s command of nature by dissecting its particulars.85 As Herbart wrote, “The contemporaneous environment can be analyzed into separate things, the things into their component parts, and these last again into properties. Properties, elements, things and the environment may be used for abstraction, so as to form out of them various formal concepts.”86 Herbart, who studied with Fichte and succeeded Kant at the university in Königsberg in 1809, adapted—­and in doing so, systematized—­the Anschauungsunterricht popularized by Pestalozzi in educating young children for use in primary schools. According to Herbart’s formulation, the teacher must begin by selecting an aspect of knowledge or a “general truth” (an arithmetical rule; an ethical or political principle) to be explored with students according to a methodology that relies upon their existing knowledge, which, in combination with newly presented information, serves as a foundation upon which to develop new understanding.87 At all levels of the curriculum, students move from specific, detailed information to advanced directed thought. Insofar as learning involved apperception, education, for Herbart, became a science of selecting the mechanisms and sequences through which to introduce information to students. Herbart’s followers—­like Wilhelm Rein, who published an eight-­­­­­vol­ ume work in which Herbartian principles were applied to each year of the eight-­year primary school curriculum, as well as a ten-­volume pedagogical encyclopedia—­helped to mold the educational methods of primary schools in Germany (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.88 Rein described a Herbartian teaching method as consisting of five parts: preparation (Vorbereitung), presentation ­(Darbietung), ­association

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(Verknüpfung), generalization (Zusammenfassung), and application (Anwendung).89 Students first were prepared to receive new material by calling forth previously received ideas (via description, images, objects, and experiments); through guided association, students were led by the teacher to understand an aspect of knowledge that framed a lesson by creating relationships between what they already knew and the newly received material; this knowledge was then articulated by students as a general statement and applied to a contemporary circumstance. For example, in the first year of study, fairy tales that students likely already knew were used to introduce subjects—­like natural history—­that would be developed further as they progressed through the curriculum. In discussing Grimm’s Das Lumpengesindel (The Ragamuffins) the characteristics of a squirrel (Eichhörnschen), an animal that featured in the narrative, were elaborated according to the five stages of instruction. Children used their knowledge of the animal first to describe “how [a squirrel] bounces and jumps, climbs, sits, nibbles on the acorn; how it teases the boy who wants to catch it!” In the second stage, students were shown a taxidermy squirrel (ausgestopften Eichhörnchens) and asked to observe and describe it exactingly, noting, for example, that the “forefeet have four toes and a stub of a thumb, the hind paws have five toes; there are sharp claws on the toes; and the forelegs are shorter than the hind legs.” Students then compared squirrels to other animals about which they had learned previously, like mice. Then, in the fourth stage of instruction, they made generalizations: “The squirrel is a lively, funny animal; It can jump and climb very well; It is a rodent; It mostly sticks to trees; It prefers to eat fir seeds, acorns and nuts.” Finally, knowledge was applied in a manner that—­unbeknownst to students—­set up themes for future lessons about how animals are adapted to their environments: “What does the squirrel use for climbing? (sharp claws); to jump? (bushy tail); to bite? (sharp teeth).”90 And as the curriculum progressed, the squirrel might be reintroduced in anatomy lessons (fig. 1.10).

Fig. 1.10. Squirrel (Eichhörnchen), specimen no. 268 in Bibliotheca paedagogica: Verzeichnis die bewährtesten und neuesten Lehrmittel . . . (Leipzig, 1908). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

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Fig. 1.11. Schreiber’s wall chart illustrating basic geographic concepts (Schreibers Wandtafel zur Veranschaulichung geographischer Grundbegiffe), in Bibliotheca paedagogica: Verzeichnis die bewährtesten und neuesten Lehrmittel . . . (Leipzig, 1908). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

The images and objects employed at primary schools were instruments that made complex structures accessible to interpretation. They made natural phenomena, environments, and human actions that would otherwise be inaccessible to students for direct observation visible in faithful, sometimes eccentric images, like a composite landscape in which different geographies and land uses were compressed into a single picture, the parts of which are unified by a modern transit network (fig. 1.11). A taxidermy squirrel allowed one to observe the animal’s physical characteristics more easily and in greater detail than one could by observing a living squirrel. And one certainly could not see into a live squirrel’s body to reveal its skeletal system as one could when aided by objects and illustrations. As the curricular goals became more complex, so too did the visual material. The anatomies of important organisms—­like honeybees, the cultivation of which was essential to pollination of crops—­were broken apart and enlarged in printed materials. In a classroom that might have as many as fifty students and, perhaps, one microscope, this magnification was a practical alternative to direct observation. Furthermore, images of the insects’ anatomical components, reproductive cycle, and habitat could be juxtaposed with visualizations of bee husbandry—­the organism and its agricultural significance presented together (fig. 1.12). Even more evocative objects included actual raw material associated with the honeybee, like a portion of its nest or honeycomb, as well as examples of insects that threatened the cultivation of honeybees, like the wax moth (fig. 1.13). Educational aids like these were pragmatic; but they also assisted students in developing the skills necessary to see accurately and analytically so that, in time, a kind of reductive vision became habitual.91 The means of seeing into the structure of things, in combination with the kinds of problems posed to students as the curriculum advanced, underscored how breaking an object 1 / From Object to Process

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Fig. 1.12. Honeybee, Schröder-­Kull biological wall charts (Honigbiene, Schröder-­Kull Biologische Wandtafeln), in Bibliotheca paedagogica: Verzeichnis die bewährtesten und neuesten Lehrmittel . . . (Leipzig, 1908). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF). Fig. 1.13. Bee biology with hive (Bienenbiologie mit Schwarm), in Lehrmittelkatalog, Linnaea Naturhistorisches Institut (Berlin, 1910). Courtesy Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des DIPF (BBF).

or problem or concept into its constituent parts was essential to making sound and reasoned judgments about already known practical concerns. The learning aids employed toward this end tended to be methodologically reductive; parts were analyzed in order to understand and explain a system. So too were the activities of instruction, which became increasingly From Object to Process / 1

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complex and practically oriented as students moved through the primary school curriculum. In the eighth and final year of study, Rein suggested that natural history instruction contain units on heating and lighting; telegraphy, electricity, and magnetism; food; minerals and raw materials; regional geology; and ecology.92 His Theorie und Praxis des Volksschulunterrichts nach Herbartischen Grundsätzen included a twenty-­t wo-­page sample lesson (Unterrichtsbeispiel) about how students might study the properties of the mineral lime (Kalk) in their local environments.93 The curriculum involved several school subjects, including mineralogy, chemistry, and specialized aspects of geology, like geognosy, which is the study of a material’s exterior appearance and internal construction. As was typical of a Herbartian instructional method, students first were encouraged to observe the material in situ, which they did by investigating the stone foundation of the school building, going on mineralogical excursions, and looking at monuments in churchyards, as well as visiting sculpture workshops and building sites. They observed which kinds of flora, like Vinca minor (lesser periwinkle), and fauna, like snails, thrived in lime-­rich habitats. In making these observations, students were meant to ponder if the sum total of the characteristics observed would allow them to differentiate limestone from other minerals.94 They collected specimens to assemble their own illustrative material (Anschauungsmaterial) for visual, chemical, and other forms of investigation in the classroom, which also involved the school’s mineralogical collection. In doing so, they established a “clear comparative compilation of [the] properties” of lime and used these to articulate which among the specimens collected were varieties of the mineral.95 Having considered the mineral’s appearance, its individual properties as well as how these properties could be modified, its interaction with other materials and organisms, and in what way it could be used, students would be prepared to apply knowledge of lime to practical concerns: to determine whether or not lime was present in plant ash or to know which plants to cultivate in calcareous soil.96 Ultimately, knowledge was meant to be applied toward predetermined ends. In a Herbartian curriculum, activity was directed toward something concrete that schoolchildren were meant to know and that could be understood through the (active) examination, assessment, and measurement of objects from the natural world. What they were to do with their refined understanding of nature—­save for accomplishing specific tasks—­was not addressed per se. This was a barrier to productivity for Kerschensteiner, who observed that “modern German education was wanting in creative power”; it promoted “passivity” and “receptivity.”97 Rather, in Begriff der Arbeitsschule (1912), he advocated for the creation of schools in which manual activity served as a pedagogical locus meant to train the will and to sharpen the judgment of students so that they apply these abilities anew.98 As he wrote:

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[If] the will is to be strengthened, it must have freedom in action. If the intellect is to learn how to judge clearly, it must . . . through experience work up its ideas and concepts. If sensitivity is to increase, reason and feeling must be brought into contact with manifold experience.99 47

For Albers—­who, when reflecting upon his experience as a primary school teacher, objected to the classification of nature and herbaria—­the active nonactivity of a Herbartian curriculum was a barrier to creativity.100 The Prussian state might have mandated, in 1910, that “lessons in the native flora should only be given by the natural objects themselves” in middle school herbology (Pflanzenkunde) curricula, but the classification of the natural world remained the curricular goal.101 Albers’s problem was not with herbaria per se; rather, it was that through them children were taught to view nature as a collection of objects to be sorted.102 His pedagogy was future-­oriented. One did not learn techniques or facts intended to be applied in specific situations—­one did not make art. Rather, one developed a general knowledge of material and form that was meant to be employed independently. Albers’s pedagogy was productive—­to such an extent that students effectively made their own learning aids in completing assignments. These were material manifestations of the process that went into their making—­the activity of learning. As such, they register the principles of observation and material investigation that were central to Albers’s pedagogy and that undergird the practices of many artists who participated in his curriculum. Ultimately, as Kant preferred, Albers developed a pedagogy in which the activities through which a student discovered a principle and its potential application occurred simultaneously.103 He achieved this by making an analytical subject of the educational ideologies and structures of his own education. Pedagogic Form

By the time he began teaching at Yale University, in 1950, Albers had established a curriculum separated into three instructional components; these were basic design, drawing, and color, which he described respectively as fostering “imagination,” promoting “discipline,” and demonstrating “sheer magic.”104 He had initiated what ultimately would be known as his course in basic design at the Bauhaus in 1923 under the direction of Walter Gropius, and later established a curriculum in representational drawing at the request of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school’s third and final director.105 Between 1933 and 1949, Albers expanded these offerings at Black Mountain College, where he also first taught his well-­known color course. As was emphasized in Yale’s School of Architecture and Design Bulletin (1958), the curriculum Albers introduced at the university stressed the “visual formation” of students: “the consequent attitudes of precise observation

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and discriminating formal articulation serve throughout to give direction and structure to the student’s developing vision, judgement, and technical skill.”106 Instruction was meant to train students’ abilities to discern and put into practice the continually changing shape of modern life—­to develop a visual consciousness that would inform the appearance of their work regardless of media. Albers was adamant that no art was to be made in his courses. Rather, the objects made were to be evidence of creative behavior, material manifestations of the investigative processes that brought them into being within established parameters. Albers selected the materials with which students worked and suggested constraints within which they were to labor in completing a given exercise; for instance, he might ask students to transform a single sheet of corrugated cardboard into a form that revealed the structural potential inherent to the material by using limited methods of manipulation (fig. 1.14).107 He prioritized experimentation: “Tasting, testing and trying are more valuable than studying,” he once remarked.108 His pedagogy was not based upon the emulation of ideal examples (which he felt led to imitation); indeed, Albers offered little instruction per se in his basic design, drawing, and color courses. Rather, he created circumstances in which students developed mental flexibility and, as importantly, formed a “productive intention” or “will” disposed toward activity and creation.109 The design curriculum included two general categories of exercises: material exercises, in which students investigated the mechanical potential inherent to singular materials (or combinations of materials), and matière, in which students combined two or more materials so as to explore their surface qualities—­what Albers referred to as their “look” and “feeling.”110

Fig. 1.14. Josef Albers teaching Werklehre (basic design) at the Bauhaus, ca. 1928. Photograph by Umbo (Otto Umbehr). Gelatin silver print, 12.6 × 17.1 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.28.6. © Phyllis Umbehr/Galerie Kicken Berlin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn.

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Fig. 1.15. Material studies (metal), Black Mountain College, ca. 1939–­1941. Photographic negatives by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foun-

Along with paper (discussed in chapter 2), metals were among the commonly employed materials in the classroom. Students initially crafted simple exercises in which they transformed tin sheets into three-­dimensional objects. A student might make two cuts at opposite ends of a sheet and twist it into a simple volume; or she might make several cuts and create an eccentric form (fig. 1.15). In doing so, she demonstrated the varied ways in which volume can be extracted from a plane, and also showed how one could employ the natural tendency of tin to curve when cut—­the material’s “constructive possibility”—­in design.111 In more advanced exercises, students might exploit the reflective quality of tin to create the appearance of volume. Or, as did one student, they might arrange a mass of drawn metal wire in its coiled, factory-­delivered form upon a reflective plane of metal

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dation, 1976.19.2475, 1976.19.2445. Both © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

to emphasize how a material known to have significant tensile strength could be made to look flimsy (fig. 1.16). Similar kinds of effects were used in studies in which students combined different materials. In one example, a student juxtaposed the reflective surfaces of bent tin and a pliable strip of pigmented cellophane in such a way that their material independence was diminished (fig. 1.17); in another, a student stretched what might have been rayon stockings over a freestanding wire frame to create the appearance of a plane of bent metal; hence two materials were combined such that the properties of a third were simulated (fig. 1.18). Metal also was used in simple and elaborate construction studies. While one student propped two metal rings of different sizes against one another to create a construction held together by their relative weights (fig. 1.19), another made a complex sculptural object combining wire with disparate elements cut and bent from a sheet of tin (fig. 1.20). The material understanding derived from working with metal had a direct application for students who entered the Bauhaus metal workshop; however, most of the materials with which students worked in the design course—­including Plasticine, sand, shellac records, film stock, glass plates, matchsticks, and razor blades—­had no immediate application at the Bauhaus, and workshop-­based educational structures were not employed at Black Mountain College and Yale University. Rather, Albers asked students to manipulate materials so as to reveal the extent of their visual perspicuity and, as importantly, to challenge themselves to think counterintuitively and thus creatively. From Object to Process / 1

Fig. 1.16. (facing, top) Material study (coiled wire), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 8.2 × 11.5 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.286. Fig. 1.17. (facing, bottom) Gertrud Ursula Schneider, material study (combination study: tin and red cellophane), ca. 1927. Photograph by Edmund Collein. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 16.6 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.37a. © Ursula Kirsten-­Collein. Fig. 1.18. (above) Material studies (combination studies: wire and fabric), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11.7 × 16.5 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.284.

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Fig. 1.19. Equilibrium study (metal), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11.6 × 8.6 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.135. Fig. 1.20. Walter Tralau, equilibrium study (metal), 1927. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 6 × 9 cm. Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin.

Albers associated drawing instruction with the development of visual discipline and, in keeping with Rousseau’s formulation, considered drawing itself to be “the graphic craft of delineation” (fig. 1.21). All of the exercises he assigned in his drawing course were meant to hone the dialectics of perception and articulation: “to develop observing eyes, understanding minds, and controlled hands.” That the visualization of form anticipates its delineation—­that we see before we draw—­was a central course concept. To emphasize this, Albers first had students draw simple shapes in the air upon an “imaginary frontal plane” (fig. 1.22). This might be followed by an exercise in which he asked students to write their names forward—­ which they could do habitually—­and then to write them backward, which they did with surprising difficulty. He might ask students to draw a bottle without lifting the tips of their sharpened hard pencils from the paper; or to arrange unmodulated straight and curved lines and then—­more challenging—­to dispose a curved line that was the same length as a corresponding straight line (fig. 1.23); or to articulate spatial distortions by drawing the foreshortened curves that comprise an obliquely projected Bodoni-­t ype lowercase “e” within neighboring parallelograms. Students would cover entire sheets of paper with ellipses, repeating and reversing the form horizontally, vertically, and obliquely, ultimately allowing their motor senses to lead the activity.112 Writing one’s name backward, drawing a bottle slowly with one line, and drawing ellipses require directed mark-­ making. The exercises thus emphasized how one must envision a form 1 / From Object to Process

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Fig. 1.21. Josef Albers teaching drawing at Black Mountain College, 1944. Photograph by Josef Breitenbach. Gelatin silver print, 6.5 × 5.7 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.28.930. © Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.

Fig. 1.22. Students drawing in air, University of Bridgeport, 1966. Photograph by Wolf Seeberg. Gelatin silver print, 16.2 × 23.5 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers Papers, OS box 18.

before articulating it—­how the eye needs time to recognize proportion and placement. It also highlighted the degree to which vision and drawing are bodily activities.113 In essence, Albers’s goal was to allow the mark-­ making—­and vision—­associated with observational drawing to become as habitual as writing one’s name. Although the exercises Albers assigned did not proceed according to a fixed sequence, one can infer how connections between visualization and the act of articulation were reinscribed from exercise to exercise. Drawing ellipses led to drawing flowerpots, saucers, and collars; the difficult task of drawing transparent lightbulbs might follow (fig. 1.24). Studies of unmodulated lines (employing different line spacing) led to those of modulated From Object to Process / 1

Fig. 1.23. Study in disposing, ca. 1950–­1958. Fig. 13 in Josef Albers, Search versus Re-­Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 51. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Watkinson Library at Trinity College. © The Trustees of Trinity College.

Fig. 1.24. Studies by Bertrand Goldberg: ellipses, ca. 1932–­ 1933; collars, 1933; lightbulbs, 1933. Graphite on cream wove paper, each approx. 45 × 58 cm. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums/ Busch-­Reisinger Museum, BR49.103, BR49.91, BR49.89. Gifts of the artist.

Fig. 1.25. Marshall,

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­“Engineer’s Scale: Study of Modulated Lines,” Yale University, ca. 1950–­1960. Pencil on newsprint, 45.4 × 30.2 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.26.771.

Fig. 1.26. Ernst Louis Beck, matière drawing (wire netting), 1931. Graphite on paper, 42 × 53.5 cm. Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin.

lines, for which students used soft lead pencils and varied the pressure applied in marking the paper’s surface so as to vary relationships between figure and ground (fig. 1.25). Soft lead pencils and pen were used to render the shape of soft objects—­like coats and other draped forms—­which students drew to discern the difference between contour and transition lines (see fig. 0.6). Shading was forbidden in these exercises; rather, students learned how few marks were required to render volume in graphic form. Students also made drawings of various surfaces, like that of wire netting (fig. 1.26). Although some of these so-­called matière drawings were quite intricate, the goal was not to copy the appearance of an object’s surface in exacting detail, but rather to render its typical appearance or visual essence; students were charged “to find out by which means or tool (e.g. hard or soft pencil) and by which manual performance (e.g. staccato or legato) we will be able to produce an unmistakable graphic articulation.”114 From Object to Process / 1

Fig. 1.27. Bertrand Goldberg, study in facture, 1932. Collage on cream wove paper, 58.5 × 45.1 cm. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­Reisinger Museum, BR49.133. Gift of the artist. Fig. 1.28. Matière scale (glass, tin, newsprint, pins, dirt, peppercorn pikes), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 9 × 11.7 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.287.

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Fig. 1.29. Matière (wallpaper, twine, rubber mat, fabric), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­ 1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11.8 × 9.2 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.155.

In making matière drawings of wood, charcoal, fur, and newsprint (which was an aspect of Albers’s design curriculum at the Bauhaus before the establishment of a separate drawing course), students investigated and described the organic structure, human-­made facture, and texture (a quality exhibited by materials that retain their structure when manipulated, like knit fabrics) of different materials.115 To further their understanding of the visual effects of these and other materials, students arranged fragments of images cut from print publications in matière scales, stepwise progressions between visual polarities like tight-­loose, hard-­soft, or heavy-­light (fig. 1.27). They also employed three-­dimensional materials toward this end in studies that emphasized material extremes. In one study, a student articulated a range of surface qualities between smooth and rough; the surface of a glass plate registers as having the smoothest appearance, followed (moving counterclockwise) by a slightly tarnished piece of tin, a newspaper clipping, a patch of dirt, and a collection of peppercorn spikes, which register as having the roughest appearance (fig. 1.28). Among Albers’s goals was for students to appreciate “vivid expressions” (anschauliche ausdrücke), like the distinction between a rose and a thistle (rose-­distel).116 Rather than compare an actual rose and thistle, one student selected a piece of wallpaper that included an image of a rose and positioned a bundled mass of spikey rubber matting upon it, tied together with a piece of twine (fig. 1.29). The image of a rose captures the flower’s delicate, loosely massed soft petals as they unfurl. And the jumble of rubber spikes conveys—­but does From Object to Process / 1

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Fig. 1.30. Student exercise for Josef Albers’s preliminary course, 1928–­1929 (matière: brick, mushroom, nail, ribbon). Photograph by Howard Dearstyne. Gelatin silver print, 8.3 × 11.2 cm. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­Reisinger Museum, BR50.38. Gift of Howard Dearstyne. © Estate of Howard Dearstyne.

not replicate precisely—­a thistle’s rough surface and spiked foliage. The student thus applied her developing knowledge of material properties creatively to demonstrate a course principle. Albers’s prompts to students were deceptively simple: “make two materials appear as one,” he might suggest. To which one student responded by juxtaposing the porous appearance of cut pieces of bread with the surfaces of similarly sized rough stones in such a way that the respective weights of the materials appeared similar. In a more involved study, a student placed a mushroom on its side upon a brick; a nail pierces the fungus and presumably serves to help hold it and a thin ribbon draped over the long side of the brick in position (fig. 1.30). In this matière, the structure of a mushroom (its seemingly abraded yet entirely organic surface) is juxtaposed with the roughened surface of a brick. Again, one’s presumptive knowledge of the respective weights of a naturally formed and a manmade object is challenged, a point furthered by the juxtaposition of flexible ribbon and rigid steel nail, which also represent extremes of material (and linear) ­fluidity and rigidity. In other studies, students combined materials that exhibited haptic similarities to show how dissimilar materials could be used to reinforce visual effects. One student drew attention to the facture of a sheet of newsprint by adding other materials to its surface, including the tacks used to pin works for critique upon a bank of wooden cabinets at the Bauhaus in Dessau (fig. 1.31). These tacks—­the mechanical perforations of which resemble the rhythm of the printed page’s figure-­ground relationship—­ were arranged in a grid (at upper right) and in vertical sequences elsewhere in the composition, thus mirroring the organization of the newsprint’s printed columns. Yet elsewhere tacks are positioned at random, indicating the possibility of variation within the typographic grid. White muslin 1 / From Object to Process

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Fig. 1.31. Matière (newsprint, lace, muslin, string, metal tacks), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer

placed upon the surface of the newsprint reiterates the varied tonalities of the printed page and deemphasizes its narrative function. The fabric’s white edge forms a horizontal line that contrasts with the corresponding black edge of a piece of mass-­produced lace positioned slightly off center and parallel to the newsprint’s columns. Elements have been removed from this band of lace, giving it an irregular, degraded appearance that complements the irregular order of the printed page while also replicating its figure-­ground relationship. In positioning fragments of lace removed from the band elsewhere in the composition, the student draws attention to the artifice of the exercise and to its surface, as does a crumpled piece of muslin (at lower left), the seeming haphazard and spontaneous arrangeFrom Object to Process / 1

unknown. Gelatin silver print, 9 × 11.7 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.288.

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Fig. 1.32. Josef Albers teaching color at Black Mountain College, 1944. Photograph by Josef Breitenbach. Gelatin silver

ment of which contrasts to the order of the grid and draws one’s attention to the materiality of the newsprint itself. While there is an element of spontaneity—­even whimsy—­in many matière made in the context of the design course, these were, as one student recalled, exercises in “intellectual adaption” rather than “dramatic expression.”117 As Albers articulated, “By practicing such explorations we come to compare materials. We discover similarities and differences between paper, cardboard, corrugated paper, and clothes; or between foils and tins. We will find boundaries of physical capacities, but also possibilities for trespassing them by means of illusion.”118 Encouraging color to commit trespass was central to the color instruction, which consisted entirely of material exercises through which students studied what Albers considered to be the most mutable material at their disposal. Indeed, students were discouraged from using color in matière made for the design course: “Matière and color,” he wrote, “although both surface characteristics normally compete and thus rarely further each other.”119 The inductive method students employed when comparing and contrasting pieces of metal, glass, fabric, cellophane, and other materials in finding solutions to problems posed in matière exercises is expressed straightforwardly in Albers’s color instruction (fig. 1.32). The method of instruction was almost entirely comparative. Rather than mixing pigments (a difficult task for novice students that often resulted in inconsistent color

print, 20.6 × 25.4. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.28.590. © Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.

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Fig. 1.33. Josef Albers, “Color study (2 colors appear as 1 color),” ca. 1963. Plate VII-­4b in Inter­action of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © Yale University Press.

matching), Albers had students work with colored paper. They would j­ uxtapose scraps clipped from magazines, paper bags, painted pieces of paper, and (upon its introduction in 1948) pieces of Color-­aid paper, packages of which offered students hundreds of examples with which to work. Students could rapidly and efficiently place colors in different relationships and observe the perceptual effects of doing so. Additional pedagogical benefit occurred, as Albers observed, when unexpected color relationships presented themselves accidently in the arrays of colored paper spread across students’ worktables. The course typically began with preliminary exercises meant to highlight the relativity of color perception. Students might be asked to select, from an array of reds with different values, hues, and intensities, the one “red” that matched that used in Coca Cola advertisements; they would find that they disagreed about which “red” was accurate, thus underscoring the subjectivity of color perception. Students then would complete exercises that involved juxtaposing hundreds of pieces of paper to demonstrate their control of the material’s mutability. They would be asked to combine planes of colored paper so as to make one color appear as two different colors or two different colors to appear as one color, depending on the ground colors upon which they were placed (fig. 1.33). In more advanced exercises, they combined pieces of paper to create the illusion of transparency and what Albers’s referred to as “film color.” In the latter, students used opaque paper to create the illusion that a piece of acetate had been laid over the From Object to Process / 1

Fig. 1.34. Color study (film color, addition and subtraction), Black Mountain College, ca. 1945–­1948. Photographic color positive by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.35.279. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 1.35. Color study (vibrating boundaries), Black Mountain College, ca. 1945–­1948. Photographic color positive by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.35.62. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

surface of an exercise. Some students combined this illusion with other exercises, like those in which they demonstrated additive and subtractive color or spatial illusion (fig. 1.34). Students were also challenged to ­create specialized optical effects, like the seemingly vibrating boundaries between planes of contrasting hues but similar brightness (fig. 1.35). So-­called free studies were assigned throughout the semester. These abstract compositions were completed outside class and in response to an open-­ended prompt like “work with colors you dislike”; alternatively, one student might select three or four colors as parameters within which her classmates should work when executing a study.120 Prompts like these were meant to challenge students to work outside of the color palettes with which they were comfortable. Free studies often were made with leaves, which, while commonly associated with Albers’s color instruction, had also been incorporated in exercises at the Bauhaus—­like Alfredo Bortoluzzi’s clever use of an oak leaf in a study in which a floral wallpaper pattern was rearranged to produce a spatial effect (fig. 1.36). Regardless of what materials made up an exercise’s surface, it would be evaluated only in terms of how well it brought color interaction to the fore. In one example

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Fig. 1.36. Alfredo Borto­luzzi, transformation studies (wallpaper, leaf, fabric, drawn lines, wash), ca. 1927. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11.1 × 15.1 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.69. © Fondo Alfredo Bortoluzzi/Fondazione Banca del Monte, Foggia.

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Fig. 1.37. Color study (free study with leaves), Yale University, ca. 1950–­1960. Photographic color positive by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.35.433. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(fig. 1.37), a student brought green, gold, and brown into harmony in a free study made of printed elements, cut and whole leaves, and gold leaf: masses of layered graphic elements mimic the modeled surface of leaves; the verso of a leaf (at upper right) and a corresponding bronze color along the lower right edge balance one another; and a sliver of green grass (at upper right) helps bring forth the green ground beneath the partially gilded leaf (at left). All of this—­as in Albers’s exercises generally—­to develop a material consciousness predicated upon an understanding that art making is a dynamic process. Albers’s pedagogy emphasized experimentation, the activity of making, and the contingency of artistic material—­and, by extension, one might suggest, the contingency of the artwork itself as something that is made and experienced. In this sense, his pedagogy anticipated the move “from object to process” in advanced art initially articulated in late 1960s and with 1 / From Object to Process

which some of his most notable students, like Eva Hesse, are associated.121 Understanding Albers’s pedagogy in relation to the German tradition in which he was schooled, as well as the ideas of those who sought to reform that tradition, allows us to recognize how it informed the work of his students at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University. The objects made in Albers’s courses were catalysts for creativity; they aided students in developing a creative consciousness that stressed material mutability. Yet, ironically, the visual record through which Albers’s pedagogy is known to us consists largely of still images—­photographs of objects that often no longer exist.122 It is incumbent upon us to imagine students folding, unfolding, and refolding pieces of paper; manipulating sheets of tin; and juxtaposing the visual qualities of fabrics and mushrooms and fur and bread and bricks so as to understand the properties of the material at their disposal while simultaneously grappling with how to engage these properties not only most productively, but also most inventively.

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In light of Josef Albers’s desire to employ the most legible means possible to image visual instability in his linear constructions and his Homage to the Square series of prints and paintings, photography would seem to have been an ideal medium. Indeed, Albers, who acquired a 35mm Leica camera in 1928, took thousands of photographs throughout his life.1 At the Bauhaus, he made portrait collages for friends (fig. B.1) as well as a series of surrealistic images of shop mannequins and other objects; however, the subject matter of most of his photographs is objects and individuals encountered while traveling, particularly in Germany and Central and South America.2 Many of these images were not printed, and those that Albers did print (or, more often, had printed commercially) were not displayed during his lifetime.3 Thus Albers’s photographs were almost exclusively for his eyes only. His unwillingness to exhibit his photographs, as well as his systematic approach to these images, reveals his attitude toward the seemingly objective medium and what he perceived to be its artistic limitations. Albers’s understanding of the medium as such was formed—­well before he began making his own photographs—­through his experience as a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer) in Wilhelmine Germany and corresponds with Heinrich Wölfflin’s attitude about the educational employment of the medium. The utility of photography had been a significant topic among German educators in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as was mechanical objectivity more generally in the scientific community.4 Instructional technologies used previously were thought to be outdated, particularly those visual aids (Anschauungsmittel) meant to form basic understanding via firmly and concretely rendered figures. In 1875 one author declared in the pages of the Allgemeine Schulzeitung, “What our students lack is the image.”5 Pictures, they observed, were more potent than even the most vivacious of teacher’s lessons, during which children presumably imagined corresponding images: “A truthful image can correct a hundred false and

Fig. B.1. Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer; ­[Schlemmer] in the Master’s Council; [Schlemmer] with Wittwer, Kallai, and Marianne Brandt, Preliminary Course Exhibition; [Schlemmer] and Tut, 1928–­1930/1932. Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard, 29.5 × 41.6 cm. The ­Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Jon L. Stryker. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

nebulous ideas.”6 The honesty of the photograph, cast as able to register detail more precisely than other reproductive media, was thought to be an essential educational tool in this regard. It also was a medium with which many children already were familiar. But rather than a form “in service of vanity and curiosity,” it could be fashioned—­disciplined, even—­to suit the “seriousness” of the school.7 If used according to a methodology, properly composed photographs proved no threat in the modern classroom; to the contrary, they could be employed effectively in religious instruction as well as in teaching classics, German literature, geography, and mathematics.8 By the time Albers assumed his first teaching position, in 1908, debate about the use of photographs in the pages of education journals and newspapers had been supplanted by conversations about the educational potential of the Kinematograph.9 If arranged and framed according to established pedagogic principles, moving images could also be an important new way for children to properly visualize other cultures, the natural sciences, and industrial production. Far from a threat to children, as some considered film to be, it could be a potent means for grasping reality.10 Like photographic images, however, films would need be clear in their educational objectives, and factual. That there was a correct way of organizing still and moving instructional images implies that there also was a correct way of seeing these images. To a trained educator, the intentionality and clarity of their composition was key; thus, it was a given for Albers that photographic and moving images could be instructive and purposeful—­ insofar as they were designed to confirm a principle or an idea experienced in reality. Albers approached the medium in this manner, as had Wölfflin. Wölfflin held firm views about how photography ought to be employed in the service of art history, which corresponded to how the medium was to be employed educationally in general.11 It was essential that the photographer’s eye be trained to recognize and thus photomechanically reproduce the correct view of a work of art—­particularly sculpture—­as the resulting images, in turn, were meant to train those who viewed them to see clearly.12 An educated eye must produce images intended to educate the eyes of others. Ultimately, for Wölfflin, the medium of photography was unreliable; in addition to the problem of the photographer’s untrained eye, the graininess and lack of clarity of the images hindered proper seeing.13 The images were, in a sense, illegible. Worse yet, viewing unclear photographs that caused the eye to move restlessly across their surfaces reinscribed the lack of focus associated with modern vision.14 This was particularly so in images of work associated with the Baroque, which, even though themselves reliant upon the mobility of the viewer’s eye (and body), still possessed an ideal view. As an antidote to the visual confusion that unclear and poorly framed photographs presented, Wölfflin suggested that one visit collections of plaster casts, where one could “see things as they should appear.”15

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Fig. B.2. (facing) Josef ­Albers, Interior of the Abteikirche Neresheim, Baden-­ Württemberg, n.d. Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard, each 30.5 × 45.7 cm. (a) Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop; (b) Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.7.1081. Both © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Albers, who recalled rubbing his fingers over the surfaces of well-­ reproduced photographs of charcoal drawings while studying at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin (Royal Art School, Berlin), used his own camera to observe and analyze visual phenomena.16 He was captivated by the visual instability of the Baroque in particular, photographing the exuberant interior of the Wieskirche in Steingaden, Germany, the intricately carved façade of the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús in Arequipa, Peru, and the façade of the Catedral de Oaxaca in Mexico. In many instances, he then arranged and pasted small photographs of the buildings (some cut from contact prints, and sometimes supplemented by postcards) onto sheets of cardboard. Whereas the individual image recorded an observation, the assemblage of like images in an array was an invitation for analysis—­to find the ideal view. For example, Albers appears to have been fascinated by the elaborate cornice in the Abteikirche Neresheim—­drawn to the visual rhythm of its broken bands, which fold themselves around the perimeter of the church, projecting into space, seeming to stretch and exaggerate themselves to follow the shapes of the volutes and acanthus leaves of the capitals below. He reinforced these dynamics by juxtaposing photographs of the cornice with one another, the shifting planes of which characterize the pliability and multiplicity of the Baroque and—­like the apparently unresolvable combination of lines that constitute his linear constructions—­are in keeping with Albers’s visual sensibility (fig. B.2).17 The array of photographs underscored an observed reality of particular interest to the artist and aided in clarifying a fundamental principle of his art and pedagogy: that vision was in continuous flux. For Albers, this is how photography could be in service of proper seeing. Although students didn’t use cameras in Albers’s classroom per se, objects made in the context of his design instruction became the subjects of photographs that reinforced his pedagogic principles. Lotte Gerson activated a paper tower to produce immaterial form as sunlight streams through its negative space while simultaneously casting its positive space in shadow (fig. B.3). The photograph reinterprets aspects of the tower’s pedagogical effectiveness (its balance of positive and negative space) in reverse projection. At the same time, the image illustrates another of Albers’s key principles: that every visual thing has form—­even light—­and that the appearance of form is conditional—­in this case, upon the intensity and angle of sunlight that streams through Gerson’s tower, the position of the photographer, and the optics of the camera’s lens. Thus, when observed as an object in relation to environmental phenomena and as the subject of a photograph, the paper tower assumes pedagogical significance beyond its existence as an apposite material study in which paper was shown to demonstrate rigidity. Students also experimented with light-­sensitive paper as part of their course of study.18 They made photograms, for instance, placing threedimensional objects of different densities and degrees of transparency b / P h o t o g r ap h y

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Fig. B.3. Lotte Gerson, material study (paper, static-­dynamic contrast), ca. 1928. Gelatin silver print, 10.2 × 7.5 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 85.XP.384.76. © Ursula Kirsten-­Collein.

—­like glass, nails, and hexagonal hardware cloth—­upon photosensitive sensitive paper, exposing it to light, and developing the resulting twodimensional image (fig. B.4). In doing so, students demonstrated how embodied perception is different from photographic perception. This was key to Albers’s understanding of photography, which he articulated in his only extensive statement on the medium.19 Those who made—­as well as those who viewed—­photographs should do so with eyes trained to discern distinctions between these kinds of vision, the former of which was also influenced by individual psychology and spatial knowledge: “A swimmer looks at water in another way than a fisherman or a painter,” Albers declared. Two-­dimensional photographic vision was a mechanical

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Fig. B.4. Charlotte Voepel-­Neujahr, exposure study (nails, pencil, eyelets, gauze, wire netting, prisms), ca. 1928. Cyanotype, 29.4 × 29.1 cm. Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin.

­distortion of what one sees with one’s eyes. Hence, for Albers, the selection of what to photograph—­and how to photograph it—­was paramount. In an attempt to convey the possible artfulness of the medium, he stated, “The absence of facture and draftsmanship as marks of the individual hand [in photography] seem to be a loss. But it is a gain as it enables us to grasp the vision of the photographer in the most direct and immediate way.”20 The “intensity” of the photographer’s vision was as revealing as the marks made by a painter on a canvas. Photography, which, in theory, could produce a detailed and objective image of the world, was—­as an artistic medium—­burdened by personal expression.21 This helps explain Albers’s anxiety about displaying his photographs; unlike the grid used in composing his linear constructions, the camera did not satisfy his desire to remove personal marks from his images. This also presents an invitation to view the negatives, slides, and photographs that constitute his unique and enormous image bank accordingly; more than any other medium in which he worked, these images reveal the intensity and consistency of Albers’s own vision. One finds, for instance, that the principles of his paper-­folding exercises appear to have been always in his mind’s eye. In 1953, while teaching at the newly opened Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Albers visited the recently rebuilt Moritzkirche in Augsburg. But rather than document the church’s reassembled architecture, he focused upon the design of its parishioners’ folded linen veils (fig. B.5). While aboard ship from Le Havre to New York in 1955 after a second teaching appointment in Ulm, he again directed his exacting observational eye to the folded linen veils of a group of nuns (fig. B.6). Although he is not known to have classified the images he amassed according to linguistic categories, as Aby Warburg famously did, it is difficult

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Fig. B.5. Church interior with nuns, Moritzkirche, Augsburg, Germany, ca. 1953–­1954. Photographic negative by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.7791. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. B.6. Nuns aboard the S.S. Liberté, 1955. Photographic negative by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.13622. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

not to make one’s own iconological associations when surveying Albers’s image collection.22 Ancient patterns are activated anew as the jaguar-­face of a cuauhxicalli photographed in Mexico City in 1939 reappears in the monstrous teeth of a 1950 Buick Eight’s chrome grille, photographed in 1953. For Warburg, these kindred images would reveal how cultural practices manifest themselves across time: the fearsome fangs of the nagual Tezcatlipoca (the god of warriors) that dignify and empower a Postclassic Mesoamerican sacrificial vessel and the aggressive, powerful face of an automobile in post–­World War II America are authoritative symbols separated by centuries and cultures (fig. B.7). Correspondences like this offer remarkable insight into what forms drew Albers’s attention.

