”Albers was a poet and a moralist“

Well, I got it from all kind of places. I of course went to the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin and Dessau and to all the big Bauhaus Archives, Harvard for example, because Gropius left a lot of stuff at Harvard. But mostly it was the Albers Archive in Connecticut. He, Josef Albers, was a tireless self-archivist, he kept every piece of paper, every photograph, everything. It is an excellent archive.

That’s an interesting question. Well he was quite largely self-taught. He liked to say “I come from Adam and my father and that’s all”. He always said, I never studied with Kandinsky, I never studied with Klee… He liked to give the impression, like a lot of artists, that there was no suggested influences in his work.

He was very difficult to see though, he was very defended, it was very difficult to write about him, he was very enclosed. He was a bit like a performance artist, people like John Cage came to Black Mountain College and said the invented performance but I think that Josef, certainly in America, performed being German for example. But it is difficult to find out, he didn’t like to talk about personal things at all. The Germans call it „Innerlichkeit“:  He hated expressionism, he though it was self-indulgent, so anything that was about the self he didn't like. And he didn’t keep a diary and so you kind of have to construct him from what he said and what he made. It was more like being an archeologist rather than a biographer.

I certainly don’t think that he was kind of spiritual, or if he was Josef would never have spoked about that, because that would have been exactly this „Innerlichkeit“. But I think it was some kind of daily practice with him, like for some people might say the Rosenkranz, but for Josef part of his religiosity was the daily practice of making art, making the same image again and again. Well, I wouldn’t use the word spiritual but there was something religious about it.

It is a very indirect answer, but you might like it: My college and I were standing in front of the Homage to the square in America and, looking at it, she said: “it’s such a very romantic work” and I thought this is very interesting. But of course, it is romantic in an very old, old-fashioned sense. Because, he sets himself the idea of perfection of painting squares in the knowledge they will never be perfect. The edges are always a bit off, he liked the word „Schwindel“, he would set out to paint something, and in his mind he knew what it was going to be like and then the painting would be a swindle, it would fool him...  like a trick! There is humor in it, but I would also say that he was a moralist and a poet.