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Fig. B.7. (a) Ocelocuauh­ xicalli, Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, México City, México, 1939. (b) Buick Eight, 1953. Photographic negatives by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.6520, 1976.19.4300. Both © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. B.8. Josef Albers, Trees, Hawaii, 1954. Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard, 30.5 × 20.6 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the summer of 1954, Albers taught Basic Design and Advanced Painting at the University of Hawaii, where Jean Charlot recalled he also spent time seated by the sea making small sketches with pencil and ruler for linear constructions in a notebook.23 Albers—­who rarely sketched from life—­returned to Yale University with these sketches as well as a rich assortment of photographs of student work, island flora, volcanic rock, and other images taken enroute (fig. B.8). During his sea voyage between Hawaii and California, he observed, on at least a dozen occasions, coils of knotted rope suspended in various combinations from a line running along the ship’s deck (fig. B.9). He later pasted contact prints of these photos—­for analysis—­on cardboard, along with images of the Grand Canyon taken during his overland journey between California and Connecticut (fig. B.10). The array indicates that Albers was fascinated with the visual dynamics of mass and space—­with the ability of rope to assume and hold a form. This had occupied the interest of at least one of his students, as seen in a rare image of a material study in rope. The tension twisted into a rope itself is employed to create a freestanding form that defines and is defined by its spatial circumstance (fig. B.11). Albers also captured the tautness of the coiled and knotted rope that hung freely and presumably moved to and Fig. B.9. Ropes, 1954. Photographic negative by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.2113. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. B.10. Josef Albers, The Grand Canyon and coils of rope, 1954. Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard, 30.8 × 20.5 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.7.407. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. B.11. Material study (rope), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­ 1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print. 7.9 × 5.6 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.170. Fig. B.12. (overleaf ) Latex-­coated string and rope for No title (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) in Eva Hesse’s Bowery studio, 1969. Photograph by Henry Groskinsky. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

fro as the ship sailed. In viewing these images, one intuits that these coils of rope are heavy insofar as they weigh down the line from which they are suspended. Yet, at the same time, one can see through these coils, which affords a contradictory appearance of lightness. Again, Warburg is useful to consider. Georges Didi-­Huberman describes the overlooked “theoretical daring” of Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas, suggesting that it functions as a mechanism for an imaginative search for meaning through montage.24 In this spirit, it is perfectly reasonable to associate the forms in Albers’s photographs of coiled rope with the latex-­infused rope of Eva Hesse’s No title (1969–­1970; fig. B.12). As Albers prioritized in his pedagogy, Hesse focused upon material dialectics in No title, which is weighed down by gravity yet seemingly resistant to its pull. Interestingly, Hesse was wary of having her work photographed. When Gretchen Lambert visited her studio for dinner in 1966, Hesse articulated her fear in a diary entry: “It scares me to have my work photographed. I found it impossible to either dust, arrange plan on wall, even paint wall for photographing. Like the work is there, the ideas, the love the pain, the concrete manifestations I cannot touch them now.”25 Whereas photography was a private observational tool for Albers, for Hesse, it represented letting go of the intimate, private feeling that went into crafting a work.26

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O n Eva H e s s e a nd A l ber s

In the decades following the death of Eva Hesse in 1970, at age thirty-­four, critics and historians have tended to position the artist’s oeuvre relative to—­masculine—­modernist art making and art criticism in texts often informed by feminist and psychoanalytic discourse as well as the circumstance of the artist’s biography.1 The unusual materials and forms Hesse employed in her practice have assumed a prominent role in such writing (fig. 2.1). In her pioneering text on the artist, Lucy R. Lippard noted that, unlike the aesthetic of her male contemporaries, the “distorted geometry, layers, veils, and hidden forms” in Hesse’s work “encourage[ed] a sensuous response” that was “personal”—­a perspective on Hesse’s work that Griselda Pollock later observed was inherently feminist.2 Hesse’s work in three dimensions has been characterized as an intervention in the tradition of modernist painting: the transgressive material support of her work—­like rubber and fiberglass—­reassociated the material of sculpture with the “problematics” of working in two dimensions and sublimated the frontal address of “modernist opticality” and the flatness of the picture plane as “precondition of form.”3 Some of her work has been described as “needlework gone berserk,” and Hesse has been positioned as having “made her art out of her illness, which substantially defined her identity as a woman and (to a lesser degree) as a Jew, as one of the disempowered and despised.”4 That meaning has been fashioned from the materiality of Hesse’s work extends logically from how the artist’s practice was cast in her lifetime. In the late 1960s, her work was shown in exhibitions organized according to material-­specific parameters, including some that highlighted new approaches to the material and processes of art making.5 Critics of all stripes took note accordingly. Writing about the exhibition Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers (Fischbach Gallery, 1969), Hilton Kramer remarked upon the variety of materials with which Hesse worked, like fiberglass, rubber, and twine.6

Fig. 2.1. Eva Hesse’s hands manipulating latex-­coated string and rope, 1969. Photograph by Henry Groskinsky. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Writing about the same exhibition, Emily Wasserman also listed the range of materials, which inspired particularly descriptive prose: she noted the sculptures’ “creased and rippling viscous contours,” their “light-­catching lump[y] . . . surfaces,” “impishly deliberate” torn and crumpled edges, and general floppiness and irregularity.7 And in a review of Tony DeLap, Frank Gallo, Eva Hesse: Trio (Owens-­Corning Fiberglas Center, 1970), an industry-­ sponsored exhibition of artists who worked with reinforced plastics, Cindy Nemser declared, “Concentrating on surface . . . Hesse’s improbable images attract and repel at the same time. . . . Miss Hesse allows the materials to take form out of their own potential as well as out of the raw materials of her own psyche. Like fearful monsters out of an abyss, they seem to rise whole and gleaming as entities in their own right.”8 Josef Albers, with whom Hesse studied at Yale University between 1957 and 1959, and who was widely known—­then, as now—­for a curriculum that emphasized material investigation, received relatively little attention in the discourse on the artist during her lifetime or subsequently. Albers has most often served as a foil, representative of a tradition against which she was working.9 Yet a reader attuned to Albers’s teaching can’t help but notice how the language used to describe Hesse’s work often aligns

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with key aspects of Albers’s instructional methods. In his design and color instruction, Albers stressed experimentation that would result in transforming a student’s understanding of a material’s properties. This often was achieved by juxtaposing materials in seemingly inharmonious ways or by reshaping a single material, like a sheet of paper, so as to make it behave in an unexpected manner. Wasserman observed Hesse’s contradictory use of materials: “In careful but surprising ways, she molds incongruous materials, often making their formal properties almost contradictions themselves.”10 John Perreault remarked that “[Hesse] used fiber glass, latex, string, rope, and other materials in a personal, quirky way, almost as if they were not what they were.”11 And, moving beyond literal material properties, Douglas Crimp noted the presence of binary oppositions (a mainstay of Albers’s instruction) throughout Hesse’s oeuvre: “serial/random, soft/hard, sculptural/pictorial, fixed/changeable, free/confined.”12 Indeed, while not articulated explicitly in discourse about the artist, Hesse’s experimentation with various kinds of materials is indebted to Albers and her Yale education, the latter of which she expressly disliked.13 In contrast to the tendency to discuss Hesse’s work—­and materiality —­as being the product of her psyche, as sensuous, and as the result of emotional rather than intellectual labor, in this chapter I demonstrate the extent to which Hesse approached her practice methodically and in a manner in keeping with Albers’s example and ambition. Albers’s art is not of significance per se; rather, the principles mediated through the pedagogic forms he employed and the instructional ethos he fostered are imperative to revealing a haptic history of Hesse’s work, one in which the artist drew upon—­rather than resisted—­her experience of Albers’s curriculum. In keeping with my larger argument that Albers’s pedagogy was significantly informed by aesthetic, educational, and scientific thought known to him through his training to become a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer) and a drawing instructor (Zeichenlehrer), in the second half of this chapter I situate Albers’s paper-­folding exercises historically, within a long-­standing material tradition. In doing so, I traverse the history of fashion, domesticity, and early childhood education and move from the superfluous folds of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century ruffs to exercises from Albers’s design instruction in order to reveal the richness and sophistication of paper folding as an educational form. The decision to focus upon paper folding specifically (and this rhetorical move more generally) may appear to be a whimsical digression, but, with the help of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the pliancy of the Baroque fold, I ultimately assert that Albers exploited the suppleness of folding in his instruction, both literally and as a metaphor for material inquiry in general. And that it was this kind of flexible, adaptive mode of material inquiry that Hesse inherited from Albers (fig. 2.2).

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Fig. 2.2. Josef Albers with

Lightweight and Weighted Down

a folded-­paper study, 1968. Photograph by Henri Cartier-­Bresson. Gelatin silver print, 18.3 × 24.3 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.28.199. © Fondation Henri Cartier-­ Bresson/Magnum Photos.

In 1952 Eva Hesse graduated from the High School of Industrial Art in Manhattan, at which she had studied window display.14 She then matriculated at the Pratt Institute and completed the requisite year-­long foundations curriculum—­which was similar in principle to the Bauhaus preliminary course, although the pedagogic program was not replicated—­before entering the program in advertising design in the second year of study. The foundations curriculum consisted of courses in “figure structure,” “nature structure,” “product structure,” creative design (two-­dimensional), creative design (three-­dimensional), color, communication, art history, and physical education.15 Dissatisfied with Pratt, Hesse withdrew in December 1953 and soon after began working at Seventeen magazine, while also attending untutored drawing sessions at the Art Students League. In fall 1954, she enrolled in a three-­year certificate program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, from which she graduated in spring 1957. At Cooper Union, her coursework included instruction in architecture, drawing, lettering, graphic techniques, two-­dimensional design, photography, sculpture, and aesthetics, as well as a course in painting technique and several painting courses.16 She then attended Yale University’s Norfolk Summer School and, in fall 1957, enrolled as a third-­year painting student in the bachelor of fine arts program at the Yale School of 2 / Fold/Manifold

Architecture and Design.17 As an advanced painting student, she would have devoted much of her time to independent work.18 Hesse graduated from Yale in spring 1959. Although she had taken at least one course at Cooper Union based on Albers’s color instruction, it was at Yale that Hesse first encountered his curriculum in its totality. At its core, the curriculum encouraged a dialectical understanding of one’s creative material, which, through its manipulation, could be a means for enacting a psychic effect; more broadly, it established mechanisms for determining the relative merits of a student’s work as the product of intense discipline and self-­criticism. Hesse, in turn, activated these internalized learning behaviors so as to meet evolving creative challenges and demands throughout her career.19 In order to see the extent to which this was the case, however, one must untangle Hesse’s fraught relationship to Albers and explore the latter’s pedagogy in light of Hesse’s education, her understanding of her work and its materiality, and her own experience as an educator. As is clear in reading Hesse’s unrelentingly introspective and selfanalytical diaries, she was resistant to authority and criticism generally. In response to an uncomfortable circumstance at her workplace in 1960 she noted, “My hostility comes out when someone faces me with things (even for my personal welfare) that I feel incapable of handling.”20 Similar feelings manifested themselves in her relationships with instructors, who presumably had her best welfare in view. About a photography instructor at Cooper Union she wrote, “had trouble with photography instructor I always feel I want to fight or attack him. I think he reminds me of daddy. He can’t converse; he must instill his authority. He reacts in just the form he claims he is against . . . a terror.”21 She later remarked about the course: My morning class was incredibly dull with nothing accomplished nothing learned. We stand by like a bunch of idiots while the instructor nervously jumped around explaining, demonstrating, developing of a few crummy pictures. I hadn’t cared about the lone bottles in the window when I snapped the shutter nor when the darn thing was in the developer. Valuable time, which it should be spent over such idiotic fetishes of a neurotic instructor. It is not a course of learning or aesthetics so at least the technical knowledge of it could be put over. His encompassing of every nothing makes it impossible to concentrate so one doesn’t acquire the necessary few isolated facts. this brings us to the much needed break—­ lunch hour.22

About Yale, she told Cindy Nemser, “I did well there, but schools depend on both faculty and students, and the faculty was poor.”23 Regarding the trio of faculty painters—­Albers, Rico LeBrun, and Bernard Chaet—­she remarked, “If you didn’t follow their idea, it wasn’t an idea.”24 Yet Hesse held Albers in high regard despite this. Other than passing reference to Fold/Manifold / 2

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LeBrun and Chaet, Albers is the only teacher she speaks about in any detail with Nemser. She continued to list Albers—­along with Lippard and Mel Bochner—­as a reference well into the 1960s.25 In her diaries, she recorded her responses to a lecture he had given as well as his criticism of her work and, several years after graduating from Yale, an instance in which Albers appeared in one of her dreams.26 Furthermore, Albers is the only faculty member Hesse mentions by name in letters written to her therapist while at Yale. In one letter, he is invoked immediately following commentary about her boyfriend: “This year . . . has taken a lot out of me, and I am like a frightened child. I feel very insecure and seek security and protection from Victor. I feel next year to be a challenge as I face the mighty king in person, Joseph [sic] Albers. On the other hand I feel I should not come back [to Yale] at all.”27 And before graduating, she gave Albers one of the color studies she made for his course, which he reproduced in his text Interaction of Color (1963) and as the back cover of the text’s revised pocket edition (1975). Although resistant to authority, Hesse was drawn to—­even craved—­discipline, which Albers had in spades and which he demanded of his students. She took to Albers’s color course and to Albers more generally because both provided clear and well-­conceived parameters within which to work.28 During Hesse’s tenure at Yale, Albers taught a two-­semester course called “structural organization” in the Department of Architecture; in the Department of Design (which included painting, sculpture, and graphic arts) he taught color and drawing courses as well as an advanced painting course described as “Advice and criticism as to individual projects of varying character and purpose.”29 The color and drawing courses facilitated a posture of exploratory material inquiry that emphasized the malleability and potentiality of one’s materials (color, line, etc.). Mastery of form and concept was essential; how form was employed to articulate an idea was the overall concern. In the classroom, Albers addressed form by obliging students to attend exclusively to formal aspects of color and line through disciplined studies. Concept he addressed through critique. Albers visited the studios of advanced students weekly and occasionally would stage small critiques of individual works that drew his attention.30 Much of Albers’s color course consisted of systematic exercises that students would complete throughout the semester. At the start of each session, projects typically begun in the previous session and completed at home would be selected for group review; students might then make corrections to their studies following group assessment or begin to explore a new color problem.31 In so-­called free studies students were allowed to work with colors imaginatively as homework assignments. “The measure for evaluation [in a free study],” Albers claimed, “is color relatedness. This means color juxtaposition in which color exists for color’s sake, and therefore appears autonomous, and not merely as an accompaniment to form, to shape.”32 Students might respond to general prompts, such as to create 2 / Fold/Manifold

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a study using a restrictive color palette or with colors one dislikes, or they might formulate a color problem of their own; their response could incorporate various kinds of paper or paperlike materials—­most notably leaves. Hesse saved several of the color studies she made at Yale, which reveal her facility with the dialectics of Albers’s exercises insofar as her juxtaposition of contradictory materials produces unexpected visual effects. One study shows how stripes of as many as twelve different hues of Color-­aid paper of mostly similar value and saturation could be combined in a manner that neutralizes the intensity of any individual color (fig. 2.3). She was so proud of another study that she mentioned it in her diary (fig. 2.4).33 In this deceptively simple study, Hesse positioned the stem of a pinnate sumac with symmetrical red leaves in the center of a composition at a slight curve. It is placed on a ground that consists of a red piece of paper, half of which is overlaid with a piece of black paper. The leaves are glued to the surface such that they appear to be subjected to the effect of gravity, increasingly weighted down as one looks from top to bottom, thus disrupting the plant’s natural symmetry. Red pigment of higher value applied to the surface—­which can be seen through the slightly degraded leaves, highlighting their edges—­creates subtle chromic intensification as well as forming a black stripe that runs down the middle of composition that draws attention to its asymmetry. The overall effect is one of subtle color modulation and visual rhythm achieved with only two colors. Fold/Manifold / 2

Fig. 2.3. Eva Hesse, No title, 1957 (color study). Color-­aid paper on cardboard, 24.1 × 15.6 cm. Collection of Hilary Pecis and Andrew Schoultz. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Fig. 2.4. Eva Hesse, No title, 1957 (color study: free study with leaves). Leaves, paper, and gouache on construction paper, 26.0 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

In lieu of a leaf, Hesse included a paper bag in another of her studies (fig. 2.5). As is common in her color studies, she combined colors of similar value. In this study, purple, orange, red, brown, and blue hues are positioned against one another, creating a sequence of color relationships as the eye moves from left to right across edges separating brown and red, red and blue, blue and brown, and so on. In another study, she arranged fragments of purple Color-­aid paper, denser black and brown papers, a leaf (much of which has eroded), and a distinctive brown and silver candy wrapper as a painterly collage in which color generates form (fig. 2.6). She lay soft, torn edges of black construction paper over the leaf to echo the leaf’s typically irregular edge; at the bottom of the composition she inverted the gesture, placing the leaf’s ragged edge over the roughly torn edge of the light brown paper. The central vein of the leaf moves diagonally across the composition and transitions seamlessly into the edge of one of the pieces of purple Color-­aid paper that outline the leaf’s tip, where a piece of candy wrapper has been inlaid with leaf matter. The candy ­wrapper,

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Fig. 2.5. Eva Hesse, No title, 1957 (color study). Color-­aid paper, construction paper, and paper bag on cardboard, 35.6 × 21.6 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1998.21.12. Gift of Helen Hesse Charash. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Fig. 2.6. Eva Hesse, No title, 1957 (color study: free study with leaves). Leaves, Color-­aid paper, construction paper, and candy wrapper on paper, 10.1 × 19.0 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

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which shows its outer, silver-­lettered face at middle right, is reversed at left, with edges folded in upon itself as it is enmeshed with leaf matter. Color has been instrumentalized throughout to generate form; indeed, Albers praised Hesse’s work for the course—­as she recalled, he always was curious about what she had done as homework assignments.34 Hesse turned to another paper bag in a drawing made in Chaet’s second-­ year drawing course, which was quite different in character than Albers’s introductory drawing course.35 Albers established rigid material restrictions in his course so as to help students develop “clear linear visualization” and “precise articulation.”36 Students were initially limited to using fine-­ tipped pencils; they sometimes were not allowed to lift their pencils from the paper as they drew or to use erasers, and they could not use shading or charcoal because these masked precision. Much of the course was devoted to line drawing. Students would meticulously draw parallel lines at equal distance from one another; they might draw different kinds of ellipses for weeks.37 Chaet, by contrast, had students draw forms that exploited the dynamics of linear formation; for example, the “pulling and stretching” of a tree’s natural form would be drawn out by the student and aid in their developing a personal understanding of form.38 He also had students draw tree roots, rock formations, and shoes. Another popular form was the paper bag, which, for Chaet, was “among the most difficult objects to articulate because of [its] complicated tracery of folds.”39 In one of several drawings of paper bags she made for Chaet’s course, Hesse carefully observed a bag’s slightly deflated and misshapen form (fig. 2.7). It is an exacting drawing made with few lines and—­as Albers advocated—­combines accurate observation with efficient articulation. Although Hesse does not mention taking Albers’s drawing class, she would have been aware of course principles nevertheless; included among the drawings she preserved are two line drawings that resemble those typically made in Albers’s course. In one, she seems to have combined two of Albers’s exercises (one in which students varied the spacing between lines and another in which they emphasized different tonalities of line) meant to render the appearance of forward and backward visual movement.40 She also made a nested line drawing in which she positioned parallel lines of equal weight but different lengths and spacing to form a zigzag pattern that creates a spatial effect that resemble folds of paper (fig. 2.8). Its verso reads, in Hesse’s hand, “a similar problem / more dicipline [sic] / one idea / if necessary draw guide lines.”41 Albers abhorred work that rearticulated the vision of another artist. When asked, in 1958, what advice he might give a young artist, he responded: My main advice for practicing students of art today is a severe warning: keep off the band wagon! All the great ones did. By great is meant here not the momentary and fashionably successful—­but the inventive performer of a new seeing: the one who creates vision and therefore presents a new everlasting insight. 2 / Fold/Manifold

The visionary and lasting one always has kept independent of fashionable trends. Not for the sake of separation, nor for being merely different, but for being himself. He knows that developing art depends upon developing oneself. But he also knows this means a most intensive work based on continued self-­criticism, for years, for many more years, for a lifetime.42

For Albers, one’s vision was personal insofar as it was individual; he ruthlessly pushed students to articulate what was visually unique in their work. Hesse, who maintained that a personal sensibility—­a kind of honesty—­ could be expressed through form, was remorseless in her criticism of her work: she internalized Albers’s demand for self-­criticism. About what likely was her final painting critique at Yale, she wrote: May 5 [1959] Today is a problem day again. Everything has been upsetting. Possibly a result of yesterday,—­crit, & meeting with dr.—­at any rate my painting is lousy & the attitude is worse. It is true I can’t solve the problems step by step & try to accomplish everything at once. A painting is built in stages, you seek out & develop portions at a time. Everything Fold/Manifold / 2

Fig. 2.7. Eva Hesse, No title, 1958. Graphite on paper, 35.6 × 27.9 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1998.21.14. Gift of Helen Hesse Charash. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Fig. 2.8. Eva Hesse, No title, 1957 (nested line drawing). Ink on paper, 15.5 × 21.0 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1983.109.16. Gift of Helen Hesse Charash. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

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must be that way. Learning about ideas and even learning to know another person. . . . Yesterday Lebrun said: knowledge of technique could facilitate to a further development and means for experimentation of form. Paintings should be built in stages of washes and glazes, thin over thick, is permissible. This way you always have a choice and can constantly change, alter and discover a new way. Then pull out from the variety of ways, what you want the forms to do. Albers when looking at the same painting said the following: There is not a oneness among the forms. They lack a common unity. “What does one [form] have to do with the next?”43 Even if you would choose great contrast in color they must belong together. —­Slow down, slower development would enable greater, and more possibilities expendable.44

Among the reasons Albers disliked the work of students who aped the vision of other artists was that doing so represented a fast and easy approach to art making. This was contrary to his understanding—­and experience—­ that the development of one’s own creative vision was an arduous and lengthy process. Hesse admonished herself for trying to manufacture the whole of a painting without having first worked through its individual parts—­for wanting a quick result—­and wrote about the need to work slowly in terms both of coming to understand herself as an artist and of developing expressive ability. Soon after graduating from Yale, she wrote: The painting at present must be worked slowly for the process must be understood thoroughly by me. Whatever the result it be not the important thing. I can at any time . . . make it be a good painting. What therefore is of concern is the preparation of the stages prior to the finished work. If I know what I am about—­it is about—­I will have accomplished my problem in my work. Then aesthetic would follow because I am confident in what I know and can do.45

Years later, when living in Kettwig, Germany, during a pivotal period in which she began to build up the surfaces of her work with pigmented cord and other objects, she chastised herself for being impetuous: I cannot stand the color I use and yet it mostly develops in the same way. This I should change since I decided I like it not. It is amazing how this happens again and again. The Picasso at Documenta had an interesting use of color. I end up with red, yellow, blue, green, and I hate it. It is dumb, uninteresting and I know better. I guess I am so involved in creating my own forms that I can’t at time be concerned that much. But ironically they scream in color and then I am defeated by my own lack of concern.46

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This “lack of concern” was, to Hesse, a lack of discipline. She knew better; she had learned from Albers a disciplined approach to color (the interaction of which she largely would abandon in favor of monochromatic expression in her later work).47 After years of intense self-­criticism, Hesse began to make works in the late 1960s that she felt were “true” to the materials with which she worked and honestly expressive.48 A work like Area was able to achieve these effects because of Hesse’s careful study of the material from which it was wrought—­a mode of material inquiry that was an outgrowth of her education (fig. 2.9). Indeed, she had mastered the fundamentals of material and form, telling Nemser that “[Formal problems] are solvable, I solve them, can solve them beautifully.”49 Among the most revealing objects in Hesse’s oeuvre toward this end are the small forms known as test pieces or studiowork (fig. 2.10). Briony Fer, who acknowledges that the test pieces relate to the habit of the exercises Hesse had done while a student at Yale and which opened onto an experimental field, writes at length about the duplicitous

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Fig. 2.9. Eva Hesse, Area, 1968. Latex, wire mesh, metal, 609.6 × 91.4 cm. Photograph by John A. Ferrari. Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University. Purchased in part with designated funds from Helen Hesse Charash through the Development Fund at the University. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Fig. 2.10. Installation view, Eva Hesse: Studiowork, Camden Art Centre, London, 2009. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

aspects of the test pieces, which often are formed of industrial materials yet overtly handmade in appearance; in these, she observes, one sees the concentrated effort on Hesse’s part of making something.50 This is most evident in test pieces that Hesse made while working out specific problems, although, as Sol LeWitt remarked, she sometime did experiments “with no end (product) in sight.”51 In coming to understand how to form a work like Area, Hesse “tinkered” (to use Albers’s term) with the properties and material potentiality of rubber.52 She sutured bisected lengths of rubber tubing together to form a flexible collar that could be manipulated into different shapes (fig. 2.11); she coated wire mesh with layers of latex to build up a surface that, unlike rubber tubing, was both pliable and capable of holding its form when folded or crumpled into various shapes (fig. 2.12). Area, the materiality of which Hesse described as “ugly” in comparison to the translucence of her work in fiberglass, was made with the wire mesh that had been used to form the plugs upon which the fiberglass vessels of Repetition Nineteen III (1968) were molded. Hesse flattened the mesh bodies into rectangular panels, which she painted with several coats of liquid latex before sewing ten panels together to make Area.53 Two and a half of the work’s panels, which form slight peaks at their seams, are positioned vertically when installed, while the remainder lie horizontally. The work is rife 2 / Fold/Manifold

95 Fig. 2.11. Eva Hesse, test piece, 1967–­1969. Rubber tubing, sliced lengthwise, with metal staples, 3.8 × 24.8 × 16.5 cm. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Gift of Mrs. Helen Charash. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Fig. 2.12. Eva Hesse, test piece for Area and Seam, 1968. Filled rubber and rubber over metal mesh, 8.3 × 36.8 × 17.8 cm. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Gift of Mrs. Helen Charash. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

with visual ambiguity, appearing to be stiff yet malleable (in fact, its shape has changed significantly over time).54 In keeping with the fundaments of Albers’s instruction, Area and other forms she made in the late 1960s show how Hesse encouraged materials to behave—­productively—­in ways other than expected and employed this contradiction toward expressive ends. The lessons of Albers’s pedagogy were intentionally flexible and thus able to meet changing creative demands as they developed in the 1960s. Unlike Albers, who encouraged students to develop facility with materials so as to apply this toward visual expression that was measurable in terms of a work’s form (as good gestalt), meaning did not coalesce solely as form for Hesse, but rather was generated from the artist and expressed as form (through good gestalt). This had been a constant in her work. Soon after leaving Yale, she wrote in her diary, “The painting that is of importance is never the one where the aesthetic stands alone and is both the forms + content. The aesthetic is a means to an end. It should not be viewed in and by itself—­it is the product of an idea which is content.”55 Hesse sought out material contradiction and extremes in her work that were, in her view, similar to the incongruence of (her) life and absurdity more generally.56 This was increasingly evident in her three-­dimensional practice, and especially in late work—­like No title (1969–­1970)—­in which she resisted determining Fold/Manifold / 2

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a work’s shape in advance (see fig. B.12). However, the relinquishment of control was possible because she had studied the behavior—­the inherent restrictions and potentialities—­of the materials at her disposal, be these color or polyester resin.57 The works Hesse made in the later 1960s were uniquely her own; in this sense, she fulfilled Albers’s desire that his students find their own, singular vision. She shared this value and acknowledged it as a marker of success. Asked by Nemser if she felt that she was a traditionalist, Hesse responded (according to the transcript of the interview, which differs from its published form; I strike out here words that Nemser added or moved and restore, in brackets, words or phrases she omitted for publication): I don’t know if [you can be] completely out of the tradition[, but I don’t think I am conservative]. I know art history and I know what I believe in. I know where I come from and who I am related to or the work that I have looked at and that I am really personally moved [convinced] by and felt close to or am connected or attached to. But I feel so strongly that the only art is the art of the artist personally and found out [truly] as much as possible for himself and by himself. So I am aware of connectiveness—­it is impossible to be isolated completely—­but my interest is in solely finding [solely] my own way. I don’t mind being miles from everybody else. I am not, now, possibly. Critics, art historians, museums and galleries do like [to make a movement for their own ends which is probably one of the main reasons and that other is maybe for art history and] to make people understand, but I wonder about that. In that way I have been connected to [with] other people [and to a certain extent, of course, I am] but I don’t mind staying alone. [But I mean that I don’t only mind that but] I think it is important. [I think the] best artists are those who have stood alone and who can be separated from whatever movements have been made about them. When a movement goes, there are always two or three artists. That is all there is.58

Albers often made similar statements about the artists he admired, like Cézanne, who was what Albers considered to be one of “the real ones,” of whom there “aren’t so many,” an artist who had to work for most of his life to find the right “formulation” for his work.59 No doubt, he saw this as the arc of his own career. By the late 1960s, Hesse had mastered her material and arrived at a place in which her intentions were clear. At this point, she also began teaching. In fall 1968, Hesse started teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York.60 She had some knowledge of educational thought—­having worked with children in various capacities during her studies, including at the Educational Alliance Preschool while a student at Cooper Union, and having taught art courses to elementary schoolchildren at the Scarsdale Studio Workshop School in the mid-­1960s—­and she had considered what 2 / Fold/Manifold

it meant to be a teacher.61 While at Yale, she wrote an essay in which she articulated her thoughts on progressive education. She points out that not every experience one has is “worthwhile and educative,” but supports the notion that education should be a “living experience” so that what a child learns is meaningful when used in a “real situation.” Unsurprisingly, she also advocates for structure. “[Experiential learning] does not negate the need for coherent organization of grounding material and methods. But this positive knowledge and skills one has learned in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing with future situations.”62 Hesse—­who planned her lessons meticulously, writing out timed curricula on notecards for her class sessions in Scarsdale—­drew upon the knowledge and skills she had learned through Albers’s curriculum. In some instances, she borrowed exercises nearly directly. Her notes indicate exercises in which students are asked to select three colors that they feel are “the worst” and to combine these so as to demonstrate that no color combination is “‘wrong.’” In order to show that the “relationships” of color depend upon “amount and juxtaposition,” she suggests a four-­color exercise in which four colors are combined to make four “totally different pictures.” In an exercise using only “one color (and black and white),” she asks students to make one painting with the “greatest possible differences” and another painting with the “least possible differences.” She asks students to cut “colored paper into stripes” of varying widths and combine these into “infinite patterns” and to collect leaves “interesting in color and shape” and to use these to make “collages with paper.”63 In these plans, Hesse employed instructional parameters similar to those she had experienced with Albers. Moreover, she pushed students to test the extremes of the materials at their disposal through their combination: to create ugly color juxtapositions or to juxtapose colors in order to demonstrate the greatest possible difference. All of this was done in order to instill a dialectical understanding of material, just as Albers had done—­an approach Hesse applied expressively in her work. Hesse’s teaching notes from the first session of her painting class at the School of Visual Arts also reflect Albers’s sensibility. She reminds herself to “be clear” about the ground rules for a problem, an assignment, and conduct. She notes four points that presumably were among her opening remarks to the class, which include “Painting is a means to an end” and “color is a means.” She reminds herself to articulate that a basic, foundational vocabulary is essential and established “by means of specific problems” through which students will “learn principles from which to grow and go.” Eventually, they will have the “freedom to work out art problems [but] first need the tools.”64 It is precisely as Albers ran his foundational courses, in which students made no art until they developed a thorough understanding of design, color, and line. Indeed, her first assignment was a color problem in which students were to use black and white to “learn Fold/Manifold / 2

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Fig. 2.13. Page from Eva Hesse’s teaching notes, 1968–­1969. Eva Hesse Archive, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1977.52.49.1c. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

to see” relationships between color and amount (fig. 2.13).65 Hesse moves away from Albers—­as she did in her own practice—­in articulating that students should strive “toward a personal statement” by bringing forth new issues and solving new problems. Yet she follows this remark by re­ articulating that before doing so, one “must learn the means”: color, form (which she notes is delimited by color in painting), light and dark, and line. She reminds herself to express that painting might begin on the canvas but has no media limitations: “if art seemingly has rules, they’re all temporary and have to be broken.” Finally, she suggests that students will learn a “vocabulary from which to grow” by looking at art in galleries, museums, books, and photographs; by developing techniques; and through discussion and criticism.66 Here again she draws upon Albers, who taught his color course as a directed discussion in which students would consider one another’s color studies critically, as certainly was the case in his notoriously harsh painting critiques. The learning behaviors that Hesse internalized while a student were fundamental to her investigative approach to the unconventional—­yet, in fact, rather narrow range of—­materials she used in her late work, like polyethylene, latex, fiberglass, and polyester resin. These behaviors, which were mediated through the kinds of material studies Albers had students perform in the classroom, also underscore the material dialectics of her work, as in No title (1970; fig. 2.14). Hesse’s geometries are simultaneously 2 / Fold/Manifold

soft and hard; her forms appear to be both lightweight and weighted down. Additionally, the behaviors Hesse internalized as a student informed her conception of what it meant to be an artist: an understanding achieved through self-­criticism and predicated upon discipline and absolute control of the fundamentals of form as requisite for the creation of one’s work, which she deemed an organic extension of one’s individual self. She communicated these values to her own students both verbally and through the kinds of exercises she had them perform, as Albers had done in his classroom. This is not to say that Hesse’s work, her understanding of her practice, or even her pedagogy was solely the result of her experience with Albers; rather, taken together, her work and pedagogy demonstrate, in her own words, how the “knowledge and skills one has learned in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing with future situations.”67 This was an essential principle of Albers’s instruction as mediated through the educational forms—­like paper folding—­that he employed in the classroom. Folding and Unfolding

In 1928 Josef Albers published “Werklicher Formunterricht” (Teaching Form through Practice), a detailed statement about design education in which he emphasized the rational over the emotional and positioned the Fold/Manifold / 2

Fig. 2.14. Eva Hesse, No title, 1970. Fiberglass over wire mesh, latex over cloth and wire. Variable dimensions; as shown, 230.8 × 375 × 108 cm. Photograph by Rich Sanders. Des Moines (IA) Art Center. Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin ­Collection of the Des Moines Art Center. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Fig. 2.15. Lotte Gerson, material study (paper, static-­dynamic contrast), ca. 1927–­1930. Photograph by Edmund Collein. Gelatin silver print, 10.7 × 4.9 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.41. © Ursula Kirsten-­Collein. Fig. 2.16. Edmund Collein, detail of material study (paper, static-­dynamic contrast) by Lotte Gerson, ca. 1927–­1930. Gelatin silver print, 10.7 × 7.8 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.82. © Ursula Kirsten-­Collein.

study of material as that which must precede any consideration of function.68 An image including a paper tower made by Lotte Gerson for Albers’s Vorkurs (preliminary course) was among the illustrations that accompanied this important text (fig. 2.15). Albers described how working with paper allowed students to explore a material’s counterintuitive possibilities. Paper, he wrote, generally is “used lying down and flat and glued; one side of the paper usually loses its expression, the edge is almost never used. This is the reason we use paper standing, uneven, plasticly, on both sides and with emphasis on the edges. Instead of gluing it, we bind, pin, sew, rivet it, i.e. fasten it differently, and examine it for its performance under tensile and compressive stress.”69 Gerson’s tower must have been exceptional; it was photographed repeatedly. We see the tower in isolation, a model solution to Albers’s challenge to transform a single sheet of paper into a freestanding plastic form solely by means of cutting and folding, without creating waste, and in a manner that demonstrates its material potential. The interplay of its positive and negative space was photographed in detail and exploited photographically (fig. 2.16; and see fig. B.3). It was photographed among exercises by Gerson’s classmates, Gustav Hassenpflug 2 / Fold/Manifold

and Takehito Mizutani; Hassenpflug’s tower exhibits a similar material efficiency with its bent bands of paper offering another distinct solution to the same problem (fig. 2.17). Both towers were highly inventive: Gerson subverts one’s expectation of the inherent pliable materiality of a paper sheet, showing how it could be manipulated so as to be rigid both structurally and in appearance; by contrast, Hassenpflug’s soft, curving surface exploits the pliability of paper in an object that demonstrates its plastic potential. Gerson’s tower appears once more, turned on its side with a metal study by Mizutani (fig. 2.18). In this photograph by Erich Consemüller—­ who, as Wulf Herzogenrath observed, composed images of exercises from the Vorkurs so as to exploit their underlying principles—­Gerson’s “tower” demonstrates the transformation of a singular material into a form that appears to be static whereas Mizutani’s object shows how a single sheet of metal can be cut and bent into a dynamic form.70 Paper was a gateway material in Albers’s Vorkurs; it was readily available, easy to manipulate, and part of a long-­standing educative tradition that Albers knew well. By investigating its material properties—­through folding, tearing, cutting, abrading, and arranging—­students discovered how the inherent properties of a material could be employed in design. They did so by finding solutions to open-­ended prompts like those described above and through directed exercises, like those in folding and ­manipulating

Fig. 2.17. Material studies by Takehiko Mizutani (metal), Gustav Hassenpflug (paper, penetration illusion), and Lotte Gerson (paper, static-­dynamic contrast), ca. 1927. Photograph by Erich Consemüller. Gelatin silver print, 13.3 × 9.9 cm. Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin. © Stephan Consemüller.

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zigzag paper sheets (fig. 2.19). The latter were part of a centuries-­old folding tradition. Elaborately formed and folded ruffs and cuffs were a mainstay of courtly dress throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; these useless accoutrements signaled the social status of those who wore them insofar as significant labor was spent in continuously re-­forming these ostentatious objects.71 Indeed, Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici and Maria Magdalena of Austria displayed prominent ruffs on

Fig. 2.18. Material studies by Takehiko Mizutani (metal, static-­dynamic contrast) and Lotte Gerson (paper, static-­dynamic contrast), ca. 1927. Photograph by Erich Consemüller. Gelatin silver print, 12.5 × 17.5 cm. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau/Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus-­Museum. © Stephan Consemüller. Fig. 2.19. Josef Albers teaching at Black Mountain College, 1944. Photograph by Josef Breitenbach. Gelatin silver print, 25.5 × 20.7 cm. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.28.143. © Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.

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medals commemorating their rule (fig. 2.20). The vogue for starched linen ruffs developed in tandem with interest in folded starched linen napkin constructions, which, like ruffs, signaled one’s social standing.72 In 1629 Matthias Giegher published Trattato delle piegature, the first known illustrated text wholly devoted to napkin folding as one section of his volume Li tre trattati, which also included previously published sections on carving techniques (Il trinciante) and table service (Lo scalco).73 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer subsequently translated Li tre trattati into German, including new texts and additional illustrations.74 Neither text offered detailed step-­ by-­step instruction in folding specific objects, like the elaborate galleons, dragons, animals, and other table decorations illustrated (fig. 2.21). Rather, and like Albers’s directed introduction to crafting zigzag folded sheets of paper in his design instruction, they enumerate basic techniques and leave it to the folder to utilize these in transforming folded sheets of starched linen into various forms that will provoke amazement on a noble table. The first step in folding, Harsdörffer writes, is to bend one’s material lengthwise into sharp, even folds, which should be uniform so as to avoid problems when assembling the sheets into a design (fig. 2.22). The subtle fingers of young women, he advises, are preferable to those of large “peasant hands” (Baurenhände) when folding.75 Another illustration shows how Schuppenfalten (scale-­like folds) are made from a sheet folded in the manner described previously. The final illustration that shows hands at work illustrates the folding of Spizfalten (peaked folds), sheets of which easily can be manipulated into different shapes and are thus useful in crafting elaborate constructions.76 These are Albers’s zigzag folds. In describing these folds, Harsdörffer introduces a key principle, which is much in keeping with Albers’s approach to folding: that he who understands the art of folding and has suitable intellectual capabilities will not only replicate the forms illustrated in the text but also invent new ones.77 Fold/Manifold / 2

Fig. 2.20. Guillaume Dupré, Medal of Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1613. Bronze, diameter 8.9 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart/Adolar Wiedemann. Fig. 2.21. Illustration from Li tre trattati di Messer. Mattia Giegher bavaro di Mosbvrg . . . (1639). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

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Fig. 2.22. Illustrations from Li tre trattati di Messer. Mattia Giegher bavaro di Mosbvrg . . . (1639). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

Jean-­Daniel Krebs has described Harsdörffer’s translation of Li tre trattati as the first of his educational programs (Erziehungsprogramms) meant to distribute courtly models of comportment to a broader constituency and thereby to aid in the creation of a bourgeoisie (Verbürgerlichung).78 To further this goal, Harsdörffer added text on dinner conversation to his translation, thereby altering the character of the book to include explicit social interaction as well as matters related to style of presentation.79 He also added illustrations of folded dinner napkins, further emphasizing a shift toward a more general, albeit still an elite, audience (fig. 2.23).80 2 / Fold/Manifold

Fig. 2.23. Illustrations from Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Vollständiges und von neuen vermehrtes Trincir-­ Buch (1657). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

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With respect to the history of paper folding and the material’s use as a pedagogic aid generally, it is significant that Harsdörffer suggests that first one should fold paper in order to practice one’s folding skills, as it was easier to correct a folding error in paper than in less forgiving linen.81 The employment of paper as an aspect of learning the art of napkin folding illustrates how, as early as the seventeenth century, paper was conceived of as an educational aid because of its malleability. Folding paper was part of several aspects of professional and domestic life, especially the practice of letter writing. Like the art of napkin folding, by the eighteenth century, instruction in epistolary writing, which previously had been taught exclusively to an educated elite, was modified to address the more modest concerns of the merchant classes. As Eve Tavor Bannet’s investigation of eighteenth-­century letter-­writing manuals has shown, knowledge of grammar, spelling, and of how to write—­and how to read—­different genres of letter was essential to the creation of “epistolary networks” engaged in all manner of social, political, and economic commerce.82 Students of epistolary writing first copied model texts and then imitated these texts, first “through rewording and then through the variation, correction, amplification, inversion or radical adaptation of the model,” improving upon the form and thereby demonstrating their own facility with a genre.83 They were introduced to several types of letter, including the business letter, letter of recommendation, and others. They also were instructed on letter-­folding etiquette.84 Although Bannet investigates English and American manuals, one finds similar instructions in German-­language examples. Johann Christoph Stockhausen’s Grundsätze wohleingerichteter Briefe addresses topics from advice about the use of postscripts to the technical instruction that letters should be slightly abraded with sand before being sealed.85 It also offers direction regarding envelope etiquette and best practices in letter folding. An envelope (Umschlag) indicated affluence, as a superfluous piece of paper was necessary to create one; it also functioned to protect one’s letter in transit (for extra protection and security, a double envelope was advisable).86 On the topic of folding letters written on large pieces of paper, Stockhausen asserts that one exhibits an outmoded artistry when folding letters so elaborately that the recipient becomes weary of unwrapping them, especially if eager to read the letter.87 Rather, and much in keeping with Albers’s prioritization of the economic use of materials in his instruction, simplicity was preferable, as it was in one’s prose when writing letters.88 The elaborate protocols for folding napkins, letters, and envelopes indicate the degree to which folded objects were a measure of proper conduct that could be taught. As Joan Sallas has revealed, Hermann Franke established a curriculum in napkin-­folding instruction for children in Halle an der Saale in 1705.89 Although most children did not practice napkin folding, paper folding played a significant role in the lives of many children, as did the material more generally. Indeed, the qualities and uses of learning aids 2 / Fold/Manifold

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Fig. 2.24. Frieda Petri, paper model of a man’s shirt (Papiermodell eines Herrenhemdes), ca. 1875. Folded and sewn paper,

were a key concern in the philosophy of education. In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke noted that “a smooth pebble, a piece of paper [my emphasis], the mother’s bunch of keys, or any thing they cannot hurt themselves with, serves as much to divert little children, as those more chargeable and curious toys from shops, which are presently out of order and broken.”90 For older children, Locke suggests that lettering, larger in scale than an adult actually would write, be printed in red ink upon pieces of writing paper that pupils could then trace with pen and black ink. Exercises like these would be followed by drawings on paper meant to make what one sees “intelligible.”91 In addition to the material being a surface upon which one made marks, paper was manipulated into various forms in educational contexts. This activity increased with the advent of the industrial production of wood-­based paper in the early nineteenth century, as paper became increasingly prevalent and affordable. Frieda Petri, who taught needlework to young girls in Dresden, used paper models to demonstrate the correct execution of felled and overlock seams in her instruction (fig. 2.24). Her pupils would replicate these models in paper; like those following Harsdörffer’s suggestion, they moved on to fabric only after having worked through the technical aspects of the design in paper.92 Educational games as well as toys made of paper —­including paper dolls, various puzzles, and interactive atlases—­were produced commercially. However, ready-­made toys were not available to all children, nor did all families desire them. Wilhelm von Kügelgen recalled the contribution of Adolf Senff, a painter who served as tutor in his parents’ household, to his education in early nineteenth-­century Dresden. Kügelgen described Senff’s teaching method as the “Pestalozzi-­Krugsche method, in which one was concerned less with what one learned, but rather in the manner this happened.”93 He recalled: Fold/Manifold / 2

25.3 × 42.8 × 17 cm. Courtesy Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/ Museum für Sächsische Volkskunst.

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Fig. 2.25. Wilhelm von Kügelgen, Horse and Rider (Ross und Reiter), ca. 1845. Folded and painted paper, 8 × 9.5 cm. Courtesy Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/Museum für Sächsische Volkskunst.

Our artistic activity was not only limited to drawing, we carved wood and kneaded all kinds of pleasing [objects] in colorful wax. . . . Finally we made pasteboard, and made almost all of our toys [from it] with the teacher’s guidance, who judged very correctly, that making something in this way was best.94

“A highly enjoyable aspect of Senff’s instruction,” Kügelgen continued, “was the art of folding paper into small triangular shapes that resembled rooks (Krähen), which, in their preparation, the last fold (Bruch) was so difficult that it could not be taught.”95 Rather, Senff afforded his young pupils the time to work though the final folding procedure on their own (fig. 2.25). He also crafted an elaborate paper city of Constantinople, complete with houses, palaces, and mosques amid white sand and a blue sea, thereby enlivening the dimensions of his pupil’s environment: “The fortresses and cities, that we had observed only as plans in our war games, were now applicable to all dimensions of space, and we took on various knowledge and skill.”96 All children were not so fortunate as to be raised in a household staffed by private tutors. Manuals on childrearing and on how children could be taught to craft their own toys filled this void. In all, paper played a significant role. Christoph Heinrich Wolke’s Anweisung für Mütter und Kinder cited texts about paper modeling and folding that mothers could consult,97 and Daniel Boileau’s Papyro-­Plastics; or, The Art of Modelling in Paper stressed that: This ingenious art [of folding] is calculated to introduce children to the most common and practical applications of geometry, in a way which occupies their hands, and thus enforces their attention, without any particular effort of their thinking powers.98 2 / Fold/Manifold

The author’s emphasis on the haptic—­the occupying of hands—­in instruction is key. He continues to state, in keeping with attitudes about early-­ childhood education that stressed the role of multiple senses in learning, that the creation of three-­dimensional forms “by which both the senses of seeing and feeling are gratified, satisfy the infant mind better than bare out lines; and the study of mathematics is likely to be prosecuted with more ardour after young persons have previously amused themselves with converting quadrangles and parallelograms into tables, chairs, houses, churches, bridges, and ships.”99 These activities became standardized and internationally known through Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel’s Kindergarten curriculum, which the pedagogue began to realize in 1837 in Bad Blankenburg, Schwarzburg-­Rudolstadt. In Die Menschenerziehung, Fröbel laid out the principles of his theory of education, which was predicated upon a pantheistic understanding of nature and prioritized self-­activity and play as an extension of a child’s inner representation and impulses.100 These impulses first need to be fostered in the child and then developed through instruction. With respect to the materiality of education, Fröbel is clear that the activities he describes generally—­and developed subsequently as “gifts” and “occupations”—­ were not directly associated with practical outcomes. “Thus,” Fröbel wrote: The work in colors is not in any way meant to develop a future painter, neither is the work in singing intended to train a future musician. These occupations simply have the purpose to secure in the young human being all-­sided development and unfolding of his nature (zunächst eine allseitige Entwickelung und Darlegung seines Wesens); they furnish the general food so necessary for mental growth; they are the ether in which his spirit breathes and lives in order to gain strength and scope, inasmuch as the mental tendencies which God has given him, and which irresistibly unfold from his mind in all directions (welche aus seinem Geiste mit nicht zurückzuweisender Nothwendigkeit in allseitigen Richtungen hervorgehen), will necessarily appear in great variety, and must be met and fostered in a corresponding variety of ways.101

In his view—­quite unlike how the curriculum that bears his name developed subsequent to his death—­education was not meant to be prescriptive but more in line with a natural order that corresponded to individual development.102 Drawing upon the materiality of childhood and established activities in the home, Fröbel included paper in Die Menschenerziehung as among the kinds of materials with which children could work in order to refine mechanical dexterity and express corporeal form outwardly.103 In the Kindergarten curriculum, paper folding was cast as an affordable exercise that encouraged dexterity and neatness. Children would be instructed to transform a sheet of paper using folds that brought forth an “astounding variety of instructive and entertaining forms” that were latent Fold/Manifold / 2

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Fig. 2.26. Plates 40 and 42, “Folding” (Falten), in Hermann Goldammer, Der Kindergarten: Handbuch der Fröbelschen Erziehungsmethode . . . (Berlin, 1874). Courtesy Widener Library, Harvard University.

in the material.104 Exercises proceeded from the folding of simple “ground forms” to increasingly complex “object forms” (and ultimately “artistic forms”), some of which bear a striking resemblance to the folded napkins illustrated by Harsdörffer (fig. 2.26). Importantly, in the process of folding, several other instructional forms would be presented, thereby encouraging children to observe and to think. As a former primary school teacher, Albers knew Fröbel’s Die Menschenerziehung and endorsed a pedagogy in keeping with Fröbel’s educational theory generally, if not the specific exercises that developed in the pedagogue’s name. Albers’s exercises were not tied to specific outcomes but rather to developing observational and analytical abilities in students; on a larger scale, he wished to establish a fundamental sense of self in students.105 And as it had done in various educational contexts since the seventeenth century, paper assumed a special significance in Albers’s instruction. Students folded paper into progressively complex forms, like a hyperbolic paraboloid made from a square piece of paper (fig. 2.27) or a flexible cylindrical form with an expandable aperture fashioned from a long sheet of rectangular paper (fig. 2.28). In investigating the basic ­properties of 2 / Fold/Manifold

Fig. 2.27. Material study (paper, hyperbolic paraboloid), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, 1953. Photographic negative by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.3378. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 2.28. Material study (paper, flexible cylindrical form), Bauhaus. ca. 1925–­ 1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 8.3 × 10.8 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.75.

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the material, one student employed its tendency to roll onto itself in fashioning the bodies of two figures out of concentric circles cut from a single piece of paper without producing waste (fig. 2.29). Another transformed the geometry of a paper cylinder by cutting and bending the material into several new forms (fig. 2.30). Students would use the material to demonstrate spatial movement on small and large scales. In an exceptional example, a student suspended a piece of paper that had been folded evenly in half (at a right angle) from the classroom ceiling. A proportionate sequence of accumulative curved elements cut from this piece of paper form paper ribs that simultaneously protrude from and intersect with their corresponding—­yet rearranged, due to the fold in the paper—­negative spaces in the design (fig. 2.31). In combination, these elements constitute a multidimensional dynamic form. In another particularly vivid example, a student showed

Fig. 2.29. Material study (paper, cut and rolled), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11.6 × 8.3 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.64. Fig. 2.30. (facing, top) ­Material study (paper, transformation of a cylinder), Bauhaus. ca. 1925–­ 1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 8.3 × 11.3 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.87. Fig. 2.31. (facing, bottom) Material study (paper, spatial study), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 11 × 16.5 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.127.

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Fig. 2.32. Two construction and stability exercises from Josef Albers’s preliminary course (wood, paper), ca. 1927. Photograph by Erich Consemüller. Gelatin silver print, 17.5 × 12.6 cm. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau/ Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus-­Museum. © Stephan Consemüller.

how a carefully designed web of circles inscribed upon a sheet of dense paper could be literally drawn out, transforming a flat sheet into a voluminous, spatially dynamic, structurally self-­sufficient form (fig. 2.32). The dramatic height achieved in this example is particularly apt insofar as it illustrates how a plane of ordinary paper holds within it a tremendous expressive potential, waiting to be unleashed by a designer trained to approach creatively the materials at his or her disposal. There were always several solutions to any problem Albers posed to students; their comparative success was evaluated in terms of the ratio between the effort involved in crafting a form and its effectiveness. Take, for example, a series of objects made in response to a prompt asking students to craft a sphere from a single sheet of paper (fig. 2.33). Several students chose a dense paper to achieve this end. Some created skeletal systems, using clips to assemble various cut elements; another student created an intricate interlocking system of paper planes. In the simplest solution—­involving the lowest material effort—­a student fastened paper disks together along a central axis and folded leaves out at varying angles to form a paper sphere. The resulting form exploited the inherent material characteristics of paper as a surface into which tension can be introduced through crumpling. The variety of solutions to any of Albers’s prompts 2 / Fold/Manifold

Fig. 2.33. Construction studies (paper sphere), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–­1933. Photographers unknown. Gelatin silver prints, each approx. 8.1 × 11 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.34.119, 1976.34.120, 1976.34.121, 1976.34.122, 1976.10.76.

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indicate his educational emphasis on method over imitation. In these incomplete, enigmatic forms that so often were destined for the waste bin, we can see how “constructive thinking” (konstruktiven denken) was prioritized over the imitation of precedent.106 Through his use of paper as an instructional tool, Albers reinforced and elaborated upon aspects of the pedagogic material’s utility: he used it as a gateway to more advanced material investigation; he stressed that forms were to be brought forth from the material; he insisted that students not replicate but rather invent new forms; he emphasized the material’s inherent malleability, in particular through its folding. Locke’s consideration of the pedagogic utility of paper in Some Thoughts Concerning Education postdates Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Pacidus Philalethi (1676) by less than two decades. The latter proved significant to Gilles Deleuze, who, in Le pli: Leibniz et la baroque (1988), mines Leibniz’s conceptualization of the shape of matter to develop an understanding of the Baroque as an “operative function” rather than as a trait. Deleuze writes that a “flexible or elastic body” cannot be separated into wholly individual parts, and thus, paraphrasing Leibniz, “is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.”107 Thus, quite unlike the linearity of Descartes’s labyrinth or a monadic conception of style, the potentially endless repetition of folds serves as a model for “the sciences of matter” that do not adhere to an absolute separation of organic and inorganic—­of body and mind.108 Conceived of in this way, and through the metaphor of the infinitely unfurling fold, the Baroque can be understood ecologically: as an agent, highly adaptable, extending fluidly through time and space.109 The zigzag folded paper sheets made by Albers’s students—­and by the hands of seventeenth-­century napkin folders—­illustrate this principle quite literally (fig. 2.34). Easily manipulated, the sheets assume and hold several shapes while maintaining their material integrity. It is clear that these sheets could adapt to their surroundings, folding themselves around other objects; in turn, it is evident how external forces might influence the shape of these sheets. This also was the point of Albers’s exercise. Not only could a seemingly flimsy material like paper be transformed to demonstrate rigidity; that very same rigid form could itself be manipulated and refashioned as part of a chain of transformation. Plasticity was central to Albers’s design instruction, which he described as training in flexibility, and in which the investigation of a material’s properties ad extremum was integral to cultivating a flexible mind and an observational attitude. While Deleuze’s articulation of the infinite malleability of the Baroque fold is beneficial in understanding Albers’s pedagogy as experienced by Hesse and many others, the fold also is a useful means for visualizing how the lessons of Albers’s pedagogy proliferated. Deleuze employs the image 2 / Fold/Manifold

Fig. 2.34. Material studies (paper, zigzag folded), Black Mountain College, ca. 1939–­1941. Photographic negatives by Josef Albers. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.19.2792, 1976.19.2776, 1976.19.2795. All © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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of a boat’s prow as it moves through water as a metaphor for causality. As a boat moves through the sea it creates ripples—­or folds—­of water that ­diminish in clarity and intensity as they extend outward, away from the vessel. “Causality,” he writes, “always moves not just from the clear to the obscure, but from the clearer (or more-­clear) to the less-­clear, the more confused. It goes from what is more stable to what is less. Such is the requirement of sufficient reason: clear expression is what increases in the cause, but also what diminishes in the effect.”110 As an alternative to thinking in terms of the contentious notion of influence, thinking in terms of causality, as Deleuze suggests, is a productive way to understand the idea of Albers’s pedagogy in terms of Hesse’s practice, as well as the ways in which educational ideas ripple through cultures, becoming less formed—­or clear—­but remaining present. As Hesse became further removed from her tenure at Yale—­where she had been a painting student, as Richard Serra would be a few years hence—­she encountered crosscurrents and shifting seas that helped her to mold her work into something new and uniquely her own. Yet something—­albeit increasingly less clear—­of Albers persisted.

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The visual tension Josef Albers observed in the unfolding cornice of the Abteikirche Neresheim and many of the objects he photographed reflected his desire to render unresolvable visual dynamics within legible organizational schema. This was an especially conspicuous concern in his painting practice, to which he returned with enthusiasm soon after his arrival at Black Mountain College.1 It took him over a decade to develop a satisfying approach to the medium, which he achieved only upon removing explicit linear gestures in his Variants and Homage to the Square series of paintings (fig. C.1). He described the Homages thusly: Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-­concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings —­in proportion and placement— ­these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many ways. In consequence, they move forth and back, in and out, and grow up and down and near and far, as well as enlarged and ­diminished. All this, to proclaim color autonomy as a means of a plastic organization.2

While Albers’s linear constructions, in their “painterliness,” exhibit an antagonism toward Heinrich Wölfflin’s understanding of linear vision, Albers’s Homages are in line with the art historian’s “painterly” conception of the Baroque—­all vision, for Albers, was painterly. Albers’s early efforts in painting at Black Mountain College reveal his struggle with the medium, especially the relationship between painterly and linear vision therein. A work like Etude: Red-­Violet (Christmas Shopping) appears as if wrought spontaneously; it is thick with paint and seemingly unsystematic (fig. C.2). But this work—­like everything Albers’s did—­was

Fig. C.1. Josef Albers, ­Homage to the Square, 1950. Oil on Masonite, 40.6 × 40.6 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.1.1313. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. C.2. Josef Albers, Etude: Red-­Violet (Christmas Shopping), 1935. Oil on wood composition board, 38.1 × 35.6 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.1.1050. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. C.3. Josef Albers, untitled oil study, ca. 1935. Oil and pencil on paper, 21.4 × 30.5 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.2.233. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the result of careful study and analysis. Atop a sheet of paper on which he rendered four similar painting studies (fig. C.3), each loosely bound by a rectangle, Albers wrote “rechts gegen links” (right against left). As his annotation suggests, he applied colors in different arrangements and proportions so as to create visual imbalance between the right and left sides of the compositions; for instance, he used white pigment on only one side of three studies and added an additional deep blue horizontal band of color to the right side of one study. Significantly, in a further effort to introduce visual tension, he drew an asymmetrical abstract linear form at the center of another study and used the color in which its lines were drawn to bound the right and left sides of the overall composition. In doing so, he shifted the work of creating visual tension in the composition from color distribution to linear asymmetry.

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Fig, C.4. Josef Albers, Tenayuca I, 1942. Oil on Masonite, 50.8 × 90.8 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2017.1.1. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Albers used linear elements derived from grid-­bound geometries—­ particularly those observed during several trips to Mexico—­to apportion color in many paintings made in the 1930s and 1940s. These include paintings in which geometric forms penetrate one another, others in which horizontal bands of color are assembled in patterns that resemble masonry, and series known by the titles Tenayuca, Tautonym, and Kinetic, in which rhomboid geometries are manipulated to create dynamic diagonal visual movement (fig. C.4). In preparation for these kinds of works, he made pencil sketches and studies in oil on gridded paper to determine the appropriate quantities of color to distribute across the painting surface (fig. C.5). Linear forms derived from the grid thus shaped and explicitly denoted boundaries between colors. Contrastingly, in a series of studies for Marching X’s (1940) that foreshadow the design of his Homages, Albers superimposed different linear compositions upon nested combinations of pigment to determine which pairing of linear and painterly elements achieved a desired visual effect (fig. C.6).3 Linear forms are not used to determine pictorial proportion in these studies, nor are line and color integrated compositionally. Rather, Albers positioned linear and painterly vision in opposition in these studies. It is difficult to see them. One wants to follow the outlines of the geometric forms—­and thus view the studies linearly—­but one’s attempt to do so is thwarted by the studies’ painterly elements; likewise, the superimposed linear elements make assembling a holistic painterly image of the studies nearly impossible. But visual impenetrability was unproductive to Albers and he made relatively few of these kinds of paintings. c / Pa i n t i n g

Fig C.5. Josef Albers, two studies for a geometric abstraction (Penetrating), ca. 1943. Gouache and pencil on graph paper, 34.8 × 24.6 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.2.359. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. C.6. Josef Albers, study for Marching X’s, ca. 1940. Oil on paper, 38.1 × 59 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.2.381. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. C.7. Josef Albers, Variant (Pink-Orange Surrounded by 4 Grays), 1947– 1952. Oil on Masonite, 39.5 × 69.5 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.1.1380. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

It was only after he removed explicit linear gestures from his painting practice in his Variants and Homages—­and thereby insisted upon color autonomy—­that Albers achieved the demonstrative visual difficulty he desired (fig. C.7). He continued to use the grid to determine what percentage of a painting’s surface to cover with different colors in his Variants (fig. C.8).4 The grid assured that the individual parts of the composition corresponded to the whole; it allowed Albers to distribute color over the surface of a painting in “precise relationships” that emphasized how color interaction could, for instance, neutralize the appearance of distinctly different colors through their opposition.5 Indeed, he was drawn to the objectivity of the grid; Albers notated the verso of his paintings with the types of paints used in their making and kept detailed studio logs. In relatively short order, however, he realized that he could achieve visual effects similar to those of his Variants more efficiently with the aid of just three or four nested proportional squares.6 With his Homages, Albers moved away from a compositional system based upon determining color ratios relative to a painting’s surface mathematically to a more instinctive means of composition.7 As Elaine de Kooning reported, Albers worked with several studies of similarly scaled painted squares made on blotting paper, which he would manually juxtapose with one another to find desirable color relationships. He also used cut frames of paper to “mask” colors and overlaid painted sheets of cellophane to experiment with various color combinations quickly and efficiently before determining a combination of colors suitable for a large painting.8

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Fig. C.8. Josef Albers, analytic sketch for a Variant painting, ca. 1948. Pencil and ink on graph paper, 28 × 21.6 cm. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers Papers, box 118, folder 4. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In moving away from the objectivity of the grid in his painting method, Albers embraced a comparative compositional approach that resembled the subjectivity of color perception itself and the analytical frameworks related to the study and teaching thereof. If, as the work of Hermann von Helmholtz had shown, one’s perception of color did not correspond with external fixed reality (if the same “red” object looked—­in the case of colorblindness—­dramatically different to those who viewed it), then color perception could not be idealized.9 This view was maintained by the Prussian state, for which Albers worked as a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer). Watercolor instruction—­and, with it, color instruction—­was part of the required state drawing (Zeichnen) curricula and thus among the subjects Albers and his fellow students studied at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin (Royal School of Art, Berlin).10 In its regulations for implementing lesson plans, the state cautioned against the use of color mixtures and color systems (“For the development of the sense of color, the theoretical discussion of color mixtures and color combinations using the ‘color circle’ is of little value and may even be questionable”); rather, instruction should be led by a teacher who had developed a good taste for color (einen besonders feinen Farbengeschmack) and involve the observation of color as it appears in actual objects.11 In juxtaposing color combinations repeatedly to compose his Homages (as he also asked students to do in his color instruction), Albers developed a discerning subjective eye

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for or “good taste for color”; he employed a pseudoscientific method to understand perceptual trends. Indeed, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have elaborated, the study of color was implicated in the post-­Kantian “dilemma” to manage the gap between individual subjectivity and so-­called objective scientific understanding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 It thus became aligned with the bourgeoning fields of experimental psychology, psychophysics, and sensory physiology, which employed various instruments in laboratory settings to gather subjective sense data that could be employed to identify perceptual tendencies to constitute what Daston and Galison term “structural objectivity.”13 As such, objectivity increasingly rested upon the judgment of scientists “trained” to recognize patterns in data; like a connoisseur, one’s ability to do so was predicated upon one having been repeatedly and methodically exposed to various results.14 By restricting himself to a fixed design of nested squares, Albers discovered a more direct, legible way to compose paintings that harness the actual effects of color interaction toward aesthetic ends. In removing explicit linear elements from his Variants and Homages, Albers liberated color, which was not used to construct the appearance of concrete elements. Rather, these works present a concentrated, abstract manifestation of Wölfflin’s understanding of painterly vision. The colored squares of Albers’s Homages do not appear as distinct elements, isolated from one another, but as a mass that moves in and out of visual agreement; they show, as Wölfflin remarked, “the apprehension of the world as shifting semblance.”15 And, albeit shallow, they emphasize visual depth in the backward and forward movement of their surfaces. Like his Variants, they are not compositions in which distinct parts create singular, stable images; all elements have been made subordinate to a dominant visual effect predicated upon the flux central to painterly vision. Yet Albers’s images, unlike the paintings about which Wölfflin wrote, do not resolve into discernable, fixed masses.16 They portray visual instability itself and, in this sense, are undeniably modern—­and are undeniably informed by Albers’s explicit and implicit understanding of the aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought of Wilhelmine Germany. The three-­dimensional work of Richard Serra, who knew the principles of Albers’s color instruction well, functions similarly insofar as it mines shifting relationships between one’s physical presence relative to the artist’s seemingly instable sculptural forms.

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O n Ric h a r d S e r r a a nd A l b er s

When Richard Serra enrolled at Yale University, where he completed a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1962 and a master of fine arts degree in 1964, Josef Albers’s curricular presence remained strong despite his having retired from full-­time teaching.1 This was reflected in the ethos of the School of Art and Architecture, which continued to stress fundamentals. Upon Serra’s arrival—­as a painting student—­the curriculum was described as proceeding “inductively, deriving principles of structure, form, and order from concrete personal and group experience. At the beginning, problems are general and are focused on the correlations between different types of visual formulation.”2 Albers’s former students Sewell Sillman and Neil Welliver had assumed faculty positions at Yale and taught the color and basic design courses, respectively, during Serra’s tenure at the school.3 Serra enrolled in these courses and later was a student instructor in the color course. In that role, he was asked to help Albers proof thousands of screen-­printed illustrations for his magnum opus Interaction of Color (1963). With this text, Albers sought to instill a “way of searching” in students that would lead to an understanding of the interaction between colors and, by extension, the “interdependence” of the material with form and placement, as well as with quantity, quality, and pronouncement.4 Welliver’s course was particularly important to Serra, who, in an uncharacteristically revealing public conversation with fellow Yale alumnus Michael Craig-­Martin elaborated: Serra: The course that influenced me the most [at Yale] was the design course. Craig-­M artin: Yes, of course, and that’s exactly what I was going to ask you about. And it was very funny, because it was called Basic Design, and it had obviously nothing to do with design. . . . Serra: No, they would give you a problem—­they would give you a cork and

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Fig. 3.1. Configurational variations with a circle made in Neil Welliver’s course at Yale University, as reproduced in Yale Alumni Magazine, April 1958. Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers Papers, box 41, folder 13.

a bottle of poster paint, and you would make a dot, and then you would see what happens with the dot problem. Craig-­M artin: I’ve always wanted to ask you about that, because the idea of the course was that you found the form through an examination of the materials; that the material would give you a form, if you allowed it, instead of you imposing an idea on it. And I see that as the basis of your work. Serra: Yes, matter informs form. That is the basis of my work: it always has been. Form is something that metamorphoses into other forms. It has its own internal logic that can be dispelled and migrate into other forms.5

Although Albers did not teach basic design at Yale, as he had done at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, he established the principles upon which the course was based as chairman of the Department of Design. Welliver, who succeeded Robert G. Scott in teaching the course, added to the curriculum considerably.6 The so-­called dot problem was his invention (fig. 3.1). In the exercise, students investigated how a repeating unit, a dot made with the inked tip of a wine cork, could build up into complex configurations, including some in which dense clusters of the elemental, “axial” form (“so aggressively a figure”) came to be subsumed by the visual field.7 Welliver also had students work with random materials found on the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, in what was known as the “junk” problem, as well as with more traditional materials like clay—­which they would roll, and concrete, which they would pour.8 Serra recalled: 3 / Color Aid

Welliver would say, “Take any material you want and make something, then make something exactly like it in another material, and you’ll see what the difference is.” I got to the point where I was running cement through a meat grinder, making things that looked like cannoli. But it helped me understand that investigating the properties of a material can open up a whole host of ways of doing, making, and forming.9

This is precisely in line with Albers’s view as elaborated by Welliver, who observed that, for Albers, “any . . . piece of material you could pick up, had inherent in it the possibility of a form,” and “if you had a hold on material, then you had all the flex in the world.”10 And it is precisely in line with the understanding of material and form Serra developed in his practice; as Welliver asked of his students, the logic of what one makes with one material informs what one can (or cannot) achieve with another material. Within five years of his graduation from Yale, Serra’s work as a sculptor became the subject of sophisticated art criticism through which fundamental shifts in understanding sculptural practice were narrated.11 Yet the importance of Albers’s pedagogic principles to Serra have not been afforded significance.12 In this chapter, after summarizing how Serra has been positioned in art critical discourse since the late 1960s, I identify ways in which the experiments through which Albers’s students discovered the perceptual-­material dynamics of color resonate with Serra’s practice, particularly with his attitude toward material as opening ways of “doing, making, and forming” in his early work; his engagement with film and video; and his mining of the relationship between subject and object in his large-­scale architectural sculpture. This excursus is by no means comprehensive, but it is significant. I sketch a narrative of Serra’s practice that runs parallel to dominant accounts of his work, for example, as being opposed to a gestalt (modernist) understanding of art and as embracing constructivist materiality. Albers is necessarily absent from these entwined accounts of Serra’s practice. The former’s project indeed was to determine what visual forms presented themselves as efficient analogues to the cognitive processes of perception. Implied in Albers’s understanding of the contingency of form and cognition is a modernist conception of the artwork that Rosalind E. Krauss has deconstructed.13 But for all the talk of gestalt psychology with respect to Albers, Krauss and others do not recognize that applied educational psychology actually was at the root of his practice and teaching. Furthermore, Albers’s association with the Bauhaus has been problematic for critics who found (the politics of) the “readymade” constructivist materiality of the Soviets (which reemerged in discourse on advanced art in the 1960s) rhetorically advantageous in discussing Serra’s materiality.14 I show how viewing Serra’s practice in light of Albers’s “Bauhaus” pedagogy allows the respective work and pedagogy of the two to be understood anew. It may be “too literal” of an assessment of Serra’s work,15 but, suggestively, it demonstrates how Albers’s pedagogy Color Aid / 3

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remained relevant to subsequent generations of artists whose work appear to be—­and have been written about as—­antithetical to his aesthetics. In narrating a relationship between Albers’s teaching and Serra’s practice, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of the former’s color instruction as a mechanism for developing the critical vision of students in greater depth than has been the case previously. During his training at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin (Royal Art School, Berlin), where he studied between 1913 and 1915, Albers came into contact with the psychologically inflected pedagogy of Philipp Franck’s drawing instruction and, moreover, the experimental pedagogical research associated with the Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung (Institute for Applied Psychology and Psychological Research Collection). In foregrounding Franck’s curriculum and the concurrent experiments in applied educational—­rather than gestalt—­psychology, I situate Albers’s color instruction historically, within the context of educational thought in Wilhelmine Germany. This supports my larger argument that Albers’s pedagogy was significantly informed by aesthetic, educational, and scientific theory and practice known to him through his training to become a primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer) and a drawing instructor (Zeichenlehrer). As such, we see that Albers’s engagement with psychology was far more sophisticated than previously acknowledged and predates his arrival at the Bauhaus, where it is said that he was first exposed to the work of the Gestaltists.16 Working Methods

Serra’s work—­like that of fellow Yale graduate Eva Hesse—­has been assessed largely in terms of its challenge to the tenets of modernism and thereby the tradition with which Albers was aligned, albeit inconsistently. Robert Pincus-­Witten concluded that the work was “associated with a shift in modernist sensibility” noticeable in New York galleries in the late 1960s that featured the work of “so-­called process artists, conceptual artists, earthwork artists,” and those sculptors, like Serra, who challenged the traditional vertical orientation of the medium.17 Krauss employed a mode of analysis that privileged relationships between Serra’s sculptural dialectics in light of those of artists, like Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi, whose work represented significant shifts in understanding the conditions of modern sculpture.18 Douglas Crimp, who, in pointed contrast to Pincus-­Witten, whose writing he felt continued to be predicated upon an approach that emphasized stylistic analysis, biography, and related narratives of influence, asserted that Serra’s work was postmodernist insofar as it acknowledged the unstable categories of modernism and its “ethos of idealism.” For Crimp, as art began “to exceed” the terms of accepted media classification, “modernism itself was exceeded, replaced by works which were hybrid, contingent, materialist.”19 Indeed, in writing about 3 / Color Aid

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Fig. 3.2. Richard Serra, To Lift, 1967. Vulcanized rubber, 91.4 × 203.2 × 152.4 cm. Photograph by Peter Moore. The Museum of

Serra decades later, Hal Foster rearticulated this view in describing the artist’s early work: that it “programmatically deconstructs the modernist will to autonomy and develops the postmodernist interest in contingency.”20 A Marxist approach to Serra’s work—­which Crimp invokes in describing the significance of Serra’s site-­specific, aggressively confrontational public sculpture as materialist and thus counter to idealist, self-­sufficient modernist sculpture—­has also been employed as an interpretive lens through which to view the artist’s practice.21 Stefan Germer elaborated Serra’s work as a “negation of those categories by which sculpture is defined in traditional as well as modernist thinking,” stressing how Serra draws attention to the process of production and the process of reception as human labor.22 Taking a broad view of sculpture in the 1960s (which, if no longer conceived of as autonomous forms, then ought necessarily question its relationship to social space), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh asserted that Serra’s sculptural dialectics constituted “a new phenomenological tactility produced by the laboring body.”23 With respect to the human form and the dialectics of the subject-­object relationship in sculptural practice, most who have written about the development of Serra’s practice note the sculptor’s relatively rapid move from the creation of works in which sculptural form and a material’s inherent properties function dialectically, like To Lift (fig. 3.2), to so-­called prop pieces that exploit structural contingency, like One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (fig. 3.3), and ultimately to works in which the conditions of the site for which they are made or installed are imperative, like Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation (fig. 3.4).24 Assessments of Serra’s work in terms of phenomenological discourse accompanied this development, especially in light of the ­changing dynamics of sculptural practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.25 Color Aid / 3

Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

To do so much work in challenging the ontological status of sculpture must have been exhausting. But what effort preceded this? Absent from these methodologically diverse accounts of Serra’s practice is any sense of pleasure in the actual activity of making art—­in the process through which one arrives at the work. Yet Serra has noted the importance of playful experimentation in teaching and, significantly, with respect to his early work: One of the problems that I have observed in teaching is that it often tends to repress anything resembling play. That is one reason why teaching becomes academic. The “nonsense” of play and its sheer pleasure does not exclude a certain paradox: Need I take a self-­reflective, distancing look at what I am doing or continue to play? The paradox arises when you start contemplating whether to disengage from the experimental and make decisions or judgements, or to accept all transitional outcomes as satisfactory.26

How, especially given the subject’s prominence in discourse on Serra, do we account for the experimental action of Serra’s actual laboring body? Serra, who recalled staying up all night at Yale doing thousands of color studies, seems to have taken pleasure in—­or, at least, was obsessed with —­the experimentation that was central to Albers’s curriculum as he experienced it.27 Sillman’s color course followed Albers’s precedent closely and thus proceeded as a sequence of problems that required the repeated juxtaposition of sheets of Color-­aid paper to solve.28 For instance, students would be asked to find a third color that represented the middle mixture—­ equidistant in light intensity and hue—­between two given colors.29 And running cement though a meat grinder as an activity inspired by Welliver’s design course almost sounds like fun.30 Indeed, Serra acknowledged his admiration for the dialectics of freedom and control in Albers’s pedagogy: “What I admired about Albers was that even though his format was strict and logical, within it there was room for play.” He continued:

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Fig. 3.3. (facing, top) Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969. Lead, four plates, each 121.9 × 121.9 × 2.5 cm. Photograph by Peter Moore. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Grinstein Family, Los Angeles. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 3.4. (facing, bottom) Richard Serra, Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation, 1970–­1971 (detail). Weatherproof steel; three plates: 152.4 cm × 12.3 m × 5 cm, 152.4 cm × 14 m × 5 cm, 152.4 cm × 15.4 m × 5 cm. Photograph by Shunk-­ Kender. Pulitzer Residence, Saint Louis. Collection of Emily Rauh Pulitzer. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los

[Albers’s] color course was not taught dogmatically—­there were simple procedures that you could learn, but he also gave more open assignments like leaf studies, studies of all different kind of materials, studies with wet and dry colors, and the range of experiments helped you to understand that you could use a material in such a way that it would inform whatever you were making. If you made something in one material it would read one way but if you made it in exactly the same format with a different material you’d get a different readout. Even if the procedure was the same, the material would change both the construction and the readout of the construction. And once you understood the basic lesson that procedure was dictated by material, you also realized that matter imposed its own form on form. That’s a lesson I never forgot.31 Color Aid / 3

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Fig. 3.5. Richard Serra, Verb List, 1967. Graphite on two sheets of paper, each 25.4 × 21.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist in honor of Wynn Kramarsky. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 3.6. (facing) Richard Serra, Double Roll, 1968. Lead, two rolls, each 10.8 × 254 cm. Photograph by Peter Moore. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

A desire to play with materials—­to roll clay and to pour concrete, as students did at Yale—­underscored the well-­known list of verbs Serra crafted in 1967 (fig. 3.5).32 As Serra moved from painting to a three-­dimensional practice in the mid-­1960s, he determined actions—­like rolling, creasing, folding, and tearing—­that could guide his experimentation with material, place, mass, and gravity.33 “I was going to use anything in relationship to anything as long as it was attached to a verb,” he wrote.34 The logic of Albers’s pedagogy thus provided Serra with a mechanism for experimentation and, as significantly, a compositional framework. Toward this end, he is known to have worked extensively with rubber, which he liked because it was an active material that “deliver[ed] potential to your fingertips,” and with lead, which was similarly malleable but offered greater mass, weight, and gravitational load.35 One presumes that Serra played with these—­and many other—­materials by suspending, and binding, and cutting them; and one imagines that he compared how materials responded to these various procedures so as to determine which material, in his words, provided a “good yield” or, to invoke Albers’s evaluative criteria, produced an outcome with the smallest ratio of effort to effect. Many of these activities resulted in outcomes that were not art; however, at times, Serra disengaged from the “nonsense” of experimentation to judge and contemplate the result. At times—­as was especially important to Serra—­objects like To Lift or Double Roll, in which the processes through which their forms came into being were evident would result (fig. 3.6). And then Serra stopped playing. Despite the evident relationship between Serra’s early work and Albers’s pedagogy, some critics, witnessing Serra lay bare the tectonics of To Lift 3 / Color Aid

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and other of his early work, have interpreted this act as a reengagement with an avant-­garde strategy (associated with constructivism in the 1920s) to vacate art of its idealism.36 Among these artists, Carl Andre became a key figure in that he “exploited the real weight of materials” as a compositional strategy.37 By isolating plates of aluminum, steel, zinc, magnesium, copper, and lead in his floor sculptures, in which individual units are not bound to one another and exhibit minimal mass, Andre showed how “the properties inherent to a specific material could be used to compose [a] work.”38 Whereas Andre did not physically manipulate the materials with which he worked, Serra transformed raw material in ways that were apparent to viewers and, in doing so, he moved beyond the object-­oriented aspects of minimalism.39 Decades later, Serra confirmed that Andre’s attitude toward material (his interest in “the matter of the matter”) was of significance to his own thinking; but, when Kynaston McShine mentioned that his description of Andre’s materiality seemed similar to how he had described Albers’s teaching, Serra responded, “They are both concerned with the relationship between the material and its potential to construct. That’s basically what Albers’s design course was: take matter, apply a procedure to it, and see what evolves.”40 Whereas Andre may have demonstrated an approach to “readymade” raw material (including how it can inhabit or construct space) upon which Serra could elaborate, Albers’s pedagogy provided Serra with a working method to do so. Serra turned to the general logic of Albers’s pedagogy to establish parameters for material experimentation in his move from painting to sculptural practice; at roughly the same time, he also employed Albers’s methods for perceptual attunement in his color instruction explicitly in coming to understand the media of film and video. Again, he did so playfully. Serra employed Color-­aid paper—­a mainstay of Albers’s instruction—­in two of the seventeen films and videotapes he made between 1968 and 1979: Color Aid (16 mm, color, sound, 36 min.) and China Girl (video, black and white, sound, 11 min.).41 In Color Aid, the film’s frame is entirely filled by a sheet of Color-­aid paper; one observes its color before Serra’s fingers enter the frame and swipe it (both color and sheet) away, upward and out of view; in doing so he reveals a new color (fig. 3.7). This action is repeated every few seconds (but not according to an evident rhythm) for thirty-­six minutes—­color after color, sheet after sheet—­until an entire stacked set of 220 Color-­aid sheets is exhausted, at which point what appears to be an unedited film, shot in real time, ends. One hears the sounds produced by the act of removing dense sheets of Color-­aid paper from the frame. And one occasionally perceives an afterimage (simultaneous contrast) upon the introduction of a new color, an effect that was among those Albers had students produce in his color course.42 While some consider Color Aid to be a “belated rejoinder” to Albers’s Interaction of Color and part of what has been described as Serra’s “post-­ relational” understanding of color,43 one also can see the film as a “free 3 / Color Aid

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Fig. 3.7. Richard Serra, still from Color Aid, 1970–­ 1971. 16mm film (color, sound), 36 min. Camera:

study” akin to those Albers encouraged in his instruction. In his color curriculum, Albers initially prescribed the color studies’ conceptual parameters as well as their presentational form. Students were challenged, for example, to employ color interaction to show how two different colors could be made to look alike, and they were expected to present their findings in a specific format (see fig. 1.33). In “free studies” (which were made at home), students often could determine the form through which to demonstrate a color principle; part of the challenge was to design an imaginative mechanism to express some aspect of “color relatedness,” the overall effectiveness of which was the measure of evaluation. As Albers elaborated, “This means color juxtaposition in which color exists for color’s sake, and therefore appears autonomous, and not merely as accompaniment to form, to shape.”44 To make color exist for color’s sake—­this is what Serra attempts to do in Color Aid, the rigid compositional parameters of which (including the restrictions of 16-­millimeter color film and the film apparatus) push the possibility of color action to its limit. He fills the camera’s frame from edge to edge with one color; there is no camera movement; and the sequence of color presented follows the arbitrary order of the stack of Color-­aid paper, thus any color interaction that occurs in the form of afterimages as one color follows another is the result of chance. The presence of afterimages —­despite Serra’s reduction of the possibility for color inter­action to a minimum—­shows, as Albers taught, that it is nearly impossible to see a single color.45 As we witness Serra’s playful experimentation with materiality of color on film, we see too that there is no such thing as “post-­relational” color.46 The perceptual dynamics of black-­and-­white video—­or the abstract logic of perception—­determine the content of China Girl, the title of which comes from film industry terminology and refers to the image (typically of Color Aid / 3

Robert Fiore. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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a light-­skinned woman juxtaposed with color calibration targets) inserted into a film’s leader and used for color matching purposes.47 The video foregrounds the incompatibility of an activity (marking a sheet of gray Color-­aid paper with white pigment and then removing it from view) with the appearance of that activity as observed by a video camera. Video recording, like filmmaking, involves the registration of light upon a medium; in video, however light intensity is converted and expressed as electrical tension (voltage) on magnetic tape. Yet a limited range of light intensities were capable of being recorded by portable devices, like the Sony Portapak Serra and other artists used in the early 1970s. This was not the first time Serra had used the abstract logic of perception as the subject for a work.48 In Frame (16 mm, black and white, sound, 22 min., 1969), he explored contradictions between the filmmaker’s perception of a space (seen through the camera lens) and the unmediated perception of the same space. In the film, one sees Serra’s arm and hand as he measures the dimensions of the space observed by the camera; ultimately, the incongruity of the space as perceived by the camera and the space itself is revealed. Using Albers’s terminology, Serra demonstrated the difference between the “factual” space that is subjected to filming and the “actual” space that is perceived by the camera and seen by the viewer. The discrepancy between the “factual” (that which exists) and “actual” (that which is perceived) was the backbone of Albers color instruction, which was predicated upon the fact that color “deceives continually.”49 For Serra, these dynamics became the basis for a film. About Frame, he recalled, “Watching something happen as it is happening while being aware that it is going to end up as another structure defined by the frame of the camera seemed reason enough to use the frame as a device to determine the entire making of the film.”50 If the logic of Frame corresponds with the essence of Albers’s color instruction generally, China Girl makes this relationship more explicit; it concerns the registration and measurement of light intensities in black-­ and-­white video as distinct from their visual expression in real space.51 And it affirms a core principle of Albers’s instruction by demonstrating the degree to which a color’s light intensity is unstable. Afterimages could make, as Albers wrote, “a light grey . . . look dark at one time and almost white at another.”52 Among many exercises directed toward developing a “discriminating sensitivity” for color, Albers’s students created gradation studies in black, white, and gray. In one kind of study, they arranged gray swatches of Color-­aid paper with different light intensities in stepped scales between black and white. In doing so, they discovered various optical effects; the boundaries between rectangles appeared to be darker despite the even distribution of color on each swatch and, at times, swatches appeared to have fluted edges despite their straight lines.53 In another kind of gradation study, students arranged scraps of gray paper cut from black-­and-­white photographic reproductions in scales between dark and 3 / Color Aid

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Fig. 3.8. Josef Albers, “Color study (gradation study from dark grey to light grey),” ca. 1963. Plate V-­1a in Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). Image courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © Yale University Press.

light polarities. In making these studies, students discovered a dearth of middle-­gray source material, a fact that underscored that “photography registers and measures light and dark” differently than the eye does—­ darks appear darker and lights appear lighter in photographs.54 As a result, the variety of so-­called middle grays is lost in many photographs. In some studies, students juxtaposed these scales with a strip of medium-­gray paper to reveal the relativity of color perception (fig. 3.8). When juxtaposed with the darker grays (as at top here), the middle-­gray ground appears to be lighter; when juxtaposed with the lighter grays (as at bottom here), the middle-­gray ground appears to be darker than it is, factually. Elsewhere the boundaries separating the middle-­gray ground from the scales appear to vanish.55 China Girl is itself a kind of gradation study in which Serra explores the perception of light and dark. One observes Serra’s hand enter the frame, mark a sheet of paper that occupies the entire frame with white pigment (in one gesture from top to bottom), and then remove the sheet of paper from view, downward (fig. 3.9). This activity is repeated—­mark after mark, sheet after sheet—­for eleven minutes. Although the viewer does not realize it initially (and this is partly the point), subsequent sheets of paper display grays of slightly lower light intensity; thus, whereas initially Serra’s white mark is barely—­if at all—­detectable, by the end of the video one perceives a striking contrast between the white mark—­which is of consistent light intensity throughout—­and its gray ground. As in Color Aid, one occasionally sees afterimages of the vertical white mark after a sheet is removed; this effect intensifies as the pace of the action increases Color Aid / 3

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Fig. 3.9. Richard Serra, still from China Girl, 1972. Video (black and white, sound), 11 min. Made in collaboration with Gerry Schum. © Richard Serra/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(which it does as the video progresses) and as the light intensity of the ground decreases. More to the point, however, Serra shows the degree to which the subtleties of light intensity are lost in video production (the medium is unable to “register and measure” light intensity accurately) and, at the same time, brings the perceptual ambiguities between observed and filmed reality into high relief. These kinds of perceptual ambiguities underscore educational thought that was known to Albers and contributed to his color instruction. Disciplined Disorientation

In order to appreciate the dynamics of Albers’s color instruction—­and how these were of lasting significance to Serra—­one needs to understand how it was shaped by educational thought in Wilhelmine Germany. It is a widely held view, especially in Frederick A. Horowitz’s writing,56 that Albers’s interest in perception corresponds with principles of gestalt psychology; yet in actual fact, research in applied educational psychology like that conducted by Hans Rupp and members of the Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung (Institute for Applied Psychology and Psychological Research Collection) was of more direct significance. These activities predated the advent of gestalt psychology, which did not become an organized subject of theoretical research until roughly 1913 or a formalized research discipline until Wolfgang Köhler’s appointment, in 1922, as head of the Psychological Institute (Psychologische Institut) of Friedrich-­Wilhelms-­Universität in Berlin.57 And while we know that Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim and Karl Duncker presented lectures on psychology at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Albers stated that the ideas they expressed merely confirmed tendencies he had observed in children as a teacher.58 Without a doubt, Albers was knowledgeable about gestalt psychology; he referred to gestalt psychologists as having proven aspects of perception to

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be true in Interaction of Color and cited the “discoveries” of gestalt psychology in lectures. But his knowledge of experimental psychology was more sophisticated than those who superficially associate Albers’s teaching with gestalt principles have demonstrated. A fuller understanding of Albers’s knowledge of psychological research allows one to appreciate the kind of synthetic or critical vision he sought to develop through his color instruction, which, broadly speaking, opened onto a relational approach to material generally, and which corresponded to a view that the artist’s work involved crafting forms that negotiate objective and subjective experience. During a leave of absence from his position as a primary school teacher between 1913 and 1915, Albers completed a two-­year course at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin, where he became certified to teach drawing at secondary schools (höheren Knaben-­ und Mädchenschulen) and teacher-­ training schools (Lehrer-­Lehrerinnenseminaren und Präparandenanstalten).59 Painting was among the subjects Albers and his classmates studied at the Kunstschule, as watercolor instruction—­and with it, color instruction—­ was part of the state drawing curricula enacted by its graduates.60 The certification process was rigorous; upon completing their course of study, students took a forty-­hour state examination in eight areas (including life drawing, drawing natural forms, linear drawing, painting, and art history) administered over a five-­day period.61 The overall goal was for students to demonstrate that they had “an open, receptive eye for shapes, tonal values and colors and a sure hand, that their spatial ability and shape memory [were] well developed and that they [were] capable of teaching.”62 Although Albers described his education at the Kunstschule as “terribly stiff,”63 the time he spent in Berlin—­where he also visited the Galerie Paul Cassirer, Galerie Der Sturm, and Kunsthandlung Fritz Gurlitt and attended the annual exhibitions of the Berliner Sezession (Berlin Secession)—­was of tremendous importance. Similarities between the pedagogical attitude of Philipp Franck, the drawing professor at the Kunstschule, and of Albers are striking.64 And it was in Berlin that Albers began to assimilate methods used in the relatively new field of applied psychology (angewandte Psychologie) that would become central to his color instruction.65 To gain admission to the Kunstschule, Albers submitted a portfolio of drawings, primarily of simple natural forms, as well as a brief description of his personal background.66 The request that applicants include drawings from nature reflected the program’s revised instructional approach.67 Whereas technical drawing had been emphasized previously at the Kunstschule—­as continued to be the case at Kunstgewerbeschulen (schools of applied arts)—­the drawing curriculum Franck established was tied to the perceived psychological needs of children and young adults. In keeping with child-­centered principles of the neue Pädagogik (progressive education), Franck later wrote that a school’s drawing and art instruction should “enable children to work freely and happily.”68 At the Kunstschule,

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students were trained pragmatically and according to the kinds of procedures they would be expected to employ as educators. Rather than develop manual skill by drawing precise copies of plaster casts, they made intuitive rapid sketches after nature, at times from memory.69 In addition to classroom training in freehand and linear drawing, anatomy, and cultural history, the program included excursions to the Grunewald to sketch from nature as well as sketching trips in Berlin to the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum for Ethnology) and Märkisches Museum; students were afforded free entry to the Zoological Garden.70 Both in the classroom and during excursions they developed an understanding of visual representational conventions like parallel projection, shadow construction, and perspective. Furthermore, they honed their teaching skills—­including practical tasks like drawing on the blackboard—­in four in-­house Übungsschulen (practice schools) as well as at two external schools affiliated with the Kunstschule.71 Franck summarized his educational thought in Zeichen- und Kunstunterricht: Handbuch des Unterrichts an höheren Schulen, zur Einführung und Weiterbildung in Einzeldarstellungen,72 where he addressed broad topics like the relationship between art and nature, the dynamics of mind and body, and talent in detailing what he believed to be the essence of art teaching, its relationship to understandings of art and pedagogy, and the possibilities and limitations of art instruction generally.73 He also presented practical information about art instruction, including the use of teaching aids (Lehrmittel), approaches to nature study, the use of drawings and paintings in the classroom, and the psychological significance of art instruction.74 Several of Franck’s views specifically correspond to well-­known aspects of Albers’s instruction. For instance, Albers did not allow students to use erasers in his drawing course. Franck asserted that the use of erasers diminished the freshness (Frische) of a drawing. “One should forbid the use of the eraser or not accustom it to the children,” he wrote. “It only leads to insecurity and, because it is believed that one can improve with its help, leads to cursoriness right from the start, where great concentration is necessary.”75 Franck observed the merit of pinning student drawings to the chalkboard for group critique, which was a mainstay of Albers’s instruction—­and remains a popular practice to this day. In his discussion of psychology and instruction, Franck asserted, “Nothing educates like comparison with others, and even the least gifted learn from the work of the gifted.”76 With respect to art making, he stressed, “The craft of art is knowledge of the material and knowledge of tools.”77 While the idea (Einfall) in art was of utmost value, Franck maintained that “the idea can never violate handicraft rules, for example never defy the material. What is meant for wood cannot come from stone; what is possible in watercolor never can be easily transferred in oil.”78 In Albers’s design instruction—­especially as it was practiced at the Bauhaus—­students were to explore and experiment with various materials so as to discover their unique, inherent properties with an eye toward how to employ these in design. 3 / Color Aid

Similarities between Franck and Albers regarding their attitudes toward the education of vision as pedagogical goal are more broadly significant. Like Albers, who declared upon his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1933 that he intended to “open the eyes” of students,79 Franck foregrounded “learning to see” (sehen lernen) as central to art instruction: “To learn to see means to train the eyes and to learn to use them correctly.”80 Toward that end, it was important that children learn to see artistically, which involved the development of a synthetic vision (synthetisch sehen)—­a kind of comparative vision.81 It was imperative that they learn to do so at an early age, for the “eye . . . not kept in action, becomes dull or adjusts itself to a different way of seeing.”82 Thus, instruction in drawing, painting, and modeling was essential to a child’s development. In learning to draw or “compose in black and white,” one learned to “reproduce what is seen according to nature and from memory on the surface [and] freely manipulate the things one looks at.”83 Learning to paint or “composition in color” involved “recogniz[ing] the colors and their essence, grasp[ing] their composition and their influence on each other, understand[ing] the colored structure of a surface, [and] be[ing] able to work freely with the color.”84 And in learning to model or to “compose in plastic material,” one developed abilities to see into and render observed forms.85 Each of these tasks involved confronting the relativity of vision. Indeed, for Franck, the “contradiction between knowledge and seeing, between mind and body” played a major role in educating children to see; “the little [unschooled] children draw everything according to what they know. Only with the training of the eye do they come to the correct use of the eye and the laws of sight.”86 But drawing, painting, and modeling were more than mechanical activities meant to tame a child’s vision; they were psychologically relevant. Franck observed how approaches to drawing instruction—­as informed by the work of Carl Götze and others associated with the neue Pädagogik in Hamburg—­had developed in the decades since drawing instruction became part of school curricula in Prussia.87 “What made drawing instruction stand out from its [initial] technical limitations,” he wrote, “was the knowledge of its effect on the children’s psyche. Yes, its psychological side became as important as its artistic, and the two sides were inseparable. The more the artistic grew, the more the psychological grew.”88 The Kunstschule curriculum—­which was intended to train educators, not artists per se—­reflected the dynamics between technical skill and psychological understanding. Indeed, Franck felt that the art teacher must be a good psychologist in order to recognize the hidden inner abilities of the child as expressed artistically.89 This goal was actively pursued in the Übungsschulen, where students observed variations in how children approached the task of painting the same object; the manner in which children represented the object—­in outline or as a color field, for instance—­revealed aspects of their psychology.90 Observations like these were central to the research of the Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Color Aid / 3

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Sammelforschung in Potsdam, the work of which was known to Franck and his students through its participation in the Deutsche Unterrichts-­ Ausstellung (German Teaching Exhibition), which opened in Berlin in 1912. The German Teaching Exhibition provided an opportunity for educators to view current publications and educational apparatuses and to learn about developments in educational research. It included sections devoted to all subject areas taught in German schools, including physical fitness (Turnen, Spiel und Sport), drawing (Zeichnen), and handicrafts (Knaben-­und Mädchenhandarbeit), as well as a display of items used by school physicians (Schulhygiene).91 Franck selected the works displayed in the drawing section, which were the same as those he had assembled for the Brussels International Exhibition two years previously.92 He noted, two years on, that his selections already were out of date; “drawing from memory and representations of imagination” were underrepresented relative to current practices.93 Franck was keenly attuned to the effect psychological research had upon drawing curricula, as were the exhibition’s organizers with respect to school curricula generally. In addition to what were meant to be permanent installations devoted to school subjects, the exhibition was a venue for showcasing educational innovation through special installations. Notably, the organizers included selections from the collection of the Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung in the exhibition, as well as a separate installation entitled Einfache Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik (simple devices for experimental pedagogy) organized by Hans Rupp. The study of visual perception was essential to the work of the Institute. Founded in 1906 by William Stern and Otto Lipmann, and associated with the Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie (Society for Experimental Psychology), its members initially pursued research in predicative or descriptive psychology (Aussagepsychologie) related to forensic science, education, the development of language in early childhood, and intellectual aptitude.94 Indeed, Stern later developed the intelligence quotient, or IQ, test.95 To aid researchers—­including psychiatrists, pedagogues, ethnologists, and physicians—­in a variety of disciplines, the Institute retained material related to its own research and collected the work of other researches and educators to encourage comparative analysis (Georg Kerschensteiner, for instance, deposited thousands of drawings made by students in Munich).96 Its holdings included sample psychological questionnaires; examination protocols; drawings, writings, and musical works by individuals with various aptitudes; and documentation of natural behaviors, like examples of facial expressions.97 It also housed a library intended to provide researchers access to information about various psychological methods and analytic materials, and it served schools and other clients by evaluating psychological examinations.98 With respect to the collection, Lipmann distinguished between objects that were instinctively created, like “the drawings of the mentally ill and tattoos; the literary products of children . . . and criminals; 3 / Color Aid

and . . . children’s [musical] compositions,” and those that were created in context of a specific experiment.99 The latter were particularly useful as they invited comparison between disparate responses to prompts or stimuli; for example, as Lipmann noted, these objects were used in the visual arts to reveal how gender, psychoses, and other factors influence representation.100 They also showed changes “in the use of colors under the influence (of age or) of color blindness and color weakness.”101 The Institute drew upon these materials—­related to differential psychology—­for its exhibitions at the Fünfte Kongress der Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie (Fifth Convention of the Society for Experimental Psychology) as well as the Deutsche Unterrichts-­Ausstellung.102 Rupp, an associate of the Institute, presented a selection of devices related to experimental pedagogical research in his installation at the latter exhibition. He explained that the devices served three primary functions: they were used in the education of prospective teachers at training institutions; they served pedagogic research generally, insofar as they aided in the discovery of new pedagogic questions; and they were useful in schools to measure students’ skills (Prüfung von Fähigkeiten) and, as teaching objects themselves, “to educate the eye and train the musical ear.”103 Rupp ­arranged the devices—­including some of his own design—­in ten categories, including one devoted to color perception (Farbenwahrnehmungen).104 With regard to this category, he emphasized that while knowledge of color perception had a practical application in teaching painting and in learning how to look at pictures, it was more important that exercises draw a student’s attention to the role of color perception in everyday life and the overlooked fact that color perception is subjective.105 This was Albers’s goal as well, especially with respect to how his color course was understood at Black Mountain College in context of the school’s general education curriculum. Those of Albers’s students who took up careers as artists—­ among others, Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Susan Weil—­are well known, yet the majority of Black Mountain students applied the lessons of Albers’s color instruction indirectly, as related to an understanding of life itself as existing between objective and subjective understanding. For Albers, all of the problems of life were reflected in art.106 And the essence of art—­which Albers articulated as the discrepancy between intellect and intuition—­was manifest in the dynamics of perception. Albers’s color instruction brought these dynamics to the fore insofar as the exercises he employed—­some of which resemble Rupp’s devices—­express discrepancies between the physical fact of a color and its psychic effect. Rupp displayed devices that demonstrated physiological manifestations of color perception, like simultaneous and successive contrast (Simultan-­ und Sukzessivkontrast), as well as psychological phenomena like color constancy (Gedächtnisfarben).107 With respect to physiological manifestations of color perception, he recognized the importance of learning to grasp color relationships and the ability to differentiate various properColor Aid / 3

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ties of color.108 For Rupp, this was a particularly important skill when, for example, translating the appearance of color objects into black-­and-­white photographs. One must be able to find a suitable gray for individual colors as well as their combination.109 Decades later, Albers used black-­and-­white photographic reproductions—­as an example of how one negotiates the relativity of color perception, insofar as photography registers lights and darks differently than does the eye—­to contextualize exercises through which students developed the ability to discern the relative light intensities of a color.110 Toward that end, he would have students compare sheets of paper of the same hue and ask that they indicate which example was lighter or darker. To aid in this process, they overlapped the corners of the sheets, focusing their vision upon the point of overlap, and observed the after­ image that appeared when the top sheet of paper was removed quickly.111 If the afterimage seemed to be lighter than the bottom sheet, then the sheet that had been removed was the darker of the two. Color-­aid paper aided Albers’s students in this process. Rupp had suggested such a tool when he noted that it would be advantageous to “the investigation and education of color vision” if a large, complete collection of colors were available in a convenient format—­like “woolen fabrics or papers”—­that research subjects and students could arrange as desired.112 But even without such a set—­as during Albers’s years at Black Mountain—­ other colorful materials could be employed. Rupp suggested that teachers show students examples of different phenomena as observed in daily life and collect “drawings, ornaments, pictures, craft or other objects” for the purpose of instruction.113 He displayed what he felt were the best available devices to use in attuning students to the physiology of color perception and the perception of black and white. Holmgren’s Worsteds (Wollproben nach Holmgren), a set of approximately 130 small bundles of differently pigmented wool, could be used to examine color perception.114 Rupp suggested, for example, that one use the set to consider what one calls red “at first glance” and whether this changes “when the colors are held side by side.” Which red, he asked, is determined then to be the “best” red, and do adults, children, and painters respond to this question differently?115 Furthermore, he suggested, the set of colored wools could be used in simple experiments to recognize what colors, like violet and orange, might be “recognized as reddish, if not as red.”116 He considered the most difficult—­and instructive—­task to be indicating the differences between colors. These kinds of exercises were to be the cornerstone of Albers’s color instruction: to make two different colors appear to be the same, to identify a third color that represents the mixture of two given colors, and so on. Rupp wrote: The question arises as to whether the different properties—­tone, brightness, intensity, saturation, etc.—­are separated and what the child, as well as the adult, understands by this. You can present different pairs and ask that their differences be characterized, or you can find colors with the 3 / Color Aid

same brightness, search for the brightest, most intense color, or assemble a series of colors by their relative brightness, saturation and the like.117

And like Albers, Rupp isolated the study of value perception. He displayed the Grau-­Serie manufactured by Zimmermann, a set of fifty 50-by-60-­ centimeter pieces of paper in stepped shades of gray, to achieve similar ends with respect to black and white perception.118 One could use this gray series to describe various types of gray and to examine one’s sensitivity to gray shades. One might juxtapose sheets to determine the midpoint between two shades of gray; to transpose a combination of several grays, shifting each an equal number of steps toward greater or lesser brightness; or to observe two pairings in which the ratio between paired grays is equivalent but the magnitude of the contrast differs.119 As Rupp observed, these were questions significant to photographic practice, yet, he claimed, without tools like the apparatuses he highlighted in the exhibition—­including his own Tafel der photographischen Helligkeiteswerte (table of photographic brightness values)—­it was impossible “to search for the individual grays, to coordinate them and thus measure the delicacy of our judgment.”120 Visual judgment was Albers’s goal as well, albeit toward different ends. Rupp sought data that might aid researchers in differentiating between how, for example, children and adults perceive color, which might be useful to pedagogy and in practical applications. Albers sought to develop in his students a critical vision that could be activated productively in their own creative practice. With respect to psychological perceptual phenomena, Rupp displayed various color-­mixing devices (Mischapparate) that offered more exacting measurements than the simple devices above. These included gyroscopes and spinning tops as well as devices like the “simple mirror color mixer by Helmholtz-­Rupp” and “disks for measuring sensitivity difference by Donders-­Rupp.”121 The rotation of disks in the latter device created rings of various light intensity; users would be asked how many rings they could see in order to measure perceptual sensitivity. Among the visual experiences the devices revealed, Rupp was especially interested in Gedächtnisfarben, or instances in which a known object is perceived as having a consistent color regardless of its lighting conditions—­when, as he wrote, “the impression does not correspond to the stimulus, [but] rather is corrected.”122 With respect to research, there was merit in understanding whether different types of lighting (natural versus gas lighting, for instance) effected the correction; if age were a factor in the correction; and, significantly, if the “painter and aesthete” (Maler and Ästhetiker) experienced the correction differently.123 With respect to pedagogy, Rupp felt that exposing students to the phenomena of Gedächtnisfarben was a way of counteracting the ­“naive conception” that ascribes a specific “inherent color” to each object.124 Aware that drawing curricula in schools were intended to develop and refine a student’s vision, Rupp positioned the objects he presented as Color Aid / 3

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extending this curricular goal in terms of color perception and advocated that they be used in training teachers at Lehrerseminare. The devices offered controlled conditions though which students could “practice seeing.”125 Rupp’s ultimate question with respect to pedagogy was “in what sense should the pupil learn ‘to see’?”126 Like Franck (and Albers), he advocated for a composite vision that “stand[s] between the two realities of physical and natural color” and allows one to “strive for complete compensation, seeing one’s own color.”127 Even if complete success were not attainable, he felt the child should learn to approximate it.128 Furthermore, Rupp pondered whether or not one should be taught to see like a “painter,” who can elect to compensate for differences between one’s knowledge of a color and its perception when creating a representation of reality.129 And with respect to the rendered image, should the “work” (Arbeit) of a painter’s vision—­the activity of compensation—­be obscured from view in a representation or should this labor be retained? How, in other words, does the painter render vision?130 Albers answered this question by making the work of vision itself the subject of his painting; and he made the work of perception the subject of his color instruction. Richard Serra ultimately would make the work of perception his subject as well. Albers’s close association with gestalt psychology and its corresponding articulation in art critical discourse—­in which meaning was measured by the aesthetic effectiveness of the combination of individual elements relative to an overall, self-­contained form—­has obscured the lasting importance of his color instruction (and his pedagogy more generally). This has been the case with respect to Serra, whose work, in the wake of Donald Judd’s and Robert Morris’s challenges to a value system associated with gestalt aesthetics in the 1960s, was cast as opposed to gestalt principles.131 Rather, Serra’s approach to sculpture has been articulated as the activity of “structuring . . . materials in order to motivate a body and to demarcate a place” in time and thereby as proposing an active relationship between subject, object, and site.132 These dynamics are particularly evident in Serra’s architectural-­scale steel sculptures, into which one can enter—­most notably the series of torqued ellipses he began to produce in the late 1990s and has he described as the “least optical” pieces he had made insofar as they primarily concern the experience of space.133 Viewing these works in light of Albers’s pedagogy allows one to see the lasting significance of his instruction despite its association with the gestalt. In selecting steel to achieve the spatial effects desired of his torqued ellipses, Serra employed the material logic of Albers’s design instruction. He told Lynne Cooke that he was using steel almost as one would use rubber, in a manner similar to its use in To Lift decades earlier.134 The material properties inherent to rubber hold To Lift in place relative to the forces of gravity; indeed, the work would have been an elegantly simple response to Albers’s prompt for students to demonstrate the plastic potential of a material without creating waste—­perhaps even without using 3 / Color Aid

tools. Serra similarly employs the inherent tensile strength of rolled steel to hold his torqued ellipses in place. And, in keeping with Albers’s desire that students approach materials counterintuitively, he demonstrates the extreme plastic potential of steel, which he manipulates in a manner that makes the tremendously heavy material appear to be afloat despite one’s knowledge of its mass. He wanted the material “do something it hasn’t done before.”135 Furthermore, the ways in which Serra arranges torqued and bent plates of steel relative to one another creates a sense of spatial disorientation in keeping with the perceptual dynamics of Albers’s color instruction. This is particularly evident in a body of work in which Serra explores relationships between the curvature of a torus (the doughnut form that results when a sphere is rotated on an axis outside of the sphere) and the curvature of a sphere. In Union of the Torus and the Sphere (fig. 3.10), he fused two steel plates rolled into the respective shapes of these curves to create an eccentric form, the oppositional geometry of which presses into and shapes the space of its (our) environment. In other works, like Between the Torus and the Sphere (2003–­2005) and Blind Spot (fig. 3.11), Serra employs the spatial dynamics made possible by combining these shapes to create forms into which one can enter. In Blind Spot—­the scale of which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view as a whole—­one crisscrosses a space bounded by six arced steel plates joined at five points where one of the three plates exhibiting the curvature of a sphere meets one of the three exhibiting the curvature of a torus. Upon entering the work, one first walks through a passageway formed by two plates exhibiting the curvature of toruses, then reverses direction and walks between two plates exhibiting the curvature of spheres. One repeats this sequence, reversing direction four times, before reaching the center of the work, which is a space bounded by the intersecting curvatures of a sphere and a torus. It is a dead end; the only way out is to retrace one’s steps. The work involves gestalt principles in several ways. Consistent with Serra’s environmental installations and other of his large-­scale sculptures, it negates a gestalt reading insofar as it is nearly impossible to visualize the form as a “whole” to which individual elements might be held in relationship. A work like Blind Spot demands a different mode of interpretation, one that involves—­interestingly, given Serra’s seeming resistance to the gestalt—­an experience akin to the perceptual phenomena explored by experimental psychologists. A blind spot is an obstruction in one’s vision (a punctum caecum on the optical disc of the retina) for which one compensates involuntarily by using information received by the visual field that surrounds it to “fill in” the missing stimulus, thereby stabilizing one’s physiologically unstable vision. Upon entering Blind Spot, one finds moving back and forth through its constricted corridors without knowledge of one’s destination to be disorienting; the shape of the form cannot be fully perceived from outside or from within the work until its form is revealed (in Color Aid / 3

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inverse) when one reaches the innermost space. As one reverses course to exit the work, one employs the memory of having moved from its exterior to its center with the experience of one’s body presently moving from its center to its exterior in order to complete or stabilize one’s understanding of the work’s form. In essence, and in keeping with Serra’s desire to make the viewing subject the object of his work, one comes to understand the work’s form through one’s perception of its experience; as Serra might suggest, a work like Blind Spot shows how perception is thinking—­or, updating the logic of Albers’s notion that “seeing is a creative act”—­how perceiving is a creative act. Although it ostensibly has nothing to do with color, Blind Spot invokes the compensatory aspects of vision and, more generally, signals perceptual instability, which was the essence of Albers’s color instruction. Yet color relativity, according to Rudolf Arnheim (who trained under Wolfgang Köhler in Berlin) frustrated Gestaltists. With respect to Albers’s color instruction, Arnheim noted, “Color is a most exasperating demonstration of the gestalt thesis that the appearance of a perceived object depends on what is seen around it.”136 If the individual units that, in combination, constitute a stable form (or a “good gestalt”) are themselves instable insofar as they are seen in relation to their surroundings, then a verifiably unified color composition is impossible. While this instability might have bothered those who sought to objectify perception, it was a creative opportunity for Albers insofar as color relativity opened onto a view of all artistic Color Aid / 3

Fig. 3.10. (facing) Richard Serra, Union of the Torus and the Sphere, 2001. Weatherproof steel, 3.6 × 11.5 × 4 m overall; plate thickness, 5 cm. Photograph by Dirk Reinartz. Dia:Beacon, New York. Dia Art Foundation. Gift of the artist. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © ­Estate of Dirk Reinartz, courtesy Galerie m, ­Bochum, Germany. Fig. 3.11. Richard Serra, Blind Spot, 2002–­2003. Weathering steel, three toroid and three spherical sections, 4 × 17.9 × 9 m overall; plate thickness, 5 cm. Photograph by Dirk Reinartz. Private collection. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Estate of Dirk ­Reinartz, courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, G ­ ermany.

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material as contingent. This relational approach to material was essential to the work of several of those who experienced his curriculum, the lessons of which they applied creatively in their individual practices. With respect to Serra, the creative application of Albers’s pedagogy involved, in his early work, the establishment of parameters through which to play with material; in his exploration of potentialities of the media of film and video, the framing of an experimental practice; and, in his later work, the creation of three-­dimensional circumstances in which one experiences perceptual discrepancies. Albeit latent in discourse on the artist, Serra did learn something from Albers. His own brief teaching career underscores this fact and returns us to the problem of Albers’s position in discourse on advanced art. Soon after he graduated from Yale, Serra took several teaching jobs in New York City, including at Queens College.137 Albers’s pedagogy helped to ground his instruction. “At Queens” he remarked, “I taught a design course that dealt with figure-­ground and use of materials in the Albers tradition.”138 When Robert Pincus-­Witten, Serra’s colleague at Queens, penned his seminal text on the artist for Artforum in 1969, he devoted one of the essay’s four sections to a discussion of Serra’s teaching, which the critic considered to be “an important pedagogical contribution.”139 Serra, he declared, upended the instructional tradition: “Since there was no ‘perfect’ model against which the student production could be gauged,” he wrote, “a radical anti-­ establishment aspect of Serra’s teaching was that the notion of ‘Excellent,’ ‘Good,’ ‘Fair,’ or ‘Failing’ was entirely expunged. In short, the entire notion of ‘Art’ did not arise.”140 He described Serra’s instruction as “an elementarist analysis of the physical properties germane to any given material.”141 It “minimizes . . . any valorized finished product, but instead stresses those issues and procedures which are central to the execution of any specific act, or set of acts, in as clear and didactic a way as possible”—­and was thus unlike the typical “evolutionary” and “final-­object-­oriented” approach to instruction, which Pincus-­Witten described as “post-­Cézanne-­like,” “post-­ Hofmann-­like,” and “post-­Albers-­like” (by which he meant after or in keeping with these traditions).142 Yet it is clear that Serra’s desire for students to investigate the properties of materials according to set procedures that result in didactic outputs that are not “Art” is in keeping with Albers’s instructional methodology. To recall Serra’s description of the latter’s design course, “take matter, apply a procedure to it, and see what evolves.”143 For Pincus-­Witten, however, Serra’s work and teaching were cut from the same cloth and were similarly innovative. This may have been the case, but one wonders why the critic found it necessary to excise Albers from the narrative of Serra’s pedagogy, just as he was from the genealogy of Serra’s practice? Serra’s teaching was understood, not as rooted in an educational tradition (which it was), but as a radical pedagogy; and, more generally, pedagogy was assumed to reflect, rather than inform, the shifting conditions of art making.144 Pincus-­Witten, who was among the 3 / Color Aid

critics who first articulated the move toward process-­oriented practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recalled that “basic pictorial and sculptural properties appeared to be the ‘subject’ or primary importance” in the work students made in Serra’s courses: “Images of stroking, counting, forms which leaned, forms which fell, scatterings, mural scale compositions of pasted paper in which at each moment that a local center ‘appeared’ so it was ‘displaced.’”145 Attending to the inherent properties of materials was central to Albers’s pedagogy, which, as Albers elaborated, was meant to promote intellectual flexibility and material inventiveness: “We do not start [our studies] with retrospection and have no ambition to represent, to illustrate, to embellish or to express something. And we do not think of making useful objects right away.”146 As in responses to Albers’s frequent prompt, asking students to demonstrate perceptual contradiction in their studies, in student films made in context of Serra’s course, “moving objects were shot so that they appeared to be still while the static environments appeared to move.”147 The radicality Pincus-­Witten observed in Serra’s teaching was a critic’s fantasy, the crafting of which helped to write Albers’s out of history. Furthermore, it denied the fact that Albers’s pedagogy also was born in a moment of educational progressivism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some proponents of which (like Friedrich Nietzsche) were skeptical of state interests in education, and to which a view of education as emancipatory (indebted to Jean-­Jacques Rousseau) was central.148 Yet in keeping with the way critical writing on Serra and other artists developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Serra necessarily was cast as making a fundamental break with an educative tradition despite evident links between his instruction and Albers’s pedagogy.

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Play t i me

In the late 1960s, philosopher Nelson Goodman founded a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education called Project Zero.1 Its purpose was to investigate the nature of artistic knowledge and, as Goodman recalled, the arts “as ways of understanding and even of constructing our environments.”2 The enterprise was in keeping with the basic desire of Hans Rupp and many others—­including some Bauhäusler—­to develop means for quantifying perception and to employ the resulting data educationally; among the topics initially queried by members of Project Zero was how children perceived different kinds of pictures.3 Simultaneous with the establishment of Project Zero—­across campus—­the recently inaugurated Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts mounted the third of three exhibitions intended to help define its fledgling program in visual studies.4 The organizers of Bauhaus—­a Teaching Idea acknowledged the design school’s precarious position in the 1960s. Although the Bauhaus had exerted a “powerful influence,” they conceded that it was “both praised and criticized for the wrong reasons” and recognized how the recent “creative revolt” against the Bauhaus had fostered the construction of ahistorical mythologies. Bauhaus—­a Teaching Idea was intended to present the history of the design school accurately and, significantly, to encourage a “critical re­appraisal” of current approaches to visual studies; “perhaps we can see more clearly where we are going,” the organizers declared, “if we can recognize where we have come from.”5 Despite the exhibition’s skeptical approach to the received Bauhaus narrative, Josef Albers refused to lend work to Bauhaus—­a Teaching Idea; again, he asserted that he did not wish “to participate in Bauhaus exhibitions or Bauhaus propaganda.”6 And he would not be swayed.7 Yet, while he was unconvinced by retrospective approaches to the Bauhaus, it is worth asking: wouldn’t the former primary school teacher have found the activities of Project Zero intriguing? It is striking how effectively Albers translated educational thought originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth

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centuries—­intended to educate children and derived from the activity of play—­in curricula meant for adult students of art and design, especially in light of play’s increasing significance in discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Allan Kaprow notably observed its importance to the education of the “un-­artist” in 1972.8 And play—­conceived of as a mindset or outlook about purposeful activity that is experienced as empowering, meaningful, and joyful—­ultimately became the subject of empirical research under the auspices of Project Zero.9 The following example of how play can be employed to help students understand the mutability of perception is in line with Albers’s appreciation of “directed fun and work.”10 At one of Project Zero’s partner schools, pairs of children were asked to work together to determine how to draw a map of the world upon the surface of an orange. They thus were afforded a degree of agency within parameters. After executing this assignment, the students were instructed to peel the orange and consequently to experience (and understand) the relationship between the Earth as a three-­dimensional object and its two-­dimensional representation, which they recognized as differing from the (often distorted) representations they had seen in atlases and elsewhere—­and may even have referred to in determining what to draw upon the surfaces of their oranges.11 Albers, who happened to live in a town called Orange, delighted in the educational utility of visual deception (which he called a Schwindel) and liked brain teasers.12 He encouraged his students at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University to engage in lateral thinking, activity that was, in the contemporary language of Project Zero, fueled by a conviction that understanding is not only something you have, but something you do. The quality of activity was what mattered in the end.

Ep i l o g u e

This book is the outgrowth of a paper I delivered at the 94th Annual College Art Association Conference when a graduate student and expanded upon in conjunction with the exhibition Albers and Moholy-­Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World at Tate Modern. I thank Charles Cramer and Kim Grant as well as Achim Borchardt-­Hume for providing the first opportunity to explore themes that became the foundation upon which I crafted this book. Research did not begin in earnest until years later, while I was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. The book’s character developed further while I was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Amherst College. My Amherst colleagues and friends in the Department of Art and the History of Art and at the Mead Art Museum helped to shape both the book and its author—­thank you, especially, Carol Clark, Nicola Courtright, Betsey Garand, Carol Keller, Samuel Morse, Yael Rice, Natasha Staller, and Robert Sweeney. At Indiana University Bloomington, I have benefited from the support of the Department of Art History as stewarded by Patrick McNaughton and Diane J. Reilly, and from each of my exceptional departmental colleagues, including Amelia Berry, Alexandra Burlingame, Douglas Case, and Fenella Flinn. The book assumed its final form at the Institut für Kunst-­und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-­Universität zu Berlin, where I held an Alexander von Humboldt-­Stiftung/Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. I am very grateful for the support of my institutional sponsors Claudia Blümle and Michaela Marek, the long-­standing enthusiastic encouragement and generosity of Susanne von Falkenhausen, and the kindness shown me by members of the Institut, many of whom contributed to my final conceptualization of the book. Eva Ehninger, Inge Hinterwaldner, Angela Matyssek, and Margarete Pratschke were especially generous interlocutors. Many people helped me in various ways to shepherd this book to publication. They include Larne Abse Gogarty, Zeynep Çelik Alexander,

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Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Graham Bader, Lamia Balafrej, Sarah Bassett, Timothy Alan Bell, Christopher Benfey, Barry Bergdoll, Homi K. Bhabha, Phillip E. Bloom, Torsten Blume, Alessandro Bortolazzo, Ellen Boucher, Annie Bourneuf, Horst Bredekamp, Jon Cancro, Melissa Chan, Michael Allman Conrad, Katherine D. Crone, Chanchal B. Dadlani, Melody Barnett Deusner, Stephen Deusner, Brian DeVore, Patrick C. Downs, Ann-­Cathrin Drews, Noam M. Elcott, Eric Ellingsen, Jonathan Elmer, Michelle Facos, Ksenia Fedorova, Briony Fer, Rachel Ferris, Laura Frahm, ­Johanna Függer-­ Vagts, Margaret S. Graves, Franziska Greiner-­Petter, Cordula Grewe, Sarah Guérin, Robert E. Harrist Jr., Steffen Haug, Anke te Heesen, Reinhold Heller, Arturo Herrera, Nancy Hiller, William E. Hood, Matthew C. Hunter, Rachel Jans, Jitske Jasperse, Branden W. Joseph, Joost Keizer, Athena Kirk, Holgar A. Klein, Cynthia Klinghammer, Giles Knox, Juliet Koss, Min Kyung Lee, Ann-­Sophie Lehmann, David Levine, Steven Lindberg, Megan R. Luke, Martha MacLeish, Colleen McKenna, Christine Mehring, W. J. T. Mitchell, Andrew Moisey, Dylan Joseph Montanari, Kathrin Müller, Richard T. Neer, Mignon Nixon, Elizabeth Otto, Naz Pantaloni, Johannes Pauwen, Lynn Peemoeller, Prudence Peiffer, Kathy Pollack, Ryan Powell, Bret L. Rothstein, Marco Scacchi, Birgit Schapow, Georg Schelbert, Wayne Schmitt, Joel Score, Claire Sherman, Rachel Shuman, Michaele Simmering, Robert Slifkin, Olga Smith, Steve Taviner, James Whitman Toftness, Stefan Trinks, Jordan Troeller, Anna Vallye, Imke Volkers, Martha Ward, Matthias Waschek, Zhu Jing, and Tina Zürn. I am indebted particularly to Charles W. Haxthausen and to Karen Koehler, from whose council and wisdom I have benefited immensely—­and to Robin Schuldenfrei. Brenda Danilowitz, Karen Koehler, Christina Normore, Jeannette Redensek, Christa Noel Robbins, and Dawna L. Schuld each read sections of the manuscript in various stages of completion; the book is much better due to their efforts as well as those of two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press. This book simply would not have existed were it not for my most enduring supporters, my parents, Eugene and Sandra, and my brother, Andrew, as well as Lisa Kaplan, Jennifer Mansfield, Florian Mitter, Asya Ollis, Rebecca Partridge, and, last but not least (mostly, in fact), Stefano Santangelo, i.e., Sciurus Ste. It also owes its life in no small part to Susan M. Bielstein, editor extraordinaire at the University of Chicago Press. The staff of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation are among the most generous colleagues I have encountered—­working with them is a delight. I cannot thank Nicholas Fox Weber, Brenda Danilowitz, and Jeannette Redensek enough for their long-­standing support, and for teaching me so much about Albers. I also sincerely thank Michael Beggs, Fritz Horstman, Nicole Marino, Samuel McCune, Karis Medina, Amy Jean Porter, and Maria Shevelkina. The Albers Foundation provided all images of and the rights to reproduce Albers’s work by courtesy. Richard Serra also supplied images and waived fees to reproduce his work, as did Helen Charash and

Acknowledgments

the Estate of Eva Hesse. I am most grateful for the kindness they have shown in doing so. Among the librarians, archivists, and curators who have assisted me in my research, I thank Andria Derstine and Andrea Gyorody at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; Paul Schlotthauer at the Pratt Institute Libraries; Genevieve Coyle at the Yale University Library; Emily Rothrum and Tiffany Wang at Hauser & Wirth; Trina McKeever at Richard Serra Studio; Laura Muir at the Harvard Art Museums; Erika Babatz and Nina Schönig at the Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin; Mirjam Koring at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; Kai Ole Koop, who introduced me to the now-­defunct Pädagogische Museum der Universität Bielefeld; Rüdiger Wulf at the Westfälisches Schulmuseum; Dietmar Schenck at the Archiv der Universität der Künste Berlin; Sibylle Volz and Silke Güthling at the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin; and Kristina Keogh, former head of the Fine Arts Library at Indiana University Bloomington. Research for this book was underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt-­Stiftung/Foundation, the latter of which also helped to finance its production. The Department of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington helped offset fees for image acquisition. I am grateful for having been awarded a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation as well as a Research Fellowship from the Indiana University College Arts and Humanities Institute and a Research Leave Supplement from the College of Arts and Sciences and Office of the Vice Provost for Research at Indiana University Bloomington.

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1. “50 Years

Bauhaus,” brochure for Chicago exhibition, August 25–­September 26, 1969, Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin. 2. Josef Albers to Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunsthaus Zürich, January 12, 1968, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archives, Papers of Josef Albers (hereafter, Albers Foundation, Papers), box 97, folder 10. Josef Albers (1888–­1976) was a student at the Bauhaus between 1920 and 1923. Along with László Moholy-­Nagy, he taught the Bauhaus preliminary course between 1923 and 1928; he was solely responsible for the course from 1928 until the Bauhaus closed in 1933. 3. Josef Albers to Ludwig Grote, November 18, 1967, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 97. folder 10. Walter Gropius observed, in response: “Why [Albers] has developed such isolation is unknown to me. He has had quite some recognition in [the United States], but he may think this is not enough.” Walter Gropius to Ludwig Grote, January 3, 1968, Bauhaus-­Archiv Berlin. 50 Years Bauhaus opened in Stuttgart on May 4, 1968, some three weeks following the shooting of Rudi Dutschke in Berlin and just days before thousands took to the streets of Paris. Major news outlets seem not to have taken note of Albers’s far smaller protest and offered generally uncritical assessments of the exhibition as installed in Stuttgart (1968), London (1968), and Paris (1969). See, for example, Erich Pfeiffer-­Belli, “Beschwörung einer schöpferischen Idee: Die Ausstellung ‘50 Jahre Bauhaus’ im Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 8, 1968; Edwin Mullins, “If the Revolution Hadn’t Happened . . . ,” Sunday Telegraph, September 22, 1968; Jacques Michel, “L’École du Bauhaus et son Rayonnement: Mythes et légendes,” Le Monde, May 10, 1969. An exception is a small notice about the Royal Academy installation in which Gropius (revising history) is quoted as stating, “The teaching methods we introduced 50 years ago at the Bauhaus, accepting that students should have as much a say as teachers, apply equally to other subjects. . . . The student explosion in America is quite spontaneous. They must be given more say.” John London, “Gropius Ahead,” Evening News, September 19, 1968. 4. Josef Albers to Ludwig Grote, May 27, 1967, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 97, folder 10. Albers had been displeased especially by an exhibition organized by Roman Clemens. See Clemens, Bauhaus: Eine Ausstellung von Idee und Arbeit, von Geist und Leben am Bauhaus 1919–­1928 und bis 1933 (Darmstadt: Kunstverein, 1961). 5. Albers was keenly aware of his portrayal in print and would write to authors to criticize and correct their texts. In 1938, he wrote László Moholy-­Nagy, asking that, subsequently, he omit a remark in The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Archi-

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tecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938) indicating that Moholy-­Nagy’s instruction continued after he had left the Bauhaus. Albers wrote, “. . . I have had the experience quite often of being considered your follower at the Bauhaus.” Josef Albers to L. Moholy-­Nagy, August 28, 1938, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Josef Albers Papers (MS 32), box 2, folder 20. 6. Anni Albers to Jay Doblin, July 3, 1969, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 97, folder 10. 7. Critics and curators who attempted to view Albers’s work as “contemporary” in the 1960s and early 1970s struggled to do so. In his catalogue essay for Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Geldzahler suggests that Albers’s art refutes the false duality and mutual exclusivity of art and science insofar as Albers approaches color both technically and emotionally. John Canaday, to whom Geldzahler may have responded in his essay, wrote about optical art similarly. He found it to be a reflection of contemporary culture, as humanistic values were increasingly supplanted by those of “launching pads and industrial machinery.” See Geldzahler, Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971); Canaday, “The Responsive Eye: Three Cheers and High Hopes,” New York Times, February 28, 1965. 8. Albers founded the art curriculum at Black Mountain College, where he taught between 1933 and 1949. He also held visiting teaching appointments at schools including Harvard University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of Hawaii, and Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. He was chair of the Department of Design at Yale University from 1950 to 1958 and continued to serve as visiting critic at Yale until 1960. At the time of his death, in 1976, Albers had been the subject of monographs by Eugen Gomringer and Werner Spies as well as numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1973 he was the inaugural recipient of the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. See George Heard Hamilton, Josef Albers: Paintings, Prints, Projects (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956); Kynaston McShine, ed., Josef Albers: Homage to the Square (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964); Gomringer, Josef Albers: His Work as Contribution to Visual Articulation in the Twentieth Century (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1968); Spies, Albers (Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1970); Sam Hunter, ed., Josef Albers: Paintings and Graphics, 1917–­1970 (Princeton, NJ: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1971); Geldzahler, Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 9. Some formalist critics were drawn to Albers’s paintings. Donald Judd described the artist’s geometry as “lambent” and his disparate colors as “unbounded,” contradicting “the apparent rigidity of the geometry and provid[ing] the central lyric and exultant ambiguity of the painting.” Judd, “‘In the Galleries,’ Arts, December 1959,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–­1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 7. For Hilton Kramer, understanding the “astringent” methods Albers employed to dislocate personal feeling from execution in producing works of “optical power” and “intellectual clarity” was of utmost significance. Kramer, “Recent Paintings at the Janis Gallery,” Arts Magazine 32 (April 1958): 52. By contrast, Albers’s work was profoundly out of step with Harold Rosenberg’s prioritization of cathartic expression as locus of meaning in abstract painting (which Kramer famously rebuked in “The New American Painting,” Partisan Review 20, no. 4 [August 1953]: 421–­27). Rosenberg’s thinly veiled disdain for Albers is most evident in the preface to the second edition of his essay collection The Anxious Object: “Albers himself excellently illustrates the type of faith in the self-­sufficiency of art that excludes from painting everything but the statement and solution of its own technical problems.” Later, he lapses into ad hominem critique, insinuating apathy on Albers’s part during the rise of National Socialism by mistaking Albers’s acknowledged lack of involvement with the social politics of constructivist art at the Weimar Bauhaus for wholesale personal ambivalence toward politics and society. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 – 3

Rosenberg, “Toward an Unanxious Profession,” in The Anxious Object, 2nd ed. (New York: Horizon Press, 1966), 16. 10. Greenberg lamented that “Albers has so rarely allowed the warmth and true plastic feeling we see in his color to dissolve the ruled rectangles in which all these potential virtues are imprisoned.” Clement Greenberg, “Art (Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers),” The Nation 168, no. 8 (February 19, 1949): 222. Unlike the painting of fellow German émigré and well-­known educator Hans Hofmann, Albers’s work was cast outside Greenberg’s self-­critical aesthetics and the dialectic that fueled the critic’s sense of history. 11. William C. Seitz, ed., The Responsive Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 3. 12. Brian de Palma, The Responsive Eye (black and white, sound, 26 min., 1966). 13. Josef Albers, Search versus Re-­Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 10. 14. See Sam Hunter, “Josef Albers: ‘Prophet and Presiding Genius of American Op Art,’” Vogue 156, no. 7 (1970): 70–­73, 126–­27. 15. Anuszkiewicz and Stanczak earned MFA degrees from Yale University in 1955 and 1956 respectively. 16. Sidney Tillim, “Optical Art: Pending or Ending?” Arts Magazine 39 (January 1965): 21. 17. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Afterthoughts on ‘Op,’” Art International 9, no. 5 (June 1965): 75. 18. John Canaday wrote favorably about the exhibition. Barbara Rose and Hilton Kramer were among those who penned critical reviews. See Canaday, “Responsive Eye”; Rose, “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art at the Modern,” Artforum 3, no. 7 (April 1965): 30–­33; Kramer, “Art: Clashing Values of 2 Generations,” New York Times, November 6, 1965. 19. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 58. Originally Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 20. John Coplans, Serial Imagery (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1968), 19. Coplans asserts that artists who worked serially (like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and even Andy Warhol) owed a debt to Albers, whose Homages he describes as a “single-­minded, haunting enterprise . . . to lock color and structure into an absolute, one-­to-­one relationship.” 21. Jane Fiske McCullough [Jane Thompson], “Haus of the Bauhaus Reconsidered,” Progressive Architecture 47 (December 1966): 162. 22. John Canaday, “Albers Show Is Marked by Vibrancy,” New York Times, November 19, 1971. Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 19, 1971–­January 11, 1972) was not reviewed extensively; however, Canaday and Peter Schjeldahl wrote reviews for the New York Times and Grace Glueck penned a profile on Albers for the same newspaper. The exhibition coincided with the publication of Margit Rowell’s essay on Albers in Artforum and a feature on Albers in ARTnews. See Schjeldahl, “Art That Owes Nothing to ‘Nature,’ but Everything to Man Himself,” New York Times, November 28, 1971; Glueck, “Each Day, Another Pancake,” New York Times, December 5, 1971; Rowell, “On Albers’s Color,” Artforum 10, no. 5 (January 1972): 26–­37; David Shapiro, “Homage to Albers,” ARTnews 70, no. 7 (November 1971): 30–­33, 96–97. 23. JV [Janet Vrchota], “Bye, bye, Bauhaus,” Print 25 (September 1971): 66–­67. 24. Important publications that feature work by Hesse and Serra and bear the imprint of shifting disciplinary priorities coincided with Josef Albers at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Robert Pincus-­Witten, “Eva Hesse: Post-­Minimalism into Sublime,” Artforum 10, no. 3 (November 1971); Rosalind E. Krauss, “Richard Serra: Sculpture Redrawn,” Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972): 39–­43. 25. McCullough, “Haus of the Bauhaus Reconsidered,” 162. 26. See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 27. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and TeamN o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 – 7

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work (New York: Reinhold, 1954), 27. The idea of the “Bauhaus idea” especially took hold in the 1960s. See Theo Otto, ed., Bauhaus: Idee, Form, Zweck, Zeit (Bransche: Gebr. Rasch & Co., 1964); Lothar Lang, Das Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Idee und Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Formgestaltung, 1965); Christian Grohn, Die Bauhaus Idee: Entwurf, Weiterung, Rezeption (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991). 28. In his review of 50 Years Bauhaus, Norbert Lynton observed that “for all Gropius’s protestations,” most people equated the Bauhaus with a style. See Lynton, “The Bauhaus at Stuttgart and the Royal Academy,” Burlington Magazine 110, no. 787 (1968): 587. 29. Ludwig Grote, “Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus,” in 50 Years Bauhaus, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1968), 10. Small sections were devoted to work made by Albers’s students in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus and to Albers’s own work made at the Bauhaus and subsequently (some of which had been lent to the exhibition by Gropius). 30. Lynton, “Bauhaus at Stuttgart,” 587. Lynton also wrote, “No one would expect an exhibition such as this to be self-­critical.” 31. Krauss has asserted that Hesse “bridled at Albers’s limitations, his rules, his dicta, at the monomania of an art ‘based on one idea.’” And Albers is a biographical parenthetical in a discussion of Serra’s works: “(he had been a teaching assistant in Josef Albers’s famous color course and had helped proof the plates of Albers’s book The [sic] Interaction of Color).” Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 313; Krauss, “Richard Serra: Sculpture,” in Krauss, Richard Serra: Sculpture, ed. Laura Rosenstock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 18. 32. NSCAD began its restructuring upon Garry Kennedy’s appointment as president in 1967; after several years of restructuring following the 1961 merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute, CalArts opened anew in 1970. See Garry Neill Kennedy, The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–­1978 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Paul Brach, “Cal Arts: The Early Years,” Art Journal 42, no. 1 (April 1982): 27–­29; Susanne Ghez, ed., CalArts: Skeptical Belief(s) (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum; Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1988). 33. Brach, “Cal Arts,” 28–­29. 34. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 5–­7, 57. Originally La Reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1970). 35. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1. For Illich, this is furthered by the transformation of nonmaterial needs (like learning or health) into commodities (services). 36. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1970; New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 72. 37. Freire, 72, 75. 38. Thierry de Duve has suggested that in the wake of the Bauhaus curricular model—­and in the “after image” of modernism—­attitude (volition without content) replaced creativity as a capacity to be cultivated, practice (theory-­as-­tool) replaced medium as the means of producing, and deconstruction (suspicion or critique) replaced innovation as overarching artistic goal. De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude—­and Beyond,” in The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, ed. Nicholas De Ville and Stephen C. Foster (Southampton, UK: John Hansard Gallery, 1994), 23–­40. 39. Josef Albers, “Dimensions of Design,” in Dimensions of Design (New York: American Craftsmen’s Council, 1958), 14. 40. “Bewußte umwegte und kontrollierte irrwege schärfen die kritik, weisen durch schaden N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 – 1 1

zum klügeren, erzeugen den willen zum richtigeren und besseren [sic].” Josef Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, no. 2/3 (1928): 4. 41. Albers, “Dimensions of Design,” 15. 42. Annette Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” October, no. 10 (1979), 72. For a recent appraisal of the issue of influence, see Christopher S. Wood, “Under the Influence,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67/­68 (November 2017): 290–­98. 43. Warburg demonstrated the Nachleben of antiquity through the persistence of its images and their function as Bilderfahrzeuge (image-­vehicles). Didi-­Huberman details how the concept of Nachleben, or survival, was supplanted by narratives of influence among art historians—­particularly Erwin Panofsky—­who relied upon the iconographic approach Warburg laid out. See Georges Didi-­Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 51–­66. 44. See Didi-­Huberman, 313–­21. 45. Didi-­Huberman opposes Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s suggestion that Warburg’s use of montage in his Mnemosyne atlas is incomparable to the practices of the historical avant-­ garde. See Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive,” October, no. 88 (1999), 117–­45; Didi-­Huberman, Surviving Image, 316–­17. 46. Recent posthistorical trends in scholarship have denied relationships between Albers and artists associated with late modernism in favor of discursive strategies that prioritize neo-­avant-­garde critical practices. See, for example, Briony Fer, “Eva Hesse and Color,” October, no. 119 (2007), 21–­36. Fer draws upon Marcel Duchamp’s renunciation of painting (in 1918) to craft an argument about the lack of color in Hesse’s later work, giving brief attention to Albers, who was most widely known for his instruction in color interaction. 47. I employ Warburg’s Nachleben generally; I do not suggest that the iconographic approach Warburg employed in his study of the afterlives of antique forms is useful here. 48. Stephen J. Ball has articulated this notion succinctly. See Ball, ed., Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990). 49. In addition to Kittler, I draw upon a notion of media studies indebted to W. J. T. Mitchell and Bill Brown, as well as the tenor of Lorraine Daston’s inquiry into images and objects that resist straightforward classification and “knit together matter and meaning.” See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–­22; Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 50. David Wellbery, “Foreword,” in Kittler, Discourse Networks, x. 51. See Kittler, “The Mother’s Mouth,” in Discourse Networks, 25–­69; Wellbery, “Foreword,” xii. 52. Although I highlight Wölfflin, Adolf Hildebrand (who was significant to Wölfflin) and others associated with aesthetic discourse in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are important to understanding Albers’s practice. On key figures in this discourse, see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). a. Linear Constructions 1. Albers used similar arrangements of line in five woodcuts in 1948; four engraving known

as Transformations in 1950; a series of inkless intaglio prints, Intaglio Duo and Intaglio Solo, made between 1958 and 1962; four lithographs in 1962; and series called Embossed N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 – 1 5

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Linear Constructions and White Embossings on Grey made between 1969 and 1971. He made a number of drawings known as linear constructions in 1936 and employed linear arrangements in some of what are known as his “architectural work” made in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. 2. François Bucher and Josef Albers, Despite Straight Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 52. 3. On gestalt psychology, Albers, and the Bauhaus, see, among others, Howard Dearstyne, “Notes on the Psychology Lectures of Dr. Karlfried Count von Dürckheim (1930–­31),” in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Hans Maria Wingler, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 159–­60; Crétien van Campen, “Early Abstract Art and Experimental Gestalt Psychology,” Leonardo 30, no. 2 (1997): 133–­ 36; Singerman, Art Subjects, 67–­96; Karen Koehler, “More Than Parallel Lines: Thoughts on Gestalt, Albers, and the Bauhaus,” in Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries, ed. Vanja V. Malloy (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2015), 45–­61. 4. In his discussion of the “break-­spotter” and perception, Gombrich notes the practices of M. C. Escher and Albers as having embraced impossible figures, like the “devil’s tuning fork.” These were “[taken] over” by these artists “from the psychologist’s laboratory.” See E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 124. See chapter 3 of this text for an historical view of Albers’s relationship to experimental psychology. 5. Between 1902 and 1908, Albers attended a Präparandenschule (preparatory school) and a Lehrerseminar (teacher’s college) in Westfalen, after which he was certified to teach general education in primary schools; between 1913 and 1915, he completed a course at the Königliche Kunstschule zu Berlin (Royal Art School, Berlin) and was certified to teach drawing in secondary schools as well as at preparatory schools and teacher’s colleges. 6. Brenda Danilowitz notes that Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915) is among the books thought to have been part of Albers’s library now in the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. Danilowitz, “Teaching Design: A Short History of Josef Albers,” in Frederick A. Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006), 12–­13. 7. Wölfflin’s oppositions are linearity vs. painterliness, plane vs. recession, closed vs. open form, multiplicity vs. unity, and clearness vs. unclearness. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 18–­23. 8. Wölfflin, 27. 9. See Wölfflin, 32–­40. 10. For an historical account of gestalt psychology, see Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–­1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 11. Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 55–­56. See also Jarzombek, “De-­Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism,” Assemblage, no. 23 (1994): 29–­69 12. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 2. 13. See Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 10. 14. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 20. 15. Wölfflin, 39. 16. This aspect of Albers’s work seemed to frustrate Werner Spies, who felt that the un­ resolvable problem presented to the viewer made one feel foolish, albeit productively so; these visual problems were akin to optics that challenged the “legitimacy of nature”

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in the seventeenth century. François Bucher, in contrast, found the “visual events” offered by Albers to be delightful. On the deceptive aspects of Albers’s linear constructions, see Spies, Albers (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1971), 36–­44; Bucher and Albers, Despite Straight Lines, 75–­78; Charles E. Rickart, “A Structural Analysis of Some of Albers’s Work,” in Nicholas Fox Weber et al., Josef Albers: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1988), 58–63; Anthony Auerbach, “Structural Constellations: Excursus on the Drawings of Josef Albers c. 1950–­1960” (diss., University College London, 2004), 198–­225. 17. By 1950 Albers had determined that asymmetrically nested squares of varying sizes, arranged symmetrically on a vertical axis offered a design constraint that could be utilized as a parameter within which to demonstrate the fluid dynamics of color relationships. In Variants, a series of paintings he began in 1947, he had used a “checkerboard-­ like structure” to apportion colors. See Jeannette Redensek, “On Josef Albers’ Painting Materials and Techniques,” in Fundación Juan March, Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2014), 21–­40. 18. I am indebted to Jeannette Redensek for alerting me to the existence of these drawings in the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. 19. Elaine de Kooning, “Albers Paints a Picture: Homage to the Square,” ARTnews 49, no. 7 (November 1950): 42; Auerbach, “Structural Constellations,” 201–­6. 20. “Wenn mein Leben einen Werth hat, so ist es dieser, daß ich das gleichseitige Viereck zum Fundament einer Anschauungslehre erhoben, die das Volk nie hatte.” Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Sämtliche Werke: Schriften aus der Zeit von 1799–­1801, ed. Herbert Schönebaum and Kurt Schreinert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1932), 13:327. 21. “Wer Winkel richtig abtheilen und einen Bogen richtig über den Winkel ziehen kann, die Fundamente der Richtigkeit aller Buchstaben in seiner Hand hat.” Pestalozzi, 13:113. 22. See Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children: An Attempt to Help Mothers to Teach Their Own Children and an Account of the Method, ed. Ebenezer Cooke, trans. Francis C. Turner and Lucy E. Holland, 2nd ed. (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1900), 124. In addition to the development of properly formed letters, this method was meant to confirm understanding of language more generally by underscoring a child’s knowledge of speech (129–­32). 23. See Clive Ashwin, Drawing and Education in German Speaking Europe, 1800–­1900 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 127–­32. 24. See Franz Carl Hillardt, Stigmographie oder das Schreiben und Zeichnen nach Punkten . . . , 2nd ed. (1839; Vienna: H. F. Müller, 1846), 5, 2. 25. “Sie ist, wie zum Teil die Egyptienne und Grotesk, ausschließlich aus geometrischen Grundformen aufgebaut, und zwar aus nur dreien: dem Quadrat, dem Dreieck, als dessen Hälfte, und dem Viertelkreis, dessen Radius der Quadratseite entspricht.” Josef Albers, “Zur Schablonenschrift,” Offset, Buch-­und Weberkunst, Bauhaus-­Heft no. 7 (1926), 397. 26. “Die vorliegende kombinationsschrift ermöglicht, alle diese schriftzeichen aus nur 3 grundformen zusammenzusetzen. die grundformen bilden als elementartypen die bausteine für alle zeichen und sind symmetrische geometrische flächen: quadrat, viertelkreis, kreis . . . [sic].” Josef Albers, “Kombinationsschrift ‘3,’” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, no. 1 (1931): 3. 27. “Die kombination der elemente erlaubt reiche variierung nach form, höhe, breite, stärke, abstand, auch innerhalb eines wortbildes [sic].” Albers, 3. 28. “Die kombinationsschrift ermöglicht erstmalig, alle schriftzeichen einschließlich varianten, also jeden schriftsatz seitenvertauscht zu setzen sowohl in horizontaler wie vertikaler richtung. alle wortbilder können somit außer vorwärts (links nach rechts)

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auch rückwärts (rechts nach links) und beiden richtungen auch kopfstehend gedruckt werden, also in jeder spiegelschrift [sic].” Albers, 4. 29. In her famous assessment of the grid in modern art, Rosalind E. Krauss writes that the grid makes Albers’s work resistant to meaning and development; she observes that Albers mines the dialectic of the grid in his works by simultaneously directing the viewer toward and away from their surfaces. See Krauss, “Grids,” October, no. 9 (1979), 63–­64. 30. Josef Albers, “On My ‘Homage to the Square,’” in Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), n.p. (my emphasis). 31. On Klages, see Thea Stein-­Lewinson, “An Introduction to the Graphology of Ludwig Klages,” Journal of Personality 6, no. 3 (March 1938): 163–­76; Jarzombek, Psychologizing of Modernity, 118–­29; Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 336–­75. 32. See Jarzombek, “De-­Scribing the Language of Looking,” 38. 33. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 21. 1. From Object to Process 1. See Charles

Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 66–­67. 2. Dewey visited Black Mountain College during the 1934–­1935 academic year and was a member of the school’s advisory council. For an account of Dewey’s relationship to the college, see Katherine C. Reynolds, “Progressive Ideals and Experimental Higher Education: The Example of John Dewey and Black Mountain College,” Education and Culture 14, no. 1 (1997): 1–­9; Katherine C. Reynolds, Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). On Albers and Dewey, see Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, trans. Stephen Mason (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 172–­75; Karl-Heinz Füssl, “Pestalozzi in Dewey’s Realm? Bauhaus Master Josef Albers among the German-­Speaking Emigres’ Colony at Black Mountain College (1933–­1949),” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 42, no. 1–­2 (2006): 77–­92; Eva Díaz, “The Ethics of Perception: Josef Albers in the United States,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 2 (2008): 260–­85. 3. In their analysis of the German education system after World War I, Thomas Alexander and Beryl Parker observe that the movement to reform the system drew “its principles from a philosophy developed on the native soil and general practice follows methods worked out by German educators.” They mention Dewey as one of several figures whose theories developed in parallel. Alexander and Parker, The New Education in the German Republic (New York: John Day Company, 1929), 352. 4. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 93. 5. Josef Albers, “Art as Experience,” Progressive Education 12 (October 1935): 392. 6. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 199. 7. Dewey, 199, 200. 8. Dewey, 194. 9. Albers, “Art as Experience,” 391. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934). 10. Albers, 391. 11. Albers, 391. 12. Albers’s pedagogy is more akin to Georg Kerschensteiner’s educational thought. Although Kerschensteiner knew Dewey’s work, his conception of the Arbeitsschule developed independently. He claims first to have read Dewey’s The School and Society N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 4 – 3 0

in 1907. See Georg Kerschensteiner, “Der Problem der Volkserziehung,” Internationale Wochenschritf für Wissenschaft Kunst und Technik 2 (March 21, 1908): 354–­74. 13. The School and Society was translated as Schule und öffentliches Leben, trans. Else Gurlitt (Berlin: Walther, 1905). On Dewey’s reception in Germany, see Stefan Bittner, “German Readers of Dewey: Before 1933 and after 1945,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19, no. 1 (2000): 83–­108. 14. Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 46. Díaz writes as if Dewey had been the dominant voice in the progressive education movement in Germany; Eeva-­Liisa Pelkonen claims that Dewey was “widely read” at the Bauhaus without providing evidence. See Díaz, 45–­52; Pelkonen, “Interacting with Albers,” AA Files, no. 67 (2013), 119–­28. 15. Democracy and Education was translated into German as Demokratie und Erziehung: Eine Einleitung in die philosophische Pädagogik, trans. Erich Hylla (Breslau: Hirt, 1930). An incorrect 1916 translation date is found in Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Dalilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006); Díaz, Experimenters; and Helen Molesworth, ed. Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–­1957 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art/Yale University Press, 2015). 16. These include the Allgemeine deutsche Lehrerzeitung (1852–­1914), Pädagogische Woche: Organ des Westfälischen Provinzialvereins des Katholischen Lehrerverbandes und der Hermann Hubertus Stiftung (1905–­1921), and Pharus: Katholische Monatsschrift für Orientierung in der gesamten Pädagogik (1910–­1925). In Westfalen, children were educated in schools corresponding to their religious faith by teachers who shared their faith. Albers was Catholic. On confessional schooling in the Kaiserreich, see Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On the impact of the Kulturkampf upon design education, see Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Drawing: The Debschitz School and Formalism’s Subject,” in Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 131–­65. 17. See Adolph Liese, ed., Allgemeine Bestimmungen über das gesamte preußische Volksschulwesen, die Mittelschule, die Präparandenanstalten und das Seminar: Nebst den Prüfungen für Lehrer und Lehrerinnen, den Fachprüfungen, Kursen für Lehrer zur Weiterbildung, dem Schulaufsichtsgesetz und dessen Anwendung, dem Lehrerpensionsgesetz und den erläuternden und ergänzenden Ministerial-­und Regierungsbestimmungen; kleines Hand-­und Nachschlagebuch für Schule und Verwaltung, mit vielen Anmerkungen und Erklärungen, 14th ed. (Neuwied: Heuser, 1908), 70–­81. 18. “Die Geschichte der Pädagogik ist bis in die neueste Zeit fortzusetzen. Die Darstellung findet dann ihren natürlichen Abschluß in der Besprechung der gegenwärtigen Einrichtungen des preußischen Volksschulwesens, sowie der für dieses allgemein gültigen oder für den betreffenden Bezrik erlasssenen besonderen Schulverordnungen.” See Liese, 83. 19. “Bei der Besprechung der Pädagogik der Gegenwart ist auch das Verständnis für die pädagogischen Aufgaben und Bestrebungen der neuesten Zeit zu vermitteln.” See Liese, 83. 20. See Daniel Walther, “Creating Germans Abroad: White Education in German Southwest Africa, 1894–­1914,” German Studies Review 24, no. 2 (2001): 325–­51. 21. See Bittner, “German Readers of Dewey.” 22. Humboldt asserted that “with the method of instruction one cares not what this or that be learned; but rather that in learning, memory be exercised, understanding sharpened, judgment rectified, and moral feeling refined.” See David Sorkin, “Wilhelm Von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-­Formation (Bildung), 1791–­1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 1 (1983): 64. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 1 – 3 2

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23. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 116. notes that Fichte’s desire for a politically motivated national system of education led Humboldt to suppress aspects of Bildung that were publicly oriented. See Sorkin, “Wilhelm Von Humboldt.” 25. On the training of primary school teachers in Westfalen, see Hildegard Stratmann, Lehrer werden: Berufliche Sozialisation in der Volksschullehrer-­Ausbildung in Westfalen, 1870–­1914 (Münster: Waxmann, 2006). 26. Albers made reference to various pedagogues in his writings and lectures. Although unnamed, he draws upon “the ancients” in asserting that “life is the best teacher”; he makes reference as well to the tradition of educating the “head, heart, and hands,” which is a reference to Pestalozzi. One presumes that the “major pedagogical works” noted in the description of the Lehrerseminar curriculum included those written by individuals about whom Wilhelm Rein wrote in his multivolume encyclopedic handbook for pedagogy. It includes entries on Basedow, Comenius, Diesterweg, Fichte, Fröbel, Goethe, Herbart, Humboldt, Kant, Lessing, Locke, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Pestalozzi, Plato, Rousseau, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Socrates. See Rein, ed., Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik, 10 vols. (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne, 1895). For an account of pedagogical thought contemporary to Albers’s education and practice as a primary school teacher, see, for instance, Karl Wacker, ed., Philosophisch-­pädagogisches Lesebuch: Zum Gebrauche beim pädagogischen Unterricht in Lehrer-­und Lehrerinnen-­Bildungsanstalten (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’sche Buchhandlung, 1907). 27. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Robert Hebert Quick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1880), 113. Locke’s text had been translated into German as early as 1708. See Des Herrn John Locke Gedanken von Erziehung junger Edelleute, aus dem Englischen uns zwar der vollständigen Edition übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen, zugleich aus durchauss mit Titulen derer Materien versehen von Seb. Gottfr. Starck (Greiffswald: Johann Wolffgang Fickweiler, 1708). 28. Locke, 21. 29. Locke, 112. 30. Locke, 39. 31. Locke, 131. 32. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. William Harold Payne (London: S. Appleton, 1906), 53. Rousseau’s text had been translated into German as early as 1762. See Herrn Johann Jacob Rousseaus, Bürgers zu Genf, Aemil oder Von der Erziehung (Berlin: s.n., 1762). 33. Rousseau, 185–­86. 34. Rousseau, 57–­61. 35. Rousseau, 125. 36. Rousseau, 144. 37. Rousseau, 35. 38. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 156–­59; Rousseau, Émile, 75. 39. Rousseau, 82–­83. 40. Rousseau, 151. 41. Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant über Pädagogik, ed. Friedrich Theodor Rink (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1803). 42. Immanuel Kant, “Lecture-­Notes on Pedagogy,” in The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant, ed. and trans. Edward Franklin Buchner (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908), 116, 123. 43. Kant, 171. 44. Kant, 179. Whereas the student’s physical education involved his being in a passive role, 24. Sorkin

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he played an active role in his moral education, which was based upon the consideration of maxims. 45. Kant identifies a man’s education as leading to his being disciplined, cultured, civilized, and moralized. See Kant, 121–­23. 46. Kant, 104. 47. Kant, 121–­22. 48. Kant, 131. 49. Kant, 158. 50. Kant, 162. 51. Kant, 161. 52. Kant, 158–­60. 53. Kant, 177. 54. Kant, 182. 55. Kant, 181. 56. Kant, 183–­84. Kant favored a Socratic method toward this end. 57. Kant, 168–­69. 58. “We must have experimental schools before we can establish normal schools.” Kant, 125. Kant’s lectures on pedagogy were an investigation of Basedow’s text Das Methodenbuch für Väter und Mütter der Familien und Völker (Altona, und in der Cramerschen Handlung in Bremen, 1770). He was so enthused by the Philanthropinum that he solicited donations in support of the school. See Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, eds., “Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum,” in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Before founding the Philanthropinum and in the tradition of John Amos Comenius’s Orbus Pictus (1658), Basedow published Elementarwerk: Ein geordneter Vorrath aller nöthigen Erkenntniss . . . (Dessau: Crusius,1774), a text meant to aid teachers and parents in educating children. It covered aspects of childrearing, moral and religious education, and educational ethics and describes various professions an older child might pursue. The text is supplemented by a separate volume of annotated illustrations by Daniel Chodowiecki, images that teachers and parents could use in their instruction. Basedow’s aims for the Philanthropinum are presented in Für Cosmopoliten etwas zu lesen, zu denken und zu thun in Ansehung eines in Anhalt-­Dessau errichteten Philanthropins oder Paedagogischen Seminars von ganz neuer Art . . . (Leipzig: Crusius, 1775). Gottlieb J. Schummel offers an account of the school from the viewpoint of a visiting child in Fritzens reise nach Dessau (Leipzig: Crusius, 1776). 59. Robert Hebert Quick, “Fred’s Journey to Dessau,” in Essays on Educational Reformers (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 282–­85. 60. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, “The Method, a Report by Pestalozzi,” in How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, 201. Pestalozzi’s major works include Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt: Ein Versuch den Müttern Anleitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten, in Briefen (Bern: Geßner, 1801) and ABC Der Anschauung, oder, Anschauungs-­Lehre der Maßverhältnisse, 2 vols. (Zürich: Geßner, 1803). Albers noted the significance of Pestalozzi, as Brenda Danilowitz, Frederick A. Horowitz, and Karl-Heinz Füssl have elaborated. See Danilowitz, “Teaching Design,” and Horowitz, “Basic Drawing,” in Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006); Füssl, “Pestalozzi in Dewey’s Realm?” 61. Pestalozzi, 205. 62. See Friedrich Fröbel, Die Menschenerziehung: Die Erziehungs-­, Unterrichts-­und Lehrkunst, angestrebt in der allgemeinen deutschen Erziehungsanstalt zu Keilhau (Keilhau: Verlag der allgemeinen deutschen Erziehungsanstalt, 1826); Bertha M. von Marenholtz-­Bülow, Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel, trans. Mrs. Horace [Mary Tyler Peabody] Mann (BosN o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 4 – 3 7

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ton: Lee & Shepard, 1877). Relevant secondary literature on the Kindergarten movement includes Ann Taylor Allen, “Children between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1840–­Present,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000): 16–­41, and Roberta Wollons, “The Black Forest in a Bamboo Garden: Missionary Kindergartens in Japan, 1868–­1912.” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1993): 1–­35. 63. Manuals meant to introduce teachers to the Kindergarten curriculum and the gifts and occupations as developed and expanded subsequent to Fröbel’s death, published in many languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, include Hermann Goldammer, Der Kindergarten: Handbuch der Fröbel’schen erzeihungsmethode, Spielgaben und Beschäftigungen (Berlin: C. G. Lüderitz’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung [C. Habel], 1874). Goldammer’s text was translated into English in 1882. 64. See Eckhardt Fuchs, “Nature and Bildung: Pedagogical Naturalism in Nineteenth-­ Century Germany,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 155–­81. Fuchs argues that the two were not mutually exclusive. 65. Georg Kerschensteiner, The Idea of the Industrial School, trans. Rudolf Pintner (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 14. Originally Begriff der Arbeitsschule (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1912). 66. “Wenig Historie—­viel Arbeit, geht uns an.” Josef Albers, “Historisch oder Jetzig?” Junge Menschen 5, no. 8 (November 1924): 171. 67. On the economic obstacles to higher education in Wilhelmine Germany, see Andrew Donson, “The Pedagogy of Obedience and Its Critics,” in Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–­1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 20–­44. Only the top 5 percent of German households could afford to send a child to secondary school; only 1 percent of German girls completed secondary schooling. 68. On Albers’s early life, see Nicholas Fox Weber, The Drawings of Josef Albers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Danilowitz, “Teaching Design”; Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work; Ulrike Growe, ed., Der junge Josef Albers: Aufbruch in die Moderne (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019). 69. For an overview of the history of schooling in Germany, see Gert Geißer, Schulgeschichte in Deutschland: Von Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011). On the history of education during the Kaiserreich, see Christa Berg, ed., Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1870–­1918, von Der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991). For information specific to Westfalen and Bottrop, see Stratmann, Lehrer werden; Karl Eckart, Schule in Bottrop: Von der Elementarschule zur Hochschule (Essen: Akadpress, 2014). For an account of German education contemporary to Albers’s training to become and work as a schoolteacher, see Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, ed., Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich, 4 vols. (Berlin: A. Asher, 1904). 70. The Catholic Teacher’s Association of Germany was founded in 1889; the regional association in Westfalen was founded in 1891. In the year Albers began teaching primary school there were twenty-­five hundred member teachers in Westfalen. See Hans Josef Tymister, “Die Entstehung der Berufsvereine der katholischen Lehrerschaft in Deutschland: Beiträge zur Schul-­und Standespolitik katholischer Lehrerschaft im 19. Jh.” (diss., Universität zu Koln, 1964), 287–­88. 71. On the Präparandenschule Langenhorst, see “Zur Geschichte der Präparandenschule in Langenhorst: Ein Gedenkblatt für die Anstalt,” Pädagogische Woche: Organ des Westfälischen Provenzialvereins, des Katholischen Lehrerverbandes und der Hermann Hubertus Stiftung 3, no. 7 (1907): 75–­78. 72. See Adolph Liese, ed., “Lehrplan für die Präparandenanstalten,” in Allgemeine BestimN o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 8 – 3 9

mungen über das gesamte preußische Volksschulwesen, 60–­70. For a Stundentafel (hourly table) indicating the number of hours devoted to each subject at a Präparandenanstalt and Seminar, see Liese, 81. 73. See Adolph Liese, ed., “Lehrplan für die Lehrerseminare,” in Allgemeine Bestimmungen über das gesamte preußische Volksschulwesen, 70–­81. Numerous reminiscences of the Lehrerseminar Büren appeared in regional education journals upon the school’s centennial, including “Der Weg zum Lehramte vor 100 Jahren! Ein kleiner Beitrag zur Jahrhundertfeir des Bürener Lehrerseminars,” Pädagogische Post 4, no. 19 (1925): 212–­13. 74. Some students also composed a chorale. See “Änderungen der Bestimmungen über die Aufnahme in die Lehrerseminare und über die Seminarentlassunsprüfung, Berlin, den 1 Juli 1901,” in Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß. Ministers der geistlichen, Unterrichts-­und Medizinal-­Angelegenheiten vom 1. Juli 1901, betreffend das Präparanden-­und Seminarwesen sowie die Prüfungen der Volksschullehrer, der Lehrer an Mittelschulen und der Rektoren, 2nd ed. (Halle an der Saale: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1909), 43–­46. 75. “Die Ausbildung der Seminaristen in der Schulpraxis beginnt in der zweiten Klasse. Vom Anfange des Jahres an halten die Seminarlehrer in ihren Fächern Musterlektionen, durch welche allmählich alle Formen des Unterrichtes in den betreffenden Fächern vorgeführt werden; an diese Lektionen schließen sich Erläuterungen über das Methodische an.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 27. 76. “Überall ist von der Anschauung oder dem Versuche auszugehen; die Schüler sind zum Beobachten und zu eigenem Denken auszuhalten; bloß gedächtnismäßiges Aneignen des Stoffes ist durchaus zu verhüten.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 38. 77. “Es ist ferner besonders darauf Gedacht zu nehmen, die Zöglinge im Anstellen von Beobachtungen und Versuchen zu üben. Darauf ist während des gesamten Unterrichts zu achten. In der Oberklasse des Seminars sind derartige Übungen planmäßig im Zusammenhange mit den Belehrungen über Methodik unter Heranziehung sämtlicher Zöglinge der Klasse zu betreiben.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 39. 78. Liese, “Lehrplan für die Lehrerseminare,” 71. 79. “Die Schüler sind auch mit den wichtigsten Lehr-­ und Lernmitteln sowie mit wertvollen Hilfsmitteln für die Vorbereitung des Lehrers auf den Unterricht und für die Fortbildung bekanntzumachen. Aus der Geschichte der Methodik ist in kurzer Form das Hauptsächlichste mitzuteilen.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 28. On the history of Lehrmittel, see, Harmut Schröder, Lehr-­und Lernmittel in historischer Perspektive: Erscheinungs-­und Darstellungsformen anhand des Bildbestands der Pictura Paedagogica, online (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2008), and Anke te Hessen’s excellent The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-­Century Picture Encyclopedia, trans. Ann M. Hentschel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 80. “Zugleich lernen die Schüler das im Bezirke eingeführte Rechenbuch genau kennen und werden mit den gebräuchlichsten Anschauungsmitteln (Rechenmaschinen) bekanntgemacht.” See Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 38. 81. “In der Geschichte der Pädagogik sind lebensvolle Bilder der wichtigsten Zeiten und der für die Entwicklung des Unterrichts-­und Erziehungswesens—­namentlich auf dem Gebiete der Volksschule—­bedeutungsvollsten Persönlichkeiten zu entwerfen.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 26. 82. For a complete list of the suggested images, see Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 32. 83. “Bei behandlung der Methodik ist darauf Bedacht zu nehmen, daß die Schüler in möglicht umfangreicher Weise mit guten Lehrmitteln (Atlanten, Wandkarten, Globen, Apparaten, Anschauungsbildern) bekanntgemacht werden. Die Anknüpfung stofflicher Wiederholungen ist bei den Belehrungen über Methodik von selbst gegeben.” Bestimmungen des Königl. Preuß., 40. In actuality, the Prussian state mandated that very few objects be present in a school. Those teaching aids that must be available in the N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 9 – 4 1

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schoolroom are (. . . müssen folgende Lehrmittel vorhanden sein) one copy of each of the teaching and learning books introduced at the school, a globe, a map of the home province, a map of Germany, a map of Palestine, illustrations for natural science lessons, an alphabet of recognizable letters glued on wood or cardboard tablets for use in the first reading lesson, a violin, a ruler and compass, a calculating machine, objects used to teach spatial relationships, and two large wooden panels. See “Organization Der Einklassigen Schule,” in Ein Besuch im Schulmuseum Büren (Büren: Schulmuseum in der Hauptschule, 1989). 84. The Westfälische Schulmuseum (Westphalian School Museum) in Dortmund —­in addition to offering permanent displays dedicated to regional history (Heimatkundliche Schulsammlung), a large collection of teaching media (Lehrmittelsammlung), and presentation materials related to pedagogy and the history of schooling (Schulgeschichte)—­ organized temporary exhibitions, like Anschauungsmittel im Naturlehreunterricht der Volksschule (Visual Aids for Teaching Natural Science in the Primary School) with accompanying publications, the first of which was a forty-­eight-­page Ratgeber bei der Auswahl von Lehrmitteln für westfälische Schulen (1911) meant to aid teachers in selecting learning materials for their schools. See E. Goldschmidt, “Das Westfälische Schulmuseum,” in Festbuch zum 32. Westfälischen Provinzial-­Lehrertag (Dortmund: C. L. Krüger, 1910), 5–­9. On school museums generally, see Max Hübner, Die deutschen Schulmuseen (Breslau: Hirt, 1904); Hübner, Die ausländischen Schulmuseen (Breslau: Hirt, 1906); Ullrich Amlung, Das Schulmuseum: Aufgaben, Konzeptionen und Perspektiven (Weinheim: Juventa, 1997); Gisela Henniger, “Zur Geschichte des Deutschen Schulmuseums des Berliner Lehrervereins 1876–­1908” (diss., Humboldt-­Universität zu Berlin, 1991); Martin Lawn, Modelling the Future: Exhibitions and the Materiality of Education (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2009). 85. See Fuchs, “Nature and Bildung,” 176. 86. Johann Friedrich Herbart, The Science of Education: Its General Principles Deduced from Its Aim, trans. Henry M. Felkin and Emmie Felkin (Boston: D. C. Heath & Company, 1896), 155. 87. See Catherine I. Dodd, Introduction to the Herbartian Principles of Teaching, with an Introduction by Professor W. Rein (Jena) (London: S. Sonnenshein & Co, 1898). 88. Herbartian curricula were well established in the United States. See Wilhelm Rein, Theorie und Praxis des Volksschulunterrichts nach Herbartischen Grundsätzen, 8 vols. (Dresden: Bleyl & Kaemmerer, 1884); Rein, Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. Similar kinds of resources were produced by the Verlag von J. Stahl in Westfalen, like Praktischer Wegweiser für Lehrer und Lehrerinnen: Ein Führer durch das Schul-­und Lehreramt (Arnsberg: Stahl, 1903) and Der Volksschuldienst in der Provinz Westfalen (Arnsberg: Stahl, 1910). 89. Dodd, Introduction to the Herbartian Principles of Teaching, 123. 90. Rein, Theorie und Praxis, 1:389. 91. Although directed differently and employing other source material, Molly Nesbit’s work has informed my approach. See Nesbit, “The Language of Industry,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1991), 351–­84. 92. “I. Heizung und Beleuchtung; II. Der schriftliche und mündliche Verkehr in die Ferne; III. Die Nahrungsmittel; IV. Die wichtigsten mineralischen Rohstoffe der Gewerbe des Orts; V. Fels und Erdboden der Umgebung; VI. Die Erde als Lebensgemeinschaft.” Wilhelm Rein, Theorie und Praxis, 8:54. 93. Rein, 8:96–­118. 94. “Berechtigen uns diese Merkmale, so verschieden aussehende Steine unter einen Namen zu bringen, und können wir damit den Kalkstein sicher von anderen Mineralien unterscheiden?” Rein, 8:105. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 1 – 4 6

95. “Übersichtliche vergleichende Zusammenstellung der Eigenschaften.” Rein, 8:107. 96. See Rein, 8:117–­18. 97. Kerschensteiner, Idea of the Industrial School, 49–­50. 98. Kerschensteiner, 56. In 1912, a resolution that endorsed principles of active education

was adopted by the membership of the Deutsche Lehrerverein (German Teacher’s Association). See Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002): 35. 99. Kerschensteiner, 48. 100. Albers, “Art as Experience,” 391. 101. “Die Unterricht in der heimatlichen Pflanzenwelt soll nur von den Naturgegenständen selbst ausgehen.” See K. Topp, Ratgeber bei der Auswahl von Lehrmitteln für westfälische Schulen, Schriften des Westfälischen Schulmuseums in Dortmund 1 (Arnsberg: Stahl, 1911), 20. 102. On the “scientization of pedagogy” that took place in the nineteenth century, see Fuchs, “Nature and Bildung.” 103. A student may not know this at the time, however. Echoing Kant, Albers wrote, “The result of the work of a school is difficult to determine while the pupil is in school. The best proofs are in the results later in life.” Josef Albers, “Concerning Art Instruction,” Black Mountain College Bulletin 2 (June 1934): n.p. 104. Albers, “Dimensions of Design,” 17. 105. Several German and English terms have been used to identify what became known as Albers’s course in basic design at Yale. For sake of clarity, I use the phrase “design instruction” to describe Albers’s teaching of design at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University. 106. School of Architecture and Design Bulletin (Yale University, 1958), 37, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. 107. Among many texts in which Albers’s pedagogy is discussed, see Friederike Hollander and Nina Wiedemeyer, eds., Original Bauhaus Workbook (Berlin: Bauhaus-­Archiv, Museum für Gestaltung, 2019). 108. Josef Albers, “Constructive Form (Lecture at the Lyceum, Havana),” 1934, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 84, folder 1; Laura Martínez de Guereñu, María Toledo, and Manuel Fontán, eds., “Josef Albers: An Anthology 1924–­1978,” in Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2014), 223. 109. Albers associated instruction with technical education, which, in his view, constrained invention. See Albers, “Constructive Form”; Martínez de Guereñu, Toledo, and Fontán, “Albers Anthology,” 222. 110. See Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 33–­35. 111. Albers, “Constructive Form”; Martínez de Guereñu, Toledo, and Fontán, “Albers Anthology,” 225. 112. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 25–­26. 113. On this topic, see Alexander, “Drawing: The Debschitz School and Formalism’s Subject.” 114. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 31. 115. Albers elaborated these terms in “Werklicher Formunterricht”; and “Combinative Form (Lecture at the Lyceum, Havana)” (1935), Albers Foundation, Papers, box 84, folder 1; and Search versus Re-­Search. 116. See Josef Albers, “Bauhaus Course Descriptions (1927–­1929),” n.d., Albers Foundation, Papers, box 34, folder 3. 117. Joan Stack, “Course Notes: Joan Stack, Black Mountain College,” n.d., Albers Foundation Archives. 118. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 33. 119. Albers, 34. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 6 – 6 0

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120. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, rev. and expanded ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2006), 48. 121. Robert Morris and Jack Burnham (who earned a BFA

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in 1959 and MFA in 1961 at Yale) articulated this shift. See Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968): 33–­35; Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 31–­35. 122. A nearly twelve-­minute silent film of Albers teaching drawing at Yale is a notable exception. See John Cohen, Josef Albers teaching at Yale, ca. 1955 b. Photography 1. See John

Szarkowski, The Photographs of Josef Albers: A Selection from the Collection of the Josef Albers Foundation (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1987); Marianne Stockebrand, ed., Josef Albers: Photographien, 1928–­1955 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1992); Karen E. Haas et al., Josef Albers: In Black and White (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 2000); Sarah Hermanson Meister, ed., One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016). 2. See Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock, eds., Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007); Jennifer Reynolds-­Kaye, Small-­Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery/Yale University Press, 2017); Lauren Hinkson, ed., Josef Albers in Mexico (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2017). 3. Albers had access to a darkroom upon moving into the Bauhaus master house formerly occupied by the photographer Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-­Nagy in Dessau. For details about images Albers developed, see Lee Ann Daffner, “Josef Albers’s Bauhaus Photocollages: A Technical Analysis,” in Meister, One and One Is Four, 123–­27. 4. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Mechanical Objectivity,” in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 115–­90. 5. “Was unsern Schülern fehlt, ist das Bild.” A. B., “Die Photographie im Dienst der Schule,” Allgemeine Schulzeitung für das gesammte Unterrichtswesen 38 (September 18, 1875): 289. 6. “Ein wahrheitsgetreues Bild vermag hundert falsche und nebelhafte Vorstellungen zu berichtigen und dies um so sicherer, je mehr es in sich die Gewähr voller Wahrheit trägt.” A. B., 189. 7. “Ich glaube, wenn ich meine Herrn Kollegen und mich selbst richtig beurtheile, daß vor allem eine gewisse Pedanterie, die uns allen ja leider eigen ist, bis jetz das Vorurtheil unter den Lehrern genährt hat, als passe solcher “moderne Kram,” der bisher wesentlich im Dienste der Eitelkeit und der Neugierde gestanden, nicht zu dem Ernste der Schule.” A. B., 289–­90. 8. A. B., 313–­15. 9. See Adolf Sellmann, “Der Film als Lehrmittel,” Allgemeine deutsche Lehrerzeitung 46 (December 1913): 545–­46; “Kinokongress und Schule,” Katholische Schulzeitung für Mitteldeutschland, no. 19 (1913), 18–­20. 10. “Der Film soll uns niemals terrorisieren, sondern immer unser Diener beim Erfassen der Wirklichkeit sein.” Sellmann, 545. 11. For a compelling discussion of Wölfflin and photography, see Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Looking: Comparative Vision,” in Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 69–­78. 12. See Heinrich Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History 36, no. 1 (2012): 52–­71. Originally, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, part 1, 7 (1896): 224–­28; part 2, 8 (1897): 294–­97; part 3, 26 (1915): 237–­44. 13. See Alexander, “Looking: Comparative Vision,” 73. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 3 – 6 9

14. See Alexander, 70. 15. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 54. 16. See Rowell, “On Albers’s Color,” 30. 17. On the complexities of the Baroque, see Helen Hills, “The Baroque: Beads in a Rosary

or Folds in Time,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 17, no. 2 (2007): 48–­71; Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 18. See Werner David Feist, My Years at the Bauhaus/Meine Jahre am Bauhaus, ed. Sibylle Hoiman (Berlin: Bauhaus-­Archiv, Museum für Gestaltung, 2012). 19. See Josef Albers, “Photos as Photography and Photos as Art,” 1943, Albers Foundation, ­Papers, box 84, folder 11; Martínez de Guereñu, Toledo, and Fontán, “Albers Anthology,” 254–­56. 20. Albers, “Photos as Photography and Photos as Art”; Martínez de Guereñu, Toledo, and Fontán, “Albers Anthology,” 255, 256. 21. Daston and Galison show that this was not the case with respect to the medium’s use among scientists. See Daston and Galison, “Mechanical Objectivity,” 125–­38. 22. Among the many who have offered insightful commentary about Warburg’s project, see E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Michael Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History,” trans. Thomas Girst and Dorothea von Moltke, New German Critique, no. 65 (1995): 59–­73; Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2003): 418–­28; Georges Didi-­Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010); Christopher Morton, “Photography and the Comparative Method: The Construction of an Anthropological Archive,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. 2 (2012): 369–­96. 23. See Jean Charlot, “Nature and the Art of Josef Albers,” College Art Journal 15, no. 3 (1956): 190. Anni Albers taught General Problems of Woven Textiles and Advanced Weaving; the Honolulu Academy of Art also mounted an exhibition to correspond to the Alberses’ visit: Josef and Anni Albers: Painting and Weaving (July 1–­August 2, 1954). 24. Didi-­Huberman, Atlas, 128. 25. Eva Hesse, Eva Hesse: Diaries, ed. Barry Rosen (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers/Yale University Press, 2016), 379. 26. In the context of a conversation about her art lasting, Hesse told Cindy Nemser, “I don’t know about the validity of keeping. I feel that if I make something, I’d like a photograph of it and then I could keep it or give it away or sell it, but I would like some record. I have this partial thought about it and it’s also interesting how life and art merge because I’ve been so sick, to the point where I could have died during all that time, that the whole idea of art and making something last is put into another perspective.” Nemser, “A Conversation with Eva Hesse,” in Eva Hesse, ed. Mignon Nixon, October Files 3 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 18–­19. 2. Fold/Manifold 1. In addition

to texts by Lucy R. Lippard, Rosalind E. Krauss, Anna C. Chave, Griselda Pollock, and Anne M. Wagner, which I cite below, the work of Briony Fer, Mignon Nixon, and Vanessa Corby is significant in this regard. See Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Nixon, “Posing the Phallus,” October, no. 92 (2000), 99–­127; Corby, Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging and Displacement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 2. Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 205–­6; Griselda Pollock, “A Very Long Engagement: Singularity and Difference in the Critical Writing on N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 9 – 8 1

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Eva Hesse,” in Encountering Eva Hesse, ed. Pollock and Vanessa Corby (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 29–­30. 3. See Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 309–­20. This too was a feminist act. As Lucy Lippard noted in 1980, “For years now, we have been told that male modernist art is superior because it is ‘self-­critical.’ But from such a view self-­criticism is in fact a narrow, highly mystified, and often egotistical monologue.” Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (New York: New Press, 1995), 173–­74. 4. Anna C. Chave, “Eva Hesse: A ‘Girl Being a Sculpture,’” in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, ed. Helen A. Cooper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery/Yale University Press, 1992), 108, 112. Hesse had a series of operations to remove a brain tumor and underwent radiation treatment and chemotherapy between spring 1969 and her death on May 29, 1970. The circumstance of her death and her tumultuous personal relationships significantly influenced her reception. See, among others, Cindy Nemser, “My Memories of Eva Hesse,” Feminist Art Journal 2, no. 1 (Winter 1973): 12–­13; Robert Pincus-­Witten, “Eva Hesse: Last Words,” Artforum 11, no. 3 (November 1972): 74–­76; Jill Johnston, “As Anybody Lay Dying,” Village Voice, January 25, 1973. 5. These included Abstract Inflationism (Graham Gallery, 1966), Eccentric Abstraction (Fisch­ bach Gallery, 1966), Nine at Leo Castelli: Anselmo, Bollinger, Hesse, Kaltenbach, Nauman, Saret, Serra, Sonnier, Zorio (Leo Castelli Warehouse, 1968), New Media, New Methods (traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, 1969–­1970), When Attitudes Become Form/Works–­Concepts–­Processes–­Situations–­Information (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), Anti-­Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), Art in Process IV (Finch College Museum of Art, 1969), and, in the year following her death, Materials and Methods: A New View (Katonah Gallery, 1971). Hesse also was included in material-­specific exhibitions like Plastics and New Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1969), A Plastic Presence (Jewish Museum, 1969), and String and Rope (Sidney Janis Gallery, 1970). See Elisabeth Sussman, ed., “Exhibition History and Selected Reviews,” in Eva Hesse (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Yale University Press, 2002), 325–­33. 6. Hilton Kramer, “Chagall Retains His Remarkable Vigor,” New York Times, November 23, 1968. 7. Emily Wasserman, “New York: Eva Hesse, Fischbach Gallery,” Artforum 7, no. 5 (January 1969): 60. 8. C. N. [Cindy Nemser], “Frank Gallo, Tony Delap, Eva Hesse at Owens-­Corning,” Arts Magazine 44 (January 1970): 57. 9. Albers is at times invoked productively in discourse on Hesse, although often antagonistically and without rigorous attention to his practice or teaching methods. Texts that discuss the Hesse-­Albers relationship include Carl Goldstein, “Teaching Modernism: What Albers Learned in the Bauhaus and Taught to Rauschenberg, Noland, and Hesse,” Arts Magazine 54 (December 1979): 108–­16; William S. Wilson, “Eva Hesse: On the Threshold of Illusions,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 427–­32; Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Pollock, “Very Long Engagement”; Jeffrey Saletnik, “Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching,” Tate Papers 7 (Spring 2007); Briony Fer, Eva Hesse: Studiowork (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009). See also the essays in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (New York: Drawing Center/

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Yale University Press, 2006): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Hesse’s Endgame: Facing the Diagram,” 117–­50; Briony Fer, “Sculpture as Sample,” 273–­304; Mignon Nixon, “Child Drawing,” 27–­56; M. Catherine de Zegher, “Drawing as Binding/Bandage/Bondage or Eva Hesse Caught in the Triangle of Process/Content/Materiality,” 59–­115. 10. Wasserman, “New York: Eva Hesse, Fischbach Gallery,” 60. 11. John Perreault, “Art Knotted and Split at the Seams,” Village Voice, December 21, 1972. 12. Douglas Crimp, “New York Letter,” Art International 17, no. 3 (March 1973): 40. 13. On Hesse’s dislike of Yale, see, especially, Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women). 14. The other concentrations at the school were advertising art, illustration, ceramics, industrial design, photography, “sign and showcard,” costume design, fashion illustration, silk screen, and jewelry. See Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Eva Hesse Archives (hereafter Hesse Archives, Oberlin), 1977.52.66. For an excellent chronology of Hesse’s life, see Helen A. Cooper, “Eva Hesse: Diaries and Notebooks,” in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, ed. Cooper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery/ Yale University Press, 1992), 17–­50. 15. “Pratt Institute Course Catalogue 1952–­1953,” Pratt Institute Archives. Frederick J. Whiteman, Norman A. Bate, Prudence Herrick, Marion Hertzler, and Calvin Albert were members of the Foundation Art faculty. Ruth P. Taylor taught color; two paintings Hesse made for Taylor’s color course are extant. Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, the second wife and widow of László Moholy-­Nagy, was also a member of staff at the Pratt Institute between 1951 and 1969. 16. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.56.35, 1977.52.56.18. 17. Bernard Chaet, Alfred Blaustein, Rudy Pozzatti, and Walter Rosenblum were resident faculty at the Norfolk Summer School in 1957. 18. To my knowledge, Hesse’s academic transcript from Yale was not preserved; thus it is difficult to know in which courses she enrolled. The Yale Corporation requires that student transcripts remain closed (even to next of kin) for five years following the student’s death or for seventy-­five years following the student’s graduation date, whichever is longer. Archival materials indicate that Hesse enrolled in drawing and art history courses as well as in Albers’s color course in fall 1957; student papers exist for two art history courses and a course on “philosophy of art”; she indicated her semester grades in art history, drawing, and painting in a diary entry; and she appears to have taken a course in English literature, which would have been required of a transfer student from Cooper Union. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin. 19. Mignon Nixon has asserted that Hesse “exploited her artistic education to invent her art” and cites her intensely colored collage and collage-­like drawings from the mid-­ 1960s as examples. Nixon, “Child Drawing,” 87. 20. Upon graduating from Yale, Hesse worked for fabric designer Boris Kroll. Hesse, Diaries, 227. 21. Hesse, 21. 22. Hesse, 53. 23. Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 4. Information about Albers was not included in the interview with Hesse that Nemser published in Artforum in 1970. It was included in subsequent publications; Nemser published expanded interviews with Hesse in 1973 and 1975 based upon the same source material. These are problematic texts. As they appear in print, the interviews read as if Nemser and Hesse were conversing naturally; however, the sequence of the conversation is out of synch with the order of topics discussed, sometime rearranged, and some information is omitted. The transcript of Nemser’s recorded interview exists in the Hesse Archives, Oberlin. See Cindy Nemser, “An Interview with Eva Hesse,” Artforum 8, no. 9 (May 1970): 59–­63; Cindy Nemser, “Her

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Life: Interview with Eva Hesse,” Feminist Art Journal 2, no.1 (Winter 1973): 13–­14; Cindy Nemser, “Interview with Eva Hesse,” in Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Scribner, 1975), 201–­30. 24. Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 5. 25. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.56.32. 26. See Hesse, Diaries, 176, 182–­83, 441–­42. 27. Eva Hesse to Dr. Helene Papanek, May 1, 1958, Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.44.19A–­B. Hesse mentioned taking Albers’s color course in a letter to Papanek written on September 21, 1957, soon after her arrival at Yale: “I am told to respect it just to have the experience of studying with Albers.” Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.44.12A–­B. 28. In the color course, Hesse recalled, “you were given coloring papers so your choices were less and you had to work within certain confines.” Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 5. 29. “School of Architecture and Design Bulletin.” Neil Welliver taught Art 11, Basic Design (Development of the visual dimensions; construction and combination; figuration and constellation). 30. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “The Painting Courses,” in Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006), 244–­45. 31. Horowitz, 198. 32. Albers, Interaction, 47. 33. “Last eve. I draw. intended to paint a picture—­homage to F. Roth, 1st good young painter to be totally recognized. Turned out lousy. tore it up and after approx. 3½ hrs. of work I tore it & within 30 min. made a lovely little collage. A Very good one. Looks like a little Klee. Red & Black—­also like the leaf study I gave Kitty.” Hesse, Diaries, 240. 34. Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 5. 35. Chaet taught Drawing 21 (Landscape, still life, and figure). Hesse mentions taking another drawing class open to all students at Yale College—­likely Drawing 20 (Graphic study of the human figure)—­in her first semester. Eva Hesse to Dr. Helene Papanek, September 21, 1957, Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.44.12A–­B. 36. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 25. 37. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “Basic Drawing,” in Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes, 150–­93. 38. See Bernard Chaet, The Art of Drawing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 95–­97. 39. Chaet, 147. 40. See No title, 1957; ink on paper, 19.2 x 17.4 cm; Estate of Eva Hesse (D 143 in forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hesse’s drawings). 41. See Eva Hesse, No title, 1957. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (1998.109.16). 42. Originally published as “Albers Answers: ‘What Is Art?,’ ‘Can Art Be Taught?,’ ‘What Would You Say to the Young Artist?’” Yale Literary Magazine, 1958; reprinted as “Art and the Artist: Josef Albers, Three Questions,” in Art and the Craftsman: The Best of the Yale Literary Magazine, 1836–­1961, ed. Joseph Harned and Neil Goodwin (New Haven, CT: Yale Literary Magazine, 1961), 276. 43. Barry Rosen transcribes Hesse’s handwritten text as “What does one head have to do with the next?,” but, in my view, the word she wrote is illegible. Hesse did not paint her series of head paintings until 1960, after having graduated from Yale. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.40. 44. Hesse, Diaries, 182–­83. 45. Hesse, 843. 46. Hesse, 400.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 5 – 9 2

47. See Briony Fer, “Eva Hesse and Color,” October, no. 119 (2007), 21–­36. 48. Alex Potts discusses this aspect of Hesse’s work in The Sculptural Imagination, 341–­56. 49. Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 6. 50. Fer, Eva Hesse: Studiowork, 140–­45, 42–­44. 51. See “Transcript of meeting between Sol LeWitt, Carol Androccio, Connie Lewallen, and

Elise Goldstein at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, November 17, 1981,” University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Some of the test pieces were made for Hesse by Aegis Reinforced Plastics, the firm that assisted her in fabricating work in fiberglass. 52. Albers discusses the “playful tinkering” (spielerisches basteln) with the material for its own sake in Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht.” 53. Hesse had intended to use all nineteen plugs from Repetition Nineteen III. See Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 14. 54. On the evolving shape of Area, see Michelle E. Barger, “A Delicate Balance: Packing, Handling, and Installation of Ephemeral Works by Eva Hesse,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 47, no. 1 (2008): 27–­40. 55. Hesse, Diaries, 842. 56. See Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 9. 57. Hesse attended a series of lectures about casting and molding polymers and other acrylic materials offered by Experiments in Art and Technology in 1967. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.76.56. 58. Xerox copy of Cindy Nemser interview, 1970, Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.46; Nemser, “Conversation with Eva Hesse,” 22. Nemser’s choice to change “convinced by” (the phrase Albers used in critiques) to “moved by” in the published version of the interview underscores a tendency to cast the artist as intuitive rather than intellectual. In the published interview, Nemser recorded the statement to which Hesse responds here as “So your work has more relation to painting than to sculpture, which one thinks of as carved-­out or molded.” According to the transcript, she actually said to Hesse, “I would like to get back to the idea of serial art or the movements that have come before you. Well let me go back to the beginning. Firstly, how do you think your work relates to the tradition of art. Do you feel that you are a traditionalist?” 59. Albers, quoted in Horowitz, “Painting Courses,” 244. 60. Hesse taught in the foundations curriculum, including drawing and “3-­D” foundations courses as well as a painting course. See Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.45.200A–­B. 61. Mignon Nixon addresses Hesse’s work through the lens of her education and work with children in an excellent essay. See Nixon, “Child Drawing.” 62. Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.47.8A–­F. 63. Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.49.8A–­B. 64. Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.49.1A–­E. 65. Albers had students perform a similar exercise using pieces of paper cut from newspapers and magazines and introduced students to the Weber-­Fechner Law as an alternative to M. E. Chevreul’s method for creating a graduated color scale. It is unclear if students were to use paper or pigment in the exercise Hesse assigned. See Albers, Interaction, 12–­17, 54–­58. 66. Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.49.1A–­E. 67. Hesse Archives, Oberlin, 1977.52.47.8A–­F. 68. Josef Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, no. 2/3 (1928): 3–­7. 69. “Papier wird draußen (in handwerk und industrie) meist liegend und flach und geklebt verwendet, eine seite des papiers verliert dabei meist ihren ausdruck, die kante wird

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fast nie genutzt. das ist uns anlaß, papier stehend, uneben, plastisch bewegt, beiderseitig und kantenbetont auszunutzen. anstatt zu kleben werden wir es binden, stecken, nähen, nieten, also anders befestigen und es auf seine leistung bei zug-­ und druckbeanspruchung untersuchen [sic].” Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” 4. 70. Erich Consemüller composed many photographs of objects made in context of Albers’s Vorkurs as part of his documentation of the school. See Wulf Herzogenrath and Stefan Kraus, eds., Erich Consemüller: Fotografien Bauhaus-­Dessau (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1989); Wulf Herzogenrath, “Josef Albers und der ‘Vorkurs’ am Bauhaus (1919–­1933),” in Wallraf-­Richartz-­Jahrbuch, Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 41, 245–76 (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1980). 71. See Natasha Korda, “Accessorizing the Stage: Alien Women’s Work and the Fabric of Early Modern Material Culture,” in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed. Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 224. 72. Joan Sallas, an expert napkin folder, has documented the history of napkin and paper folding, a body of research to which I am indebted. See Sallas, “Papier und Falten in der Aufkläringszeit” (self-­pub., 2004); Sallas, “100 Jahre deutschsprachige Papierfaltenbücher” (self-­pub., 2004); Sallas, Ursprung und Entwicklung des Serviettenbrechens: Katalog zur Ausstellung Tischlein Deck Dich (Salzburg: Salzburger Barockmuseum, 2008); Sallas, Gefaltete Schönheit: Die Kunst der Serviettenbrechens (Freiburg im Breisgau: Joan Sallas, 2010). 73. See Matthias Giegher, Li tre trattati di messer Mattia Giegher Bavaro di Mosburc, trinciante dell’illustriss. nazione Alemanna in Padova (Padua: Guaresco Guareschi al Pozzo, 1639). 74. See Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Vollständiges und von neuen vermehrtes Trincir-­Buch: handlend . . . nach Italianischer und dieser Zeit üblichen Hof-­Art mit fleiss beschrieben, und mit Kupffern lehrartig aussgebildet (Nürnberg: Paulus Fürsten, Kunsthändlers, gedruckt bey Christoff Gerhard, 1657). 75. Harsdörffer, 22. 76. “Hier sind zwar nur die Spizfalten gezeiget / können aber leichtlich rundiret werden / nach Beschaffenheit fürhabenden Bildes oder Figur . . .” Harsdörffer, 24. 77. “Wer den Grund dieser Kunst verstehet / und Hirn in dem Kopf hat / wird nicht nur folgendes laisten / sondern auch ein mehrers erfinden können.” Harsdörffer, 24. 78. Jean-­Daniel Krebs, “Harsdörffer als Vermittler des ‘honnêteté’-­Ideals,” in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer: Ein deutscher Dichter und europäischer Gelehrter, ed. Italo Michele Battafarano (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 292–­93. 79. Krebs, 293. 80. Napkin folding was thoroughly introduced to the audience Harsdörffer hoped to cultivate through subsequent publications that offered step-­by-­step directions on folding serviettes, like those appearing in the cookbook De volmaakte Hollandsche keuken-­ meid . . . (Amsterdam: Steven van Esveldt, 1752). Similar texts followed, as napkin folding became established in the bourgeois home upon the advent of industrial weaving and increased availability of linen. The two-­volume Illustriertes Konversations-­Lexikon der Frau (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1900), for example, included eleven illustrations of folded dinner napkins suitable for formal dining. For a cultural history of the napkin, see Katharina Enzinger, “‘Die Bestimmung der Serviette ist die, nicht geschont zu werden!’” in “Finger fertig:” Eine Kulturgeschichte der Serviette, ed. Lothar Kolmer (Vienna: Lit, 2008), 15–­47. 81. “Damit man aber die Sache besser erlernen kan / so ist rahtsam / daß man erstlich einen Bogen Papier nehme / und sich daran übe / dessen Fehler leichter können geändert werden / als an der gestärckten oder ungestärckten Leinwad.” Harsdörffer, Vollständiges und von neuen vermehrtes Trincir-­Buch, 22.

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82. Bannet

suggests that the structure of writing manuals changed in the eighteenth century, as did their intended audience, due to the need for consistent written communication between Britain and its colonies. See Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–­1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 83. Bannet, xii. 84. Bannet, 54. 85. Johann Christoph Stockhausen, Grundsätze wohleingerichteter Briefe, nach den besten Mustern der Deutschen und Ausländer nebst beigefügten Erläuterungen und Exempeln (Vienna: J. T. Edlen v. Trattnern, 1766), 477. 86. Stockhausen, 478. An alternative to the self-­made envelope was the fashionable couvert, which obscured one’s writing so sufficiently that it allowed one to write on both sides of the paper within; it was especially well-­suited for sending honorable letters. 87. “Einige lassen ihre Kunst zur Unzeit sehen, wenn sie die Briefe in gar zu viele Falten brechen, daß man fast alle Müde nöthig hat, sie auseinander zu wickeln. Es siehet etwas pedantisch aus, und wenn man begierig ist, den Brief zu lesen: so hält man sich nicht gerne mit langen Entwickelungen auf, und nimmt sich noch vielweniger die Zeit, dergleichen Künste leyen zu bewundern.” Stockhausen, 480–­81. 88. Bannet discusses the prioritization of brevity in certain genres of letter as well as the visual rhetoric of the page, which, for example, in letters to persons of significance, was to include ample negative space. See “Manual Architectonics,” in Bannet, Empire of Letters, 54–­102. 89. Sallas, Ursprung und Entwicklung des Serviettenbrechens, 26. 90. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 113. 91. Locke, 136–­37. 92. I thank Igor Jenzen of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Museum für Sächsische Volkskunst for sharing his knowledge of Petri’s work with me. 93. “Senffs Unterrichtsmethode war, soweit ich mich ihrer entsinne, die Pestalozzi-Krugsche, wobei es weniger darauf ankommen sollte, daß man was lernte, als vielmehr auf die Art und Weise, wie dies geschah.” Wilhelm von Kügelgen, Jugenderinnerungen eines alten Mannes, ed. Johannes Werner (1870; Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1989), 70. 94. “Unsere künstlerische Tätigkeit beschränkte sich übrigens nicht bloß aufs Zeichnen, wir schnitzten auch aus Holz und kneteten allerlei Gelungenes aus buntem Wachs. . . . Endlich machten wir auch Papparbeiten und verfertigten überhaupt fast alle unsere Spielsachen selbst nach Anleitung des Lehrers, der sehr richtig urteilte, daß eben dieses Anfertigen das beste bei der Sache sei.” Kügelgen, 74. 95. “Das Genußreichste, was Senff uns lehrte, war die Kunst, gewisse kleine, trianguläre Gestalten, sonst Krähen gennant, aus Papier zu falten, bei deren Anfertigung jedoch der letzte vollendende Bruch so schwierig war, daß er gar nicht gelehrt werden konnte. . . .” Kügelgen, 74. 96. “Die Festungen und Städte, die wir für unsere Kriegsspiele bis dahin nur als Grundrisse verzeichnet hatten, erhoben sich jetz zu allen Dimensionen des Raumes, und wir nahmen zu an mancherlei Kenntnis und Geschicklichkeit.” Kügelgen, 78. 97. Wolke cites, for instance, Heinrich Rockstroh, Anweisung zum Modellieren aus Papier oder aus demselben allerley Gegenstände im Kleinen nachzuahmen (Weimar, 1802). Christian Heinrich Wolke, Anweisung für mütter und kinderlehrer, die es sind oder werden können zur mittheilung der allerersten sprachkeuntnisse und begriffe: von der geburt des kindes an bis zur zeit des lesenlernens (Leipzig: G. Voss, 1805). 98. Daniel Boileau, trans., Papyro-­Plastics; or, The Art of Modelling in Paper: Being an Instructive Amusement for Young Persons of Both Sexes (London: T. and T. Boosey, 1830), vi.

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184

Boileau’s text is based on Bernhard Heinrich Blasche, Der Papparbeiter, oder Anleitung in Pappe zu arbeiten: Vorzüglich Erziehern gewidmet von Bernhard Heinrich Blasche, Lehrer an der Erziehungsanstalt zu Schnepfenthal (Schnepfenthal: Buchhandlung der Erziehungsanstalt, 1797). 99. Boileau, vii. 100. Fröbel, Die Menschenerziehung: Die Erziehungs-­, Unterrichts-­und Lehrkunst, angestrebt in der allgemeinen deutschen Erziehungsanstalt zu Keilhau. 101. Friedrich Fröbel, The Education of Man, trans. W. N. Hailmann (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), 327; Fröbel, Die Menschenerziehung, 490. 102. Upon Fröbel’s death, Bertha von Marenholtz-­Bülow and other of his followers crafted an increasingly rigid curriculum that became canonized in numerous manuals published to aid teachers, like Hermann Goldammer’s Der Kindergarten: Handbuch der Fröbel’schen erzeihungsmethode, Spielgaben und Beschäftigungen; Goldammer, The Kindergarten: A Guide to Froebel’s Method of Education, Gifts, and Occupations, trans. William Wright (Berlin: C. Habel, 1882). 103. Fröbel, Education of Man, 235. 104. Goldammer, The Kindergarten: A Guide to Froebel’s Method of Education, Gifts, and Occupations, 108. 105. This was especially the case at Black Mountain College, where his teaching was part of a liberal arts curriculum. See Molesworth, Leap Before You Look. 106. Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” 4. 107. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6. See also Greg Lynn, Folding in Architecture, rev. ed. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2004); Christopher P. Heuer, “Dürer’s Folds,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 249–­65. 108. Deleuze, 6. 109. See Tom Conley, “Translator’s Forward: A Plea for Leibnitz,” in Deleuze, The Fold, ix–­xx. 110. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 133–­34. c. Painting 1. Albers

had avoided painting at the Bauhaus; he wrote “Male in Öl!” (“I am painting in oils!”) to Wassily Kandinsky in 1934. See letter dated April 27, 1934, in Jessica Boissel, ed., Kandinsky-­Albers: Une correspondance des années trente; ein Briefwechsel aus den dreissiger Jahren, trans. Jeanne Etoré (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1998), 26. On Albers’s painting from this period and a comprehensive assessment of his painting technique, see Peter P. Morrin, “Paintings in America,” in Hunter, Josef Albers: Paintings and Graphics, 11–­14; Heinz Liesbrock and Michael Semff, eds., Painting on Paper: Josef Albers in America (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Brenda Danilowitz, “Josef Albers 1936–­1947: A Decade of Abstract Painting,” in Danilowitz and Liesbrock, Anni and Josef Albers, 93–­97; Redensek, “On Josef Albers’ Painting Materials and Techniques.” 2. Albers, “On My ‘Homage to the Square.’” 3. The painting that corresponds to these studies is illustrated in Danilowitz and Liesbrock, Anni and Josef Albers, 119. 4. On Albers’s Variants series, see Brenda Danilowitz, “From Variants on a Theme to Homage to the Square: Josef Albers’s Paintings 1947–­1949,” in Danilowitz and Liesbrock, Anni and Josef Albers, 143–­44; Eva Díaz, “Josef Albers and the Ethics of Perception,” in The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 30–­45. 5. See Josef Albers, “On My Variants,” in Josef Albers: Paintings, Prints, Projects, ed. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Clark & Way, 1956), 32. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 0 9 – 1 2 4

6. Albers

continued to employ the grid in doing so. He established proportions for four schema (three consisting of three nested squares; one consisting of four nested squares) based upon the division of a square into ten horizontal and ten vertical units. Typically, Albers’s use of the square has been historicized simplistically as an active device in comparison to the squares of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian or, as by Irving Finkelstein, in terms of the development of Albers’s practice. In contrast, Rudolf Arnheim analyzed the geometric proportions and “dynamic tension” of Albers’s Homages. On Albers and the square, see Hamilton, Josef Albers: Paintings, Prints, Projects; Charlot, “Nature and the Art of Josef Albers”; McShine, Josef Albers: Homage to the Square; Gomringer, Josef Albers: His Work as Contribution to Visual Articulation in the Twentieth Century; Irving Leonard Finkelstein, “The Life and Art of Josef Albers” (diss., New York University, 1968); Spies, Albers, 1971; Nicholas Fox Weber, “The Artist as Alchemist,” in Weber et al., Josef Albers: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1988), 14–­49; Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, new version (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 101–­4. 7. See Morrin, “Paintings in America,” 13. 8. See De Kooning, “Albers Paints a Picture,” 57–­58. Albers later forwent this elaborate process in favor of making color studies in oil on blotting paper to work through various combinations of color prior to executing one of his Homages. 9. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 278–­81. 10. See “Lehrplan für die Präparandenanstalten und Lehrerseminare vom Jahre 1901” in Die neueren Bestimmungen über den Zeichenunterricht in Preussen (Berlin: Verlag Albrecht Dürer-­Haus, 1907), 13–­14. 11. “Für die Entwicklung des Farbensinnes ist das theoretische Erörtern von Farbenmischungen und Farbenzusammenstellungen an der Hand des “Farbenkreises” von geringem Werte und unter Umständen sogar bedenklich, dasselbe gilt von dem farbigen Anlegen von Flächen, falls dasselbe nicht von eineim Lehrer geleitet wird, der einen besonders feinen Farbengeschmack besitzt. Auf alle Fälle müssen die Schüler praktisch unterwiesen werden, mit dem ihnen zu Gebote stehenden Farbenmaterial die Farben von Gegenständen (Blättern, Schmetterlingen, Stoffen, usw.) zu treffen.” “Ausführungsbestimmungen zu den Lehrplänen für die höheren Schulen, die Präparandenanstalten und die Lehrerseminare vom Jahre 1901,” in Die neueren Bestimmungen über den Zeichenunterricht in Preussen, 14–­18, esp. 16. 12. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 275. 13. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Structural Objectivity,” in Objectivity, 253–­307. 14. See Peter Galison, “Objectivity Is Romantic,” in The Humanities and the Sciences, ed. Jerome Friedman, Peter Galison, and Susan Haack (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 2000), 15–­43. 15. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 14. 16. Wölfflin, 15. 3. Color Aid 1. Albers retired from teaching in 1958. Serra began his academic career at the University

of California, Berkeley, in 1957, but transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied literature and took art courses with Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw. Upon graduation in 1961, he enrolled at Yale University, where he completed one year of study to earn a BFA degree, as students with BA degrees were not permitted to enroll in Yale’s MFA program. Notably, Serra’s classmates included Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, and Robert Mangold. 2. For advanced students, the course bulletin stated, “problems become increasingly N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 4 – 1 2 7

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individual and are focused on a particular professional discipline.” “School of Art and Architecture Bulletin” (Yale University, 1962) , Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. 3. Sillman had studied with Albers at Black Mountain College and followed him to Yale, where he earned BFA and MFA degrees in 1951 and 1953 respectively. Welliver earned an MFA from Yale in 1955. He taught Basic Design II (Development of the visual dimensions; construction and combination; figuration and constellation) and Painting 20 (Introductory study in painting with emphasis on pictorial elements). Sillman taught Drawing 13, Basic Freehand Drawing (Fundamental training in graphic articulation and presentation), Color 14a or b (Study of the interaction of color), and Painting 21 (Introductory study in painting with emphasis on group exercises in plastic relationships). Also teaching were Bernard Chaet, Alex Katz, Louis Finkelstein, Robert Engman, and Jack Tworkov, who later became department chairman. Serra mentions in an interview with Kynaston McShine that “Louis Finkelstein was a very good teacher but very conservative.” “A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, ed. McShine and Lynne Cooke (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 17. Finkelstein taught Drawing 31 and Painting 110. “School of Art and Architecture Bulletin” (Yale University, 1963), Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. 4. Albers, Interaction, 2. Yale University Press published Albers’s nineteen-­pound tome as a boxed two-­volume edition comprising a hardback text in which Albers contextualizes his approach to color instruction and a slipcase containing eighty folders in which are found reproductions of color studies from Albers’s courses (as screen prints and four-­color letterpress prints with offset lithography), along with a forty-­eight-­page commentary on the studies. On the history of Interaction of Color, see Brenda Danilowitz, “A Short History of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color,” in Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries, ed. Vanja V. Malloy (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2015). 5. Michael Craig-­Martin and Richard Serra, “Richard Serra and Michael Craig-­Martin’s 50-­Year Conversation about Art,” Guardian, October 1, 2016. Craig-­Martin received BFA and MFA degrees from Yale in 1963 and 1966 respectively. Information about Serra’s experience at Yale has been reconstructed through published interviews, school bulletins that indicate degree requirements and course offerings, and other accounts. Serra also refers to Albers and his experience at Yale in Hal Foster, “Richard Serra in Conversation with Hal Foster,” in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time, ed. Carmen Giménez (Bilbao: Museo Guggenheim/Steidl Verlag Göttingen, 2005), 23–­41; Phong Bui, “Richard Serra in Conversation with Phong Bui,” in Richard Serra: Rolled and Forged, ed. Gagosian Gallery (New York: Gagosian Gallery/Steidl Verlag Göttingen, 2006), 5–­15; McShine, “Conversation about Work,” 15–­40; Gary Garrels, “An Interview with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, ed. Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels (Houston: Menil Collection/Yale University Press, 2011), 65–­83; Richard Serra and Hal Foster, Conversations about Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 6. Albers hired Robert Gillam Scott in 1950. Scott had taught at the Newcomb College of Art in New Orleans and published Design Fundamentals (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1951) based upon his teaching there. Welliver served as Scott’s teaching assistant and became the instructor of record for the course in basic design upon Scott’s death. Welliver claims to have introduced entirely new exercises in his version of the course; some, however, like exercises using symbols made by typewriters and others that involve the reconfiguration of printed text from newspapers mirror exercises Albers employed at the Bauhaus. On Welliver’s course, see Frederick A. Horowitz, “Design,” in Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006), 143–­45. 7. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “Neil Welliver Discusses Josef Albers: A Conversation with Fred Horowitz,” September 27, 1996, Albers Foundation Archives. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 7 – 1 2 8

8. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “Neil Welliver Discusses Josef Albers: A Conversation with

Fred Horowitz,” July 9, 1995, Albers Foundation Archives. 9. Richard Serra and Hal Foster, Conversations about Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 2018), 46. 10. See Horowitz, “Neil Welliver Discusses Josef Albers: A Conversation with Fred Horowitz,

July 9, 1995.” Alloway, Elizabeth C. Baker, Max Kozloff, Rosalind E. Krauss, Philip Leider, John Perreault, Robert Pincus-­Witten, Carter Ratcliff, Barbara Rose, Peter Schjeldahl, and other critics wrote of Serra’s work in the pages of major journals and newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His work also was included in high-­profile exhibitions, including Robert Morris’s 9 at Leo Castelli: Anselmo, Bollinger, Hesse, Kaltenbach, Nauman, Saret, Serra, Sonnier, Zorio (Castelli Warehouse, 1968), Anti-­Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), When Attitudes Become Form/Works–­Concepts–­ Processes–­Situations–­Information (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), Guggenheim International Exhibition 1971 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971), and Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). On Serra’s early art critical reception and exhibition history, see David Frankel, ed., Richard Serra: Early Work (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag/David Zwirner, 2013). 12. Yve-­Alain Bois has offered the most compelling observation about Albers and Serra, albeit in a footnote to a coy parenthetical aside: “(at this juncture, is it irrelevant to recall that Serra was a student of Josef Albers, that great discriminator between ‘factual’ and ‘actual’ facts?).” Richard Shiff and Magdalena Nieslony also invoke Albers productively, if briefly. See Bois, “Descriptions, Situations and Echos: On Richard Serra’s Drawings,” in Richard Serra: Drawings/Zeichnungen 1969–­1990: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Hans Janssen (Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1990), 21n19; Nieslony, “Richard Serra in Germany: Perspectivity in Perspective,” trans. James Gussen, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (2008): 57–­58; Shiff, “Drawing Thick: Serra’s Black,” in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, ed. Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels (Houston: Menil Collection/Yale University Press, 2011), 31–­40. 13. See Krauss, “Moteur!” in Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 14. See, e.g., Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work: Sculpture between Labor and Spectacle,” in McShine and Cooke, Richard Serra Sculpture, 43–­58. Hal Foster is especially adamant about linking Serra and constructivism; in essays and interviews with the artist, he outlines tension between the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism: “In effect, the Bauhaus adapted the ideological look of [constructivism] to moderate the economic logic of [American Fordism]—­but then what else could it do after a failed revolution in a state controlled by capitalists?” Foster, “1923,” in Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Foster et al. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004): 189. 15. Hal Foster describes some early commentary on Serra’s work as such. Foster, “To Support,” in Frankel, Richard Serra: Early Work, 12. 16. On gestalt psychology and the Bauhaus, see Howard Singerman, “The Practice of Modernism,” in Art Subjects; Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus; Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes; Koehler, “More Than Parallel Lines.” 17. Robert Pincus-­Witten, “Slow Information,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969): 38. 18. See Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 19. Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra: Sculpture Exceeded,” October, no. 18 (1981), 69–­71. See also Rosalind Krauss’s invocation of the postmodern in her critique of historicism in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, no. 8 (1979), 41–­44. 20. Foster, “To Support,” 15. 21. Crimp, “Richard Serra: Sculpture Exceeded,” 78. 11. Lawrence

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22. Stefan Germer, “The Work of the Senses: Reflections on Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra,

ed. Ylva Rouse (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1991), 143. 23. Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work,” 55–­56. 24. Douglas 188

Crimp details this move succinctly; Rosalind E. Krauss elaborates in her seminal essay on Serra’s work. See Crimp, “Richard Serra: Sculpture Exceeded,” 71–­75; Krauss, “Richard Serra: Sculpture.” 25. For an overview of this discourse, see Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983): 276–­95; Potts, Sculptural Imagination. 26. Richard Serra, “Serra at Yale,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2003, 32. In this essay, Serra “reflects upon his personal history” until 1977. 27. Serra shared this memory with Ann Temkin in 2007. Temkin, “Richard Serra,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 148–­49. 28. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “The Color Course,” in Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes, 199. 29. See Albers, Interaction, 37–­38. 30. Working with concrete was among Welliver’s additions to the course, and one of which, according to Welliver, Albers was particularly fond. See Horowitz, “Neil Welliver Discusses Josef Albers: A Conversation with Fred Horowitz,” July 9, 1995. 31. McShine, “Conversation about Work,” 18. 32. Although crafted in 1967–­1968, Serra first published his Verblist in 1971. See Richard Serra, “Verb List, 1967–­68,” Avalanche 2 (Winter 1971): 20–­21. 33. See Serra, “Serra at Yale,” 30. On Serra’s move from painting to sculpture in the mid-­ 1960s and his earliest efforts in sculpture, see Richard Serra, “Questions, Contradictions, Solutions: Early Work,” in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time, ed. Carmen Giménez (Bilbao: Museo Guggenheim/Steidl Verlag Göttingen, 2005), 48. Serra also notes that how he was using paint as material was a factor in his giving up painting: “I was using paint with a certain disdain, with the attitude that any material was as good as any other material. And once you find that you’re not using paint for its illusionistic capabilities or its color refraction but as a material that happens to be ‘red,’ you can use any material as equally relevant.” See David Seidner and Richard Serra, “Richard Serra,” Bomb 42 (Winter 1993): 44. 34. Serra, “Serra at Yale,” 30. 35. Serra offers a compelling account of what drew him to rubber and lead in McShine, “Conversation about Work,” 27. 36. Krauss, for instance, elaborated the “constructive principle” present in the work of Donald Judd and other artists associated with minimal art as meaningful to Serra in Passages in Modern Sculpture. Hal Foster articulates this position clearly in “The Un/ Making of Sculpture,” in Richard Serra: Sculpture, 1985–­1998, ed. Russell Ferguson, Anthony McCall, and Clara Weyergraf-­Serra (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/ Steidl Verlag Göttingen, 1998), 13–­31. See also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s writing on Serra. 37. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 271. In highlighting Andre’s approach to material, Krauss favored a synchronic rather than a diachronic narrative that might have included Albers. Generally speaking—­and in keeping with poststructuralist, antihistoricist thought—­teleological narration and discussions of influence were avoided in discourse on Serra, as they were by the artist himself. In 2016 Serra noted that Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) was among the books that have been most significant to him. Regarding Bloom, he stated, “A young poet who is up against old masters must clear an imaginative space for himself through a creative misunderstanding or misreading of the poets of the past. Bloom defines six

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categories of overcoming the influence of precursors. He calls these categories ‘Re­ visionary Ratios.’ They are useful to all artists.” Richard Serra, “My 10 Favorite Books: Richard Serra,” New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2016. 38. Krauss, 272. Krauss elaborates that this work became known as process art in which the “principle of transformation” was the “observable logic of the work.” 39. Although Andre and Serra did not use binding materials or agents in compositing their work, Krauss maintains that their work is “grammatically distinct.” Krauss, 275–­76. 40. McShine, “Conversation about Work,” 28. 41. Albers had students use painted pieces of paper or color-­printed paper of various kinds in their color studies; he preferred the material—­especially the silk screened, opaque, matte-­finish Color-­aid paper introduced in 1948—­because “colors in paper always consist of outspoken flat areas which present even colors reaching precisely from edge to edge.” See Albers, Interaction, 49. 42. The “after image” effect and “optical mixture” were explored by Albers’s students. The former results when two or more colors are juxtaposed in such a way that they change the appearance of one another; the latter occurs when the simultaneous perception of two or more colors produces the appearance of another, substitute color. See Albers, 33. Among those who have discussed Color Aid, Tom Holert writes of Serra’s relationship to Albers compellingly and in a way that is, at times, in line with my independently developed views. See Holert, “The Task Is the Task,” in Richard Serra: Films and Video­ tapes, ed. Søren Grammel and Eva Falge, trans. Nicholas Grindell, Manual 7 (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, Gegenwart, 2017), n.p. 43. Temkin, “Richard Serra,” 148. 44. Albers, Interaction, 47. 45. Albers, 5. 46. Notably, this was Serra’s only color film, which might suggest that he found the medium unsatisfactory; although he did work in color video, subsequent films are shot in black and white. 47. On the china girl, see Genevieve Yue, “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” October, no. 153 (2015), 97–­116. 48. See Michelson, “Films of Richard Serra,” esp. 76–81. 49. Albers, Interaction, 1. 50. Michelson, “Films of Richard Serra,” 78. 51. Serra noted that with China Girl, Anxious Automation (video, black and white, sound, 4 min. 27 sec., 1971; with Joan Jonas and Gerry Schum), and Boomerang (video, color, sound; 11 min. 18 sec., 1974; with Nancy Holt) he explored the “internal structure” of the medium of video. See Richard Serra and Bernard Lamarche-­Vadel, “Interview by Bernard Lamarche-­Vadel,” in Richard Serra: Writings/Interviews, ed. Clara Weyergraf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117. Originally Bernard Lamarche-­Vadel, “Entretien avec Richard Serra,” Artistes (Paris) 7 (January–­February 1981): 24–­29. 52. Albers, Interaction, 72. 53. See Horowitz, “The Color Course,” 202. 54. Albers, Interaction, 16. Albers was even more critical of the appearance of color photography, writing that “Blue and red are overemphasized to such an extent that their brightness is exaggerated. Though this may flatter public taste, the result is a loss in finer nuances and in delicate relationships.” Interaction, 15. 55. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 45. 56. See Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes. 57. Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler are the principal figures associated with gestalt psychology. Koffka established a psychological laboratory in Giessen in

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1919; Wertheimer worked with Köhler in Berlin until he assumed a position in Frankfurt in 1929. Notably, Hans Rupp’s department of applied psychology, which had been established in 1920 by Köhler’s predecessor, Carl Stumpf, was housed within the Berlin institute. See Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture. 58. See Koehler, “More Than Parallel Lines,” 45. 59. Albers returned to teaching at primary schools near his native Bottrop after completing the course at the Kunstschule; he attended evening classes at the Essener Handwerker-­und Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts, Essen), where it is likely he studied with Josef Urbach and Johan Thorn Prikker. He later studied at the Königliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Royal Academy of Art, Munich), where he worked with Franz von Stuck and Max Doerner. While in Munich, he also attended Hans Hofmann’s Schule für Bildende Kunst (School of Fine Arts). In 1920 he enrolled at the Bauhaus, where he completed the Vorkurs (preliminary course) with Johannes Itten before entering the Werkstatt für Glasmalerei (stained glass workshop) in 1921. Albers’s experiences in Essen and Munich are rich topics for further study. Toward that end, on Johan Thorn Prikker, see Christiane Heiser and Mienke Simon Thomas, eds., Johan Thorn Prikker: Mit allen Regeln der Kunst, vom Jugendstil zur Abstraktion (Düsseldorf: Stiftung Museum Kunst-­Palast, 2010); Christiane Heiser, “Adolf Meyer, Josef Albers and Their Dutch Teachers,” in Netherlands Bauhaus: Pioneers of a New World, ed. Mienke Simon Thomas and Yvonne Brentjens (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2019), 54–­61; Christiane Heiser, “Formen bilden ‘aus dem geistigen Kern der Aufgabe,’” in Der junge Josef Albers: Aufbruch in die Moderne, ed. Ulrike Growe (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019), 75–­80. On the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, see Nikolaus Gerhart, ed., 200 Jahre Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2008). On Franz von Stuck, see Gabriele Fahr-­Becker, Franz von Stuck und die Münchner Akademie von Kandinsky bis Albers (Milan: Mazzotta, 1990); Jo-­Anne Birnie Danzker, ed., Franz von Stuck (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 2013). 60. See “Lehrplan für die Präparandenanstalten und Lehrerseminare vom Jahre 1901” in Die neueren Bestimmungen über den Zeichenunterricht in Preussen, 13–­14. 61. The subject areas and time afforded to these during the examination were drawing according to the live model (head) (12 hours); drawing according to nature (leaves, flowers, fruits, branches, whole plants, shells, skulls, stuffed animals and other shapes) (4 hours); drawing of devices, vessels, ornate elements, parts of interiors and buildings (4 hours); painting after nature (leaves, flowers, fruits, branches, whole plants, butterflies, stuffed animals, after tiles, fabrics, devices, vessels, etc.) (8 hours); drawing on the school blackboard (2 hours); linear drawing (5 hours); methodology (½ hour); and art history (½ hour). See Adolph Liese, ed., “Prüfungsordnung für Zeichenlehrer und Zeichenlehrerinnen vom 31 Jan. 1902,” in Allgemeine Bestimmungen über das gesamte preußische Volksschulwesen, 170–­71. 62. “In der Prüfung haben die Bewerber nachzuweisen, daß sie ein offenes für Formen, Tonwerte und Farben empfängliches Auge und eine sichere Hand besitzen, daß ihr räumliches Vorsrtellungsvermögen und ihr Formengedächtnis gut entwickelt ist, und daß sie zum Lehren befähigt sind.” Liese, 170. 63. See oral history interview with Josef Albers by Sevim Fesci, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In the same interview, Albers stated that at the Kunstschule “we learned really to paint” and “we really had to draw.” 64. Brenda Danilowitz has observed correspondences between Albers’s educational attitude and Franck’s Das schaffende Kind (1928), a text based upon the work of teachers and students at the training schools associated with the Kunstschule—­for example, that students used torn pieces of color paper in making figurative and abstract collages in the training schools. Charles Darwent also discusses Franck, who ultimately became N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 1

the director of the Kunstschule. See Danilowitz, “Teaching Design,” 11–­12; Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work, 75–­78. 65. While it likely was in Berlin that Albers developed knowledge of specific methods associated with applied psychology and child aptitude testing, he already would have been aware of the basic principles of child psychology. The empirical study of child psychology in Germany was marked by William T. Preyer’s publication Die Seele des Kindes: Beobachtungen über die Geistige Entwickelung des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren (Leipzig: Grieben, 1882). William and Clara Stern later published a seminal work on childhood, Psychologie der frühen Kindheit (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1914). As discussed in chapter 1, psychology was a subject studied by students in a Lehrerseminar (teacher’s college) and, along with experimental pedagogy, was a topic addressed in publications geared toward educators. For example, the unattributed essay “Experimentelle Pädagogik” appeared in at least three such publications in 1909, including Lehrer-­Zeitung für Westfalen, die Rheinprovinz, Hannover, Braunschweig, Waldeck-­Pyrmont und die Nachbargebiete 26, no. 7 (February 13, 1909). In 1910 F. Hötte published “Wie Lassen sich die Forschungen der moderne Kinderpsychologie für die Schulpraxis nutzbar machen,” Pädagogische Woche: Organ des Westfälischen Provenzialvereins, des Katholischen Lehrerverbandes und der Hermann Hubertus Stiftung 6, no. 14 (1910): 170–­73. An essay on the importance of experimental psychology to pedagogy appeared over three issues of Katholische Schulzeitung für Mitteldeutschland in 1911. See, among these, Reinhold Gloria, “Die experimentelle Psychologie in der Gegenwart und ihre Bedeutung für die Pädagogik,” Katholische Schulzeitung für Mitteldeutschland 10, no. 7 (March 1, 1911): 49–­50. 66. “Die Bewerber haben dabei selbständig nach der Natur gefertigte Arbeiten, die einen Schluß auf ihre natürtliche Begabung gestatten, einzureichen, außerdem eine kurze Darstellung ihres bisherigen Lebensganges und das Schulabgangszeugnis beizufügen. Die dem Aufnahmegesuch beizufügenden Arbeiten (vornehmlich Bleistiftzeichnungen nach einfachen Natur-­und Kunstformen) sind porto-­und bestellgeldfrei einzusendenden.” “Programm der Königlichen Kunstschile Berlin,” n.d., 6, Archiv der Königlichen Kunstschule zu Berlin, UdK-­Archiv, Berlin. 67. On the drawing curriculum and Franck, see Jeannette Brabenetz, “Von der Gebundenheit zur Freiheit: Philipp Franck als Zeichenlehrer,” in Vom Taunus zum Wannsee: Der Maler Philipp Franck (1860–­1944), ed. Ingeborg Becker (Petersberg: Imhof, 2010), 81–­87; Jeannette Brabenetz, “Von der Natur sehen lernen: Philipp Francks Wirken als Zeichenlehrer und Reformer,” in Der junge Josef Albers: Aufbruch in die Moderne, ed. Ulrike Growe (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019), 59–­66. 68. “Das freie, fröhliche Schaffen der Kinder zu ermöglichen.” Philipp Franck, Zeichen-­und Kunstunterricht: Handbuch des Unterrichts an Höheren Schulen zur Einführung und Weiterbildung in Einzeldarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1928), 1. 69. See Brabenetz, “Von der Natur sehen lernen,” 62. 70. “Programm der Königlichen Kunstschile Berlin,” 4. 71. “Programm der Königlichen Kunstschile Berlin,” 4. 72. Philipp Franck published three significant texts: Zeichen-­und Kunstunterricht: Handbuch des Unterrichts an Höheren Schulen zur Einführung und Weiterbildung in Einzeldarstellungen (1928); Das schaffende Kind (Berlin: Otto Stollberg, 1928); Ein Leben für die Kunst (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1944). He also published essays in the progressive periodical Der Säemann: Monatsschrift für Jugendbildung und Jugendkunde. 73. “Der allgemeine Teil soll das Wesen des Kunstunterrichts, seine Grundlagen in Kunst und Pädagogik, die Verbindung und Verquickung derselben, die Möglichkeiten und die Grenzen, die sich dem Kunstlehrer darbieten, umfassen.” Franck, Zeichen-­und Kunstunterricht, 3. 74. “Der zweite, praktische Teil soll dann den Unterricht selbst, seine verschiedenen LehrN o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 1 – 1 4 2

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ausgaben, seine Gliederung und Einordnung in den Schulunterricht sowie allerlei Vorschriften und Gesichtspunkte behandeln.” Franck, 3. 75. “Man sollte daher den Gebrauch des Radiergummis verbieten bzw. ihn den Kindern gar nicht erst angewöhnen. Er führt nur zu Unsicherheit und, da man glaubt, mit seiner Hilfe verbessern zu können, schon gleich anfangs zur Flüchtigkeit, wo größte Konzentration notwendig ist.” Franck, 53. 76. “Nichts erzieht so sehr, wie der Vergleich mit den andern, und selbst die mindest Begabten lenrnen aus der Arbeiten der Begabten; . . .” Franck, 50. 77. “Handwerk in der Kunst ist Kenntnis des Materials und Kenntnis des Handwerkszeuges.” Franck, 9. 78. “Aber nie kann der Einfall handwerkliche Regeln verletzen, nie zum Beispiel gegen das Material verstotzen. Was für Holz gedacht ist, kann nicht in Stein erstehen; was in Aquarell möglich ist, nie ohne weiteres in Öl übertragen werden.” Franck, 9. 79. This and similar statements were made by Albers at Black Mountain College, as recalled by Ted and Bobbie Dreier. See Frederick A. Horowitz, “Albers the Teacher,” in Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes, 73n1. 80. “Sehen lernen, das heißt, die Augen vergleichend einstellen und sie in diesem Sinne richtig gebrauchen lernen.” Franck, Zeichen-­und Kunstunterricht, 10. 81. “Die Massen zusammenfassend, das Einzelne vergleichend, und zwar vergleichend in Form und Farbe.” Franck, 10. 82. “Die Augen in diesem Sinne zu gebrauchen, kann gar nicht früh genug geübt werden; denn das Auge, das nicht in Tätigkeit gehalten wird, stumpft sich ab oder stellt sich auf eine andere Art des Sehens ein und um.” Franck, 10. 83. “Zeichnen lernen: Das Gesehene nach der Natur und aus dem Gedächtnis auf der Fläche wiedergeben, mit den geschauten Dingen frei gestaltend hantieren können (Komposition in Schwarz-­Weiß)” Franck, 10. 84. “Malen lernen: Die Farben und ihr Wesen erkennen, ihre Zusammensetzung und ihre Einwirkung aufeinander erfassen, den farbigen Aufbau einer Fläche begreisen, frei gestaltend mit der Farbe hantieren zu können (Komposition in der Farbe).” Franck, 10. 85. “Modellieren lernen: Beobachtetes und innerlich Geschautes körperlich darzustellen und frei gestaltend zu verwerten (Komposition in plastischem Material).” Franck, 10. 86. “Der Wiederspruch zwischen Wissen und Sehen, zwischen Geist und Körper, spielt natürlich eine große Rolle in der Erziehung zum Sehen. Die kleinen Kinder zeichnen alles nach dem, was sie wissen. Erst mit der Schulung des Auges kommen sie zum richtigen Gebrauch des Auges und auf die Gesetze des Sehens.” Franck, 23. 87. See Carl Götze, Das Kind als Künstler: Ausstellung von freien Kinderzeichnungen in der Kunsthalle zu Hamburg (Hamburg: Boysen & Maasch, 1898); Alfred Lichtwark, Drei Programme (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902). 88. “Was den Zeichenunterricht aus seinen technischen Beschränkungen heraushob, war die Erkenntnis seiner Einwirkung auf die Psyche der Kinder. Ja, seine psychologische Seite wurde so wichtig wie seine künstlerische, und beide Seiten waren nicht voneinander zu trennen. Je mehr das Künstlerische wuchs, desto mehr wuchs auch das Psychologische.” Franck, Zeichen-­und Kunstunterricht, 1. 89. “Daß deshalb der Kunstlehrer ein guter Psychologe sein muß, . . .” Franck, 48. 90. Franck, 48. 91. The exhibition, administered by A. Jolles, comprised primarily objects selected from and displayed as part of the German education section of the 1910 Brussels Inter­ national Exhibition. It was divided into the following sections: Schülerbücherei für höhere Lehranstalten (student library for secondary schools); Lehrerbibliothek für höhere Schulen (teacher library for secondary schools); Hygiene; Turnen, Spiel und Sport; Biologie; Erdkunde; Chemie; Physik; Zeichnen; Knabenhandarbeit; Mädchenhandarbeit; N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 2 – 1 4 4

Einfache Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik (simple apparatuses for experimental pedagogy); and Sammlung des Institutes für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung (collection of the Institute for Applied Psychology and Psychological Research Collection). See L. Pallat et al., Die Deutsche Unterrichts-­Ausstellung (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1913). 92. Included were examples of student drawings made at primary and secondary schools throughout Germany, as well as examples of student work made at professional drawing institutes (Zeichenlehrerseminaren), including the Berlin Kunstschule. See Philipp Franck, “Zeichnen,” in Pallat et al., Die Deutsche Unterrichts-­Ausstellung, 52–­55. 93. “In den hier ausgestellten Schülerzeichnungen tritt z. B. das Zeichnen aus dem Gedächtnis und das Darstellen aus der Phantasie nur in den beiden ersten Zeichenklassen. . . . Inzwischen haben auch in den oberen Klassen die Übungen im Zeichnen aus dem Gedächtnis zugenommen; einfache Kompositionsübungen, wo es ging, auch in Verbindung mit der Schrift, haben sich hizugestellt.” Franck, 52. 94. See Lothar Sprung and Riudi Brandt, “Otto Lipmann und die Anfänge der Angewandten Psychologie in Berlin,” in Zur Geschichte der Psychologie in Berlin, ed. Sprung and Wolfgang Schönpflug (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003), 348–­50. The Institute was administered by Otto Lipmann, who, in 1907, along with William Stern, founded the Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung. In 1910 the initial research groups associated with the Institute were dissolved; however, the Institute continued to collect material and act as a resource for researchers and educational entities. The Institute and its collections ultimately were integrated with the Psychologisches Institut (psychological institute) of Friedrich-­Wilhelms-­Universität in Berlin as a semi-­autonomous entity. For an overview, see Otto Bobertag, “Das Institut für Angewandte Psychologie und Psychologische Sammelforschung,” Der Säemann: Monatsschrift für Jugendbildung und Jugendkunde 7, no. 12 (1913): 545–­51. Bobertag has also published an annotated list of research related to or associated with the Institute. 95. See William Stern, Die psychologischen Methoden der Intelligenzprüfung und deren Anwendung an Schulkindern (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1912). 96. Kerschensteiner was superintendent of the school system in Munich. On Kerschensteiner, see chapter 1. 97. Otto Lipmann, “Sammlung des Instituts für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung,” in Pallat et al., Die Deutsche Unterrichts-­Ausstellung, 66–­67. 98. See Sprung and Brandt, “Otto Lipmann,” 349–­50. 99. “Abgesehen von diesem rein materialen Gesichtspunkte werden wir die Erzeugnisse zu unterscheiden haben in solche, die spontan—­rein als Äußerungen des Kunst-­oder Spieltriebes—­, und in solche, die auf Geheiß—­auf experimentellem Wege—­zustande gekommen sind. Zunächst werden jedenfalls die ersteren als die interessanteren erscheinen, weil sie nicht nur zeigen, wie das betreffende Individuum sich mit der Aufgabe abfindet, sondern auch daß überhaupt eine auf das Schaffen des betreffenden Werkes gerichtete Tendenz vorhanden war. Aus diesem Grunde verdienen z. B. die Bildwerke prähistorischer Menschen, (die ‘Medien’ Zeichnungen), die Zeichnungen von Geisteskranken und die Tätowierungen, ferner die literarischen Produkte von Kindern, Geisteskranken und Verbrechern, und schließlich kindliche Kompositionen ein besonderes Interesse.” Lipmann, “Sammlung des Instituts,” 70–­71. 100. “Die Serien von (Plastiken oder) Zeichnungen, die so zustande kommen, zeigen die charakteristische Art und Weise, in der sich die Fähigkeit der Darstellung mit Geschlechter, die weitaus langsamere Entwicklung bei primitiven Menschen; (sie zeigen ferner den verschiedenen Einfluß verschiedener Psycholosen); . . .” Lipmann, 71. 101. “Sie zeigen die Veränderung der Verwendung von Farben unter dem Einflusse (des Alters oder) der Farbenblindheit und Farbenschwäche.” Lipmann, 71. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 4 – 1 4 5

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102. On

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the exhibition at the Kongress der Gesellschaft für experementalle Psychologie and the Kongress generally, see Otto Bobertag, “Kongressbericht: Fünfter Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie, Berlin, 16–­19 April 1912,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung 6 (1912): 398–­407. 103. “Zur Erziehung des Augenmaßes, Ausbildung des musikalischen Gehörs.” Hans Rupp, “Einfache Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik,” in Pallat et al., Die Deutsche Unterrichts-Ausstellung, 60. 104. The ten groups were Farbenwahrnehmungen, Raumwahrnehmungen der Augen (visual spatial perception), Gehörswahrnehmungen (listening perception), Druckempfindungen (pressure sensation), Muskelempfindungen (muscle sensation), Raumwahrnehmungen des Getastes (spatial perception of touch), Gedächtnisversuche (memory testing), Reaktionsversuche (response testing), Tachistoskopische Versuche (tachistoscope testing), and Varia (various). Rupp, 61–­64. 105. “Einmal treten sie gelegentlich als Störungen, Fehlerquellen auf sowohl im praktischen Unterricht (beim Malen, Betrachten von Bildern) wie namentlich bei feineren Untersuchungen über das Farbensehen. Wichtiger ist aber folgender Punkt. Im täglichen Leben sind wir geneigt, alle diese Erscheinungen zu übersehen. Sie sind ja nur subjektiv, gehen die objektiven, eigentlichen Farben der Körper nicht an.” Hans Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik,” Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde 15, no. 1 (1914): 46. Rupp published several essays under this title in Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde between 1914 and 1918, a second of which—­15, no. 2 (1914): 104–­14—­is also cited here. The essays were collected in 1919 as Probleme und Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik und Jugendpsychologie (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer, 1919). 106. See, for example, Albers, “Concerning Art Instruction.” 107. See Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate” (15, no. 1), 46. 108. “Eine Hauptaufgabe des Farbensehens besteht darin, die Farben zu erkennen, ihre Ähnlichkeiten, Verwandtschaften zu erfassen und die verschiedenen Eigenschaften, die wir ihnen zuschreiben, klar zu sondern. An diese mehr intellektuelle Aufgabe schließt sich die ästhetische Erfassung der einzelnen Farben und der Farbenkombinationen.” Rupp, 51. 109. “Die Zuordnung muß nicht immer auf Grund der Helligkeit erfolgen, das Grau kann auch anderen Gründen zur Farbe passen. Nicht nur zu einer isolierten Farbe, sondern auch zu einer Kombination kann eine passende Grau-­Kombination gesucht werden. Damit stehen wir vor der sehr komplizierten und schwierigen Frage der Weiß-­Schwarz-­ Abbildung eines farbigen Objektes oder der farblosen Reproduktion eines farbigen Bildes. Welche Grau werden gewählt? Ist die absolute Helligkeit des Grau innerhalb größerer Grenzen gleichgültig, und kommt es nur auf das Verhältnis an? Wie verhalten sich Kinder bei diesen Versuchen? Bei einzelnen Farben gelingt Kindern die Zuordnung überraschend leicht. Zeigen sie aber auch schon Sinn für Kombinationen?” Rupp, 53. 110. See Albers, Interaction, 12–­15. 111. Albers, 13–­14. 112. Ideally, each color would have a name or number to aid in sharing results with other researchers and, ultimately, employing research findings in schools. “Zur Untersuchung und Erziehung des Farbensehens wäre eines sehr erwünscht: eine große, möglichst vollzählige Normal-­Sammlung von Farben in bequemer Form (z. B. Wollstoffe oder Papiere), so daß wir sie beliebig zusammenstellen, ordnen können. Jede Farbe hätte hier einen Namen oder Nummer. Wer immer eine Untersuchung oder Übung vornimmt, bedient sich dieser Normal-­Skala. Alle Statistiken sind auf sie bezogen. Es wird festgestellt, was die besten Farbenkenner unter reinem Rot, Blau usw. verstehen,

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was sie als Ton, Helligkeit, Intensität usw. bezeichnen. Danach wird der Gebrauch in Schulen usw. geregelt.” Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate” (15, no. 1), 51. 113. “Es ist wertvoll für den Lehrer, Beispiele aus dem täglischen Leben zu kennen, wo der Kontrast auftritt. Es sollten daher Zeichnungen, Ornamente, Bilder, kunstgewerbliche oder sonstige Gegenstände dieser Art gesammelt werden.” Rupp, 50. 114. See Rupp, 51. 115. “Was alles wird z. B. als rot bezeichnet (Umfang von “rot”)? Was auf den ersten Blick, was bei kritischer Betrachtung, namentlich bei Nebeneinanderhalten der Farben (Kontrast)? Welche Farbe wird schließlich als bestes, reinstes Rot bezeichnet? von Erwachsenen, Kindern, Malern?” Rupp, 51. 116. “Was alles wird, wenn auch nicht als rot, so doch als rötlich erkannt? Erscheinen auch noch Violett und Orange rötlich?” Rupp, 51. 117. “Die schwierigste Aufgabe aber ist es wohl, bei 2 verschieden erkannten Farben anzugeben, in welcher Hinsicht sie verschieden sind. Sie tritt schon bei der Bezeichnung der Farben auf. Es fragt sich, ob die verschiedenen Eigenschaften: Ton, Helligkeit, Intensität, Sättigung usw. gesondert werden und was das Kind, auch der Erwachsene, darunter versteht. Man gibt verschiedene Paare und läßt den Unterschied charakterisieren, oder man läßt zu einer Farbe die gleich hellen, gleich satten finden, oder läßt alle hellsten, intensivsten suchen, oder läßt eine Helligskeits-­, Sättigungsreihe zusammenstellen und dergleichen mehr.” Rupp, 52. 118. See Rupp, 53. 119. “Viel untersucht ist die Unterschiedsempfindlichkeit für Grau-­Nuancen. Wie feine Unterschiede werden noch unterschieden? Ebenso die komplizierte Frage: Können zwei Grau-­Unterschiede verglichen werden? Wie beschaffen muß ein Grau sein, damit es in der Mitte zwischen zwei anderen Grau steht? Aber wir können noch weiter gehen: Wir können irgendeine Kombination mehrerer Grau in größere oder geringere Helligkeit übertragen. Oder wir können eine Kombination, ein Verhältnis von Farben einmal kontrastreicher, einmal flauer abbilden, während doch immer das Verhältnis erhalten bleibt.” Rupp, 53. 120. “Von der Photographie hier sind alle diese Fragen bekannt. Dort haben wir aber keine Möglichkeit, die einzelnen Grau selbst zu suchen, abzustimmen und so die Feinheit unseres Urteils zu messen.” Rupp, 53. On Rupp’s Tafel der photographischen Helligkeiteswerte, see Rupp, 54. 121. See Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate” (15, no. 2), for the Einfacher Spiegelfarbenmischapparat nach Helmholtz-­Rupp (105) and Scheiben für Unterschiedsempfindlichkeit nach Donders-­ Rupp (109). 122. “Der Eindruck entspricht also nicht dem Reiz, sondern er wird korrigiert.” Rupp, 111. 123. See Rupp, 112–­13. 124. “Die naive Auffassung der täglichen Lebens schreibt jedem Gegenstande eine bestimmte ‘Eigen’farbe zu, die er besitzt, gleichgültig.” Rupp, 110. 125. “Sie üben das Sehen an auffallenden und leichten Beispielen.” Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate” (15, no. 1), 46. 126. “Für die Pädagogik ergibt sich nun das Problem: In welchem Sinne soll der Schüler ‘sehen’ lernen?” Rupp, “Probleme und Apparate” (15, no. 2), 113. 127. “Dazu kommt eine dritte Möglichkeit. Die Gedächtnisfarben kompensieren die schlechte Beleuchtung, aber nicht ganz. Sie stehen zwischen den zwei Wirklichkeiten der physikalischen und der Eigenfarbe. Sollte man vielleicht eine vollständige Kompensierung, das Sehen der Eigenfarbe anstreben?” Rupp, 113. 128. “Wenn diese auch nicht sinnfälligen Eindruck erreichbar ist, sollte man nicht wenigstens Wert darauf legen, daß das Kind sie genau abschätzen kann?” Rupp, 113.

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195

129. “Soll

196

er Gedächtnisfarben sehen? Oder soll er zum natürlichen Sehen zurückkehren, wie es dem physikalischen Reiz entspricht und wie vermutlich Maler sehen (oder wenigstens sehen können)?” Rupp, 113. 130. “Was soll nun der Maler malen? . . . Vielleicht erleichtert es aber die Auffassung, wenn die Gedächtnisfarbe gemalt wird, wenn das Bild dem auffassenden Sehen Arbeit wegnimmt. Oder soll die Arbeit ganz weggenommen und die Eigenfarbe gemalt werden, so wie es das Kind tut, das die Kirsche gleichmäßig rot malt, weil sie ‘in Wirklichkeit’ überall gleichmäßig rot ist, unbekümmert um die zufälligen Schatten?” Rupp, 113. 131. See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–­82, 183; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–­44. Hal Foster has articulated this position most succinctly, writing that Serra was fundamentally opposed to “Gestalt readings of art,” which the artist (who agrees with this characterization) understood as “idealist totalizations that serve to conceal the construction of the work and to suppress the body of the viewer.” Foster, “Un/Making of Sculpture,” 177. 132. Foster, 179. 133. Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, “Interview with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, ed. Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997), 26. 134. Cooke and Govan, 22. 135. Cooke and Govan, 23. 136. Rudolf Arnheim and Alan Lee, “A Critical Account of Some of Joseph [sic] Albers’ Concepts of Color,” Leonardo 15, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 174. Arnheim completed his dissertation, “Experimentell-­psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem,” in 1928 at Friedrich-­Wilhelm-­Universitat zu Berlin. 137. Between fall 1964 and fall 1966 Serra lived in Paris, France (while holding a Yale Traveling Fellowship), and in Florence, Italy (as a Fulbright fellow). He claims that he gave up teaching to focus entirely on his own practice after seeing Dan Flavin’s exhibition at Kornblee Gallery in 1966. (The exhibition likely was in 1967, when Flavin had two solo exhibitions at the Kornblee Gallery.) See Bui, “Richard Serra in Conversation,” 7. 138. Bui, 7. 139. Pincus-­Witten, “Slow Information,” 34. 140. Pincus-­Witten, 35. 141. Pincus-­Witten, 34. 142. Pincus-­Witten, 34. 143. McShine, “Conversation about Work,” 28. 144. The dialectics of art-­teaching and art-­making are fraught. Some view pedagogies as reflecting societal structures and expectations, while others posit that the means of art instruction develop alongside aesthetic and conceptual changes in art practice. Still others assert that educational structures reiterate social order and difference, contribute to the construction of artistic subjectivity, and thus function as agents rather than as acted upon by external conditions. See, among others, Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940); Arthur Efland, A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990); Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971); De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude”; Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Singerman, Art Subjects; James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 145. Pincus-­Witten, “Slow Information,” 35. 146. Albers, Search versus Re-­Search, 12. 147. Pincus-­Witten, “Slow Information,” 35. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 8 – 1 5 3

148. Nietzsche

presented five lectures on education at the Universität Basel in 1869. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-­Education, ed. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016). Epilogue

197

1. Project Zero was an outgrowth of Goodman’s Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory

of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1968). Goodman relinquished leadership of Project Zero in 1971. 2. Goodman, quoted in Howard Gardner, “Project Zero: Nelson Goodman’s Legacy in Arts Education,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 3 (2000): 246. The research group—­the agenda of which eventually was expanded to encompass more generalized inquiry into the nature of intelligence, creativity, thinking, learning, ethics, and understanding—­marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. 3. Gardner, “Project Zero,” 247. 4. The Carpenter Center, which opened in 1963, had previously hosted exhibitions about the basic design curriculum at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the design program at North Carolina State University. See “Exhibition Brochure: Bauhaus, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, November 26, 1966–­January 15, 1967,” 1966. 5. “Exhibition Brochure: Bauhaus.” 6. Josef Albers to Reginal[d] R. Isaacs, October 26, 1966, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 19, folder 23. Isaacs, a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, had written Albers separately about a book project; Albers refused to participate. 7. Albers communicated his strong disapproval of the 1961 exhibition curated by Roman Clemens (which was to be remounted at the Carpenter Center) to the organizer, Eduard F. Sekler. Heeding Albers’s warning, Sekler elected to edit, redesign, and add artworks to the Harvard exhibition and to produce a new catalogue, Bauhaus: A Teaching Idea (Cambridge, MA: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, 1967). This did not persuade Albers to lend work to the exhibition; however, he did allow Sekler to reproduce texts by him in the catalogue and on a panel in the exhibition. Josef Albers to Phyllis Hattis, October 26, 1966; Eduard F. Sekler to Josef Albers, October 31, 1966, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 19, folder 23. 8. See Allan Kaprow, “Education of the Un-­Artist,” part 2, ARTnews 71, no. 3 (May 1972): 34–­39. 9. See Ben Mardell et al., “Towards a Pedagogy of Play: A Project Zero Working Paper,” July 2016. 10. Albers described these kinds of activities in a lecture for primary and secondary school art teachers in 1952. See Josef Albers, “On Teaching Art to Youngsters,” March 15, 1952, Albers Foundation, Papers, box 84, folder 10. 11. Mardell et al., “Towards a Pedagogy of Play.” The working paper’s authors cite Tue Rabenhøj’s use of oranges in his classroom. 12. Josef and Anni Albers moved to Orange, Connecticut, in 1970. Albers saved his solutions to the “nine dots problem,” in which one connects nine points arranged in a symmetrical grid with four straight lines drawn without removing one’s pencil from the surface. See Albers Foundation, Papers, box 83, folder 11.

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Photographers and sources for visual material other than those indicated in captions are listed below. Every effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits. Half-title page: Material studies (metal, paper), Bauhaus, ca. 1925–1933. Photograph by Erich Consemüller. Gelatin silver print, 15.4 × 11.6 cm. Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1976.10.21. © Stephan Consemüller. Figs. 0.1, 0.2, 0.6, A.1, A.2, A.9, 1.25, B.1, B.2a–­b, B.8, B.9, B.10, C.1, C.2, C.3, C.5, C.6, C.7: Photo © Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art Figs. A.3, A.4: Photo The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Fig. A.5: Photo Pictura Paedagogica Online Figs. 1.4, 1.5: Photo © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; photographer: Dorin Alexandru Ionita, Berlin Figs. 1.24a–­c, 1.27, 1.30: Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College Fig. B.4: Photo Atelier Schneider Figs. B.12, 2.1: Photo Henry Groskinsky/LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images Figs. 2.4, 2.6: Photo D. James Dee Fig. 2.10: Photo Andy Keate Figs. 2.11, 2.12: Photo UC–­Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Fig. 2.20: Photo Adolar Wiedemann Figs. 2.24, 2.25: Photo © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/Museum für Sächsische Volkskunst; photographer: Karsten Jahnke

Abstract Expressionism, 3, 6 abstraction, 7 Adorno, Theodor W., 6 afterimages, 136, 139–­40, 146 Albers, Josef, 7–­9, 14, 28, 75, 94, 106, 133, 143, 161n4, 161–­62n5, 162n7, 162–­63n9, 163n10, 163n20, 163n22, 164n31, 165n52, 166n5, 166–­67n16, 170n26, 171n60, 175n109, 178–­79n9, 179–­80n23, 181n58, 186n4, 187n12, 188–­89n3, 190–­91n64, 197n6, 197n7, 197n10; Abteikirche Neresheim, fascination with, 70, 119; after­image, 138, 189n42; and American Op Art, 6; applied psychology, 141; at Bauhaus, 25, 27, 65, 67, 128–­30, 161n2, 166n29, 175n105, 176n3, 186n6; at Black Mountain College, 15, 25, 27, 47, 65, 119, 128, 145–­46, 162n6, 175n105, 186n3; as Catholic, 169n16; child psychology, awareness of, 191n65; Color-­aid paper, 146; color curriculum, 137; color instruction, 60–­61, 63, 85–­87, 93, 98, 126, 132, 138, 140–­41, 145–­46, 148–­49, 151, 165n46; color perception, 125–­26; color photography, criticism of, 189n54; color studies, 2–­3, 185n8, 189n41; constructive possibility, 49; constructive thinking, 116; derivative work, abhorrence of, 90–­92, 96; design education, 99–­100; ­design instruction, 142, 148, 175n105; develop­ment of creative ­vision, 92; “devil’s tuning fork,” 166n4; drawing, 2–­3; drawing instruction and development of visual discipline, 52–­53; drawing instructor (Zeichenlehrer), 11, 17, 83, 90, 130, 141–­42; experimental psychol-

ogy, 140–­41; experimentation, prioritizing of, 48, 64; foundational courses, 97; and Franck, 142; free (color) studies, 29, 63–­64, 86, 137; German education system, criticism of, 38; gestalt psychology, association with, 140–­41, 148; Gestalt­ ists, exposure to, 130; good ­gestalt, 97, 151; grid, use of, 21, 23–­24, 168n29, 185n6; at Harvard, 162n8; Hesse, as foil for, 82; at Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, 73, 162n8; lateral thinking, 156; leaf studies, 29, 63–­64; Lehrerseminar, admittance to, 39–­41; library of, 166n6; linear constructions, 2, 12–­13, 15, 17–­19, 21, 23, 67, 70, 73, 77, 119, 165–­66n1; line versus color, 17; mass and space, ­visual dynamics of, 77, 79; matière, ­3, 48, 55, 57–­60; material consciousness, 64; ­material investigation, 82–­83; materials, use and manipulation of, 49, 51, 57–­58, 60; material study, ­3; metal, use of, 51; in modernism, 11; nested squares, 126, 167n17; nine dots problem, 197n12; ­objectivity of grid, ­appeal of, 124–­25; painterly ­vision, 25; painting, 2–­3; painting practice, 119–­22, 124–­26; paintings of, 12; paper-­folding exercises, 13, 73, 83, 99, 101, 103, 110, 112, 114, 116, 181n65; pedagogy, 27, 30–­33, 37, 48, 64–­ 65, 70, 83, 85, 95, 116, 118, 129–­30, 134, 136, 151–­53, 168–­69n12; pedagogy of, as future-­oriented, 47; and perceptual abstraction, 2–­3; photographs of, 12, 67, 73, 79; photography, understanding of medium, 67, 69, 72–­73; physical fact versus psychic effect, as origin of art, 18;

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Albers, Josef (continued) plasticity, as central to design instruction, 116; portrait collages, 67; post-­ Bauhaus pedagogy, 2–­3; preparatory school (Präparandenschule), 39; primary school teacher (Volksschullehrer), 11, 13, 17, 19, 25, 27, 32, 38–­42, 47, 67, 84, 125, 130, 172n70, 190n59; in protest, 1, 155, 161n3; retirement of, 185n1; rhomboid geometries, 122; at Royal School of Art, Berlin, 13, 70, 125, 130, 141; “seeing is a creative act,” 151; sense of self in students, 110; square, significance to, 19, 24; teaching aids/materials, 12–­13, 27, 53, 55; teaching methodology of, 10–­11, 13, 41–­42; typographical studies, 21; at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 162n8; at University of ­Hawaii, 77, 162n8; visual judgment, goal of, 147; visual sensibility of, 70; vivid expressions, appreciation of, 57–­ 58; watercolor instruction, 141; at Yale, 13, 15, 25, 27, 47–­48, 65, 127–­28, 175n105, 179n18, 180n27, 180n28; zigzag folds, 103, 116 Alloway, Lawrence, 187n11 Andre, Carl, 188–­89n37, 189n39; materiality, 136 Anschauungsunterricht (object or visual lessons), 20, 37–­38, 42, 46, 67. See also teaching aids (Lehrmittel) Anuszkiewicz, Richard, 6, 163n15 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 188–­ 89n37 Anxious Object, The (Rosenberg), 162–­63n9 applied psychology, 18, 140 Arbeitsschulen (activity schools), 27. See also Kerschensteiner, Georg Area (Hesse), 93–­95 Arnheim, Rudolf, 151, 184–­85n6, 196n136 “Art as Experience” (Albers), 28 art making, 12, 81, 92, 142, 152, 196n144; as dynamic process, 64 Art Students League, 84 Ash, Mitchell G., 18 Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) (Adorno), 6 Aufschreibesysteme (discourse network), 12 Balla, Giacomo, 3 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 106, 183n82, 183n88 Baroque, 17, 69–­70 Baroque fold, 83, 116 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 32, 37, 171n58

Index

Bauhaus, 1–­2, 8–­11, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31, 38, 47, 51, 57–­58, 65, 67, 84, 128–­30, 140, 142, 155, 161n2, 164n28, 164n29, 164n38, 169n14, 175n105, 176n3, 186n6; hostility toward, 6–­7; influence of, 7; legacy of, 6–­7; modernism, 7 Bauhaus: A Teaching Idea (exhibition), ­Albers’s refusal to participate, 155 Bauhaus: A Teaching Idea (Sekler), 197n7 Berlin (Germany), 141, 143–­44 Berlin Secession, 141 Bildung (individual self-­creation), 32, 38 Black Mountain College, 1–­2, 25, 31, 47, 51, 65, 119, 128, 145–­46, 156, 162n6, 175n105, 184n105, 186n3; Dewey, significant figure at, 27; progressive ethos of, 15 Blind Spot (Serra): Albers’s “seeing is a creative act,” updating of, 151; gestalt principles, 149, 151 Bloom, Harold, 188–­89n37 Bochner, Mel, 86 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 187n12 Bortoluzzi, Alfredo, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10 Brown, Bill, 165n49 Brussels International Exhibition, 144, 192–­93n91 Bucher, François, 166–­68n16 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 131, 165n45 Burnham, Jack, 176n121 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 10, 164n32 Canaday, John, 7, 162n7, 163n18, 163n22 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 155, 197n4, 197n7 Catholic Teacher’s Association of Germany, 39, 172n70 causality, 116, 118 Cézanne, Paul, 96, 152 Chaet, Bernard, 85–­86, 90, 180n35, 186n3 Charlot, Jean, 77 Chevreaul, M. E., 181n65 childhood, 191n65; intellectual aptitude, 144; materiality of, 109 childhood education, 33, 35, 83; curiosity, cultivation of, 38; haptic approach, 109; materiality of, 109; observing and thinking, 110; physical activity, 37; under­standing, cultivation of, 34, 36; and toys, 107–­8 China Girl (Serra), 136–­38, 189n51; as gradation study, 139 Chodowjecki, Daniel, 171n58

Chouinard Art Institute, 164n32. See also California Institute of the Arts (Cal­ Arts) Clemens, Roman, 161n4, 197n7 Color Aid (Serra), 136–­37, 189n42; after­ images, 139–­40 Comenius, John Amos, 30, 170n26, 171n58 Consemüller, Erich, 101 constructivism, 134, 136 Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 84–­85, 96 Coplans, John, 6, 163n20 Craig-­Martin, Michael, 127–­28, 186n5 Crimp, Douglas, 83, 130–­31, 188n24 Danilowitz, Brenda, 166n6, 171n60, 190–­91n64 Daston, Lorraine, 126, 165n49, 177n21 de Kooning, Elaine, 19, 124 Deleuze, Gilles, 83; boat’s prow image, and causality, 116, 118; shape of matter, 116 Democracy and Education (Dewey), 28, 31 Descartes, René, 116 descriptive psychology, 144 Dewey, John, 27, 31–­32, 168n3, 168–­69n12, 169n14; at Black Mountain College, 169n2; learning by doing, 30; pragmatic ethos of, 28 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 12, 79, 165n43, 165n45 Die Menschenerziehung (The Education of Man) (Fröbel), 109 discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme), 12 Doerner, Max, 190n59 Double Roll (Serra), 134 Duncker, Karl, 140 Dürckheim, Karlfried von, 140 Dutschke, Rudi, 161n3 Duve, Thierry de, 164n38 Educational Alliance Preschool, 96 Einfache Apparate zur experimentellen Pädagogik (simple devices for experimental pedagogy) (Rupp), 144 Émile (On Education) (Rousseau), 33–­34 Engman, Robert, 186n3 Enlightenment, 27, 32 Escher, M. C., 166n4 Etude: Red-­Violet (Christmas Shopping) ­(Albers), 119, 121 Europe, 17, 31, 41, 102 experimental psychology, 126

Fer, Briony, 93–­94, 165n46 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 32, 42, 170n24, 170n26 Fifth Convention of the Society for ­Experimental Psychology, 145 50 Years Bauhaus (exhibition), 8–­9, 161n3, 164n28; Albers’s refusal to participate, 1 Finkelstein, Irving, 184–­85n6 Finkelstein, Louis, 186n3 Flavin, Dan, 196n137 Foster, Hal, 131, 187n14, 188n36, 196n131 Foucault, Michel, 12 Frame (Serra), 138 Franck, Philipp, 13, 131, 141–44, 148, 190–­ 91n64; “learning to see,” 143 Freire, Paulo, 10 Fröbel, Friedrich Wilhelm August, 32, 37, 170n26, 184n102; grids, 21; Kinder­garten curriculum, 109, 172n63; theory of education, 109–­10 Galerie Der Sturm, 141 Galerie Paul Cassirer, 141 Galison, Peter, 126, 177n21 Geldzahler, Henry, 162n7 German educational system, 168n3, 169n14, 172n67; modern American art, 11 German Empire, 24; colonization efforts, 31–­32 German handwriting, movement to ­reform, 23–­24 German Teaching Exhibition, 143–­42, 192–­93n91 Germany, 27, 31, 38, 41, 67, 165n52; child psychology, 191n65; learning aids, 45–­46; primary schools, 42–­44; progressive education, 32. See also Prussia Germer, Stefan, 131 Gerson, Lotte, paper tower, 70, 100–­1 gestalt aesthetics, 148; understanding of art, 129 Gestaltists, 130, 151 gestalt psychology, 6, 17–­18, 129–­30, 140 Giegher, Matthias, 103 Glueck, Grace, 163n22 Goldammer, Hermann, 184n102 Gombrich, E. H., 17, 166n4 Goodman, Nelson, 155 Götze, Carl, 143 Greenberg, Clement, 3, 163n10 grids, 21, 23–­24, 124–­25, 168n29, 184–­85n6 Gropius, Walter, 1, 7–­8, 11, 47, 161n3, 164n28, 164n29 Grote, Ludwig, 1

Index

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216

Hamburg (Germany), 143 Handschrift und Charakter (Klages), 24 handwriting, 21, 23–­24 haptic, 2–­3, 58, 85, 111 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp, 103–­4, 106–­7, 110; napkin folding, 182n80 Harvard University, 162n8; Graduate School of Education, Project Zero, 155–­ 56, 197n1 Hassenpflug, Gustav, 100–­1 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 127 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 13, 27, 32–­33, 38, 42, 46–­47, 170n26 Herzogenrath, Wulf, 101 Hesse, Eva, 2, 7, 9–­13, 64–­65, 116, 130, 163n24, 164n31, 165n46, 177n26, 178–­79n9, 179n15, 179n19, 179–­80n23, 180n43, 181n57, 181n58, 181n60; Albers, relationship with, 85–­86, 97–­99; authority and criticism, resistance to, 85–­86; binary oppositions, 83; brain tumor, 178n4; color studies, 87, 89–­90; at Cooper Union, 84; discipline, craving of, 86, 99; drawing course, 90; on experiential learning, 97; foundations curriculum, 84; good gestalt, 95; haptic history of, 83; identity, 81; investigative approach, 98; leaf studies, 87, 89; material dialectics, 98; materiality, 81, 83, 85, 94; material inquiry, 83; material use, variety of, 81–­82; photography of work, wariness of, 77; at Pratt, 84; progressive education, thoughts on, 97; rubber, ­potentiality of, 94–­95; self-­criticism of, 91–­93, 99; as teacher, 96–­97; test pieces, 93–­92, 181n51; three-­dimensional ­practice, 95–­96; transgressive material support, 81; at Yale, 82, 84–­87, 93–­92, 98, 118, 179n18, 180n27, 180n28, 180n35 High School of Industrial Art (Manhattan), 84 Hildebrand, Adolf, 165n52 Hillardt, Franz Carl, 21 Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, 73, 162n8 Hofmann, Hans, 163n10, 190n59 Homage to the Square series (Albers), 2, 6–­7, 13, 15, 24, 67, 119, 122, 124–­26, 163n20, 184–­85n6, 185n8; shared geometry, 19 Horowitz, Frederick A., 140, 171n60 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 32, 169n22, 170n24, 170n26 Illich, Ivan, 10 Institute for Applied Psychology and Psychological Research Collection, 130, 140

Index

Interaction of Color (Albers), 86, 127, 136–­37, 140–­41, 186n4 Isaacs, Reginald R., 197n6 Itten, Johannes, 190n59 Jarzombek, Mark, 18 Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (exhibition), 7, 162n6, 163n24 Judd, Donald, 148, 162–­63n9 Junge Menschen (magazine), 38 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 27, 32–­33, 42, 47, 126, 170n26, 171n58, 175n103; blind man’s bluff, and agility, 35; children’s education, 34–­37; flying kites, and dexterity, 35; geographical maps, 36; visual aids, 36 Kaprow, Allan, 156 Katz, Alex, 186n3 Kerschensteiner, Georg, 38, 46, 144, 168–­ 69n12; activity schools, 27 Kittler, Friedrich, 12, 165n49 Klages, Ludwig, 24 Koffka, Kurt, 189–­90n57 Köhler, Wolfgang, 140, 151, 189–­90n57 Kramer, Hilton, 81, 162–­63n9, 163n18 Krauss, Rosalind E., 6, 9–­10, 129–­30, 164n31, 168n29, 187n11, 188n24, 188n36, 188–­89n37, 189n38, 189n39 Krebs, Jean-­Daniel, 104 Kügelgen, Wilhelm von, 107–­8 Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) (Wölfflin), 17, 25 Kunsthandlung Fritz Gurlitt, 141 Kurrentschrift (running script), 23–­24. See also Sütterlinschrift (Sütterlin script) Lambert, Gretchen, 79 LeBrun, Rico, 85–­87, 92, 185n1 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 116 Le pli (The Fold) (Deleuze), 116 letter writing, 106; couvert, 183n86 LeWitt, Sol, 94 linear constructions, 2, 12–­13, 15, 18–­19, 67, 70, 73, 77, 119, 165–­66n1; brittle diagrams, 21; and gestalt psychology, 17; importance of legibility, 23 Lipmann, Otto, 144–­45, 193n94 Lippard, Lucy R., 81, 86, 178n3 Li tre trattati (Giegher), 103–­4 Locke, John, 32, 106, 116, 170n26, 170n27; educational tools, 34; tetrakis hexa­ hedron, 34 Lynton, Norbert, 9, 164n28

Malevich, Kazimir, 3, 184–­85n6 Marching X’s (Albers), 122 Marenholtz-­Bülow, Bertha von, 184n102 materiality, 101; of Andre’s work, 136; of childhood activities, 109; constructivist, 129; of education, 109; of Hesse’s work, 81, 83, 85, 94; of newsprint, 59; of play, 33; of Serra’s work, 129, 137 McCullough, Jane Fiske (Jane Thompson), 6–­7 McShine, Kynaston, 136, 186n3 memory, 28, 37, 40, 149, 151, 169n22; drawing from, 141–­44; and rupture, 12 Mexico, 70, 122; Mexico City, 75 Michelson, Annette, 11 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 7, 47 minimalism, 136 Mitchell, W. J. T., 165n49 Mizutani, Takehito, 100–­1 Mnemosyne (Warburg), 12, 79, 165n45 modernism, 1–­3, 7, 9–­11, 130, 165n46; after­ image of, 164n38 Moholy, Lucia, 176n3 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 161n2, 161–­62n5, 176n3, 179n15 Moholy-­Nagy, Sibyl, 179n15 Mondrian, Piet, 3, 6, 184–­85n6 Morris, Robert, 148, 187n11 Museum of Modern Art, 6

Passeron, Jean-­Claude, 8 Perrault, John, 83, 187n11 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 13, 17, 27, 32–­33, 42, 170n26, 171n60; educational philosophy, 20; grid, 21; objects, direct observation of, 20, 37–­38; square, as central to, 19–­20 Petri, Frieda, 107 Philanthropinum (Dessau), 37, 171n58. See also Basedow, Johann Bernhard photography: art history, in service of, 69; as educational tool, 69; and personal ­expression, 73; utility of, 67; ­visual aids, 67 Pincus-­Witten, Robert, 130, 152, 187n11 play, 38, 156; materiality of, 33; and toys, 33–­34, 37, 107 Pollock, Griselda, 81 postmodernism, 130–­31 Pratt Institute, 84, 179n15 Prikker, Johan Thorn, 190n59 Prussia, 143, 173–­74n83. See also Germany Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational, and Medical Affairs, 39 Psychological Institute (Berlin), 140 psychophysics, 126 Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation (Serra), 131 Queens College, 152

napkin folding, 103–­4, 106, 182n80 National Socialism, 162–­63n9 Nemser, Cindy, 82, 85–­86, 93, 96, 177n26; interview transcript, 179–­80n23, 181n58 Nesbit, Molly, 174n91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 153, 170n26 Nixon, Mignon, 179n19 No title (1969–­70) (Hesse), 79, 95–­96 No title (1970) (Hesse), 100 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), 10, 164n32 One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (Serra), 131 Op Art (optical art), 3, 6, 162n7, 163n18 Panofsky, Erwin, 165n43 Papanek, Helene, 180n27 paper folding, 13, 99; centuries-­old tradition, 101–­2; dexterity and neatness, 109–­10; in domestic life, 106; as educational form, 83, 107–­10, 116; napkin folding, 103–­4, 106; observing and thinking, 110; proper conduct, as teachable, 106; and toys, 107

Rein, Wilhelm, 42, 45–­46, 170n26 Repetition Nineteen III (Hesse), 94 Responsive Eye, The (exhibition), 3, 6 Romantic thought, 27, 32 Rose, Barbara, 163n18, 179n11 Rosenberg, Harold, 162–­63n9 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 13, 27, 32, 35, 52, 153, 170n26; children’s education, 33–­34; educational tools, 34; natural education, 33–­34, 37–­38; tetrakis hexahedron, criticism of, 34; toys, 34 Rowell, Margit, 163n22 Royal Academy of Art, Munich, 190n59 Royal Art School, Berlin, 13, 70, 125, 130, 141, 166n5 Rupp, Hans, 140, 144, 146, 155, 189–­90n57; devices of, 145, 147; Gedachtnisfarben, 147; Lehrerseminare, 147; painter’s ­vision, 148 Sallas, Joan, 106 Scarsdale Workshop School, 96–­97 Schjeldahl, Peter, 163n22, 179n11

Index

217

218

School and Society, The (Dewey), 31, 168–­ 69n12 School of Applied Arts, Essen, 190n59 School of Visual Arts, 96–­97 Scott, Robert G., 128, 186n6 Seitz, William C., 3 Sekler, Eduard F., 197n7 Seminar für Ausdruckskunde (Seminar on the Theory of Expression), 24 Senff, Adolf, 107–­8 sensory physiology, 126 Serra, Richard, 2, 7, 9–­13, 118, 128, 136, 139, 151, 163n24, 164n31, 185n1, 186n3, 187n11, 187n12, 188–­89n37, 189n39, 189n42, 189n46, 189n51, 196n137; afterimages, 137; Albers’s color instruction, 148–­49; and Albers’s pedagogic principles, 129, 133–­34, 140, 152–­53; Color-­aid paper, 133, 136, 138; and constructivism, 187n14; Gestalt reading of art, opposition to, 196n131; materiality, 129, 137; modernism, challenge to, 130; painting, giving up of, 188n33; and perception, 148; playful experimentation in teaching, 133; as postmodern, 130–­31; rubber, work using, 134; sculptural dialectics, 130–­31; sculpture, approach to, 148; steel, plastic potential of, 148–­49; three-­ dimensional work, 126; torus and sphere, 149; at Yale, 127, 133, 186n5 Shapiro, David, 163n22 Sillman, Sewell, 127, 186n3 Society for Experimental Psychology (Germany), 144 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 33, 107, 116, 170n27 Sorkin, David, 32, 170n24 Spies, Werner, 162n8, 166–­67n16 squares, 19, 24; drawing and writing ­instruction, significant to, 20 Stanczak, Julian, 6, 163n15 Stern, William, 144, 191n65, 193n94 Stockhausen, Johann Christoph, 106 Structural Constellations (Albers), 15 structural objectivity, 126 structure of things, 44–­45 Stuck, Franz von, 190n59 Stumpf, Carl, 189–­90n57 Sütterlinschrift (Sütterlin script), 23–­24. See also Kurrentschrift (running script) Taylor, Ruth P., 179n15 teaching aids (Lehrmittel), 13, 27, 41, 142, 173n79; government-­mandated objects,

Index

173–­74n83; as part of school museums, 174n84; in teacher training, 177n76 “Teaching Form through Practice” (Werklicher Formunterricht) (Albers), 99–­100 Tenayuca (Albers), 122 Tillim, Sidney, 6 To Lift (Serra), 131, 134, 136, 148 toys, 33–­34, 37, 107; childrearing, 108. See also play Transformations of a Scheme (Albers), 15, 165–­66n1 Trattato delle piegature (Giegher), 103 Tworkov, Jack, 186n3 Über Pädagogik (On Pedagogy) (Kant), 34 Übungsschulen (training schools), 143 Union of the Torus and the Sphere (Serra), 149 United States, 1, 7–­8, 11, 28 Urbach, Josef, 190n59 Variants series (Albers), 15, 119, 124, 126, 167n17 Vasarely, Victor, 3 Verb List (Serra), 134 visual studies, 155 Warburg, Aby, 73, 75, 79, 165n45; afterlife, notion of, 12; Nachleben, 165n43, 165n47 Warshaw, Howard, 185n1 Wasserman, Emily, 82–­83 Weber-­Fechner Law, 181n65 Wellbery, David, 12 Welliver, Neil, 127, 129, 133, 186n6; dot problem, 128; junk problem, 128 Wertheimer, Max, 189–­90n57 Westphalian School Museum, 174n84 Wilhelmine Germany, 11, 17, 27, 30, 38, 41–­ 42, 67, 126, 130, 140 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 14, 24, 67, 119, 165n52, 166n6, 166n7; child development, psychology of, 25; linear versus painterly style, 17–­18; on painterly vision, 126; photography and art history, 69 Work of Venturi and Rauch, The (exhibition), 7 Yale University, 1–­2, 7, 15, 25, 27, 47–­48, 51, 65, 82, 86–­87, 93–­94, 98, 118, 128–­29, 134, 152, 156, 175n105, 179n18, 180n27, 180n28, 180n35; Council’s Advisory Committee on Architecture Painting and Sculpture, 13; Norfolk Summer School, 84; School of Architecture and Design, 84–­85, 127