“Affinities” Illuminates Icons of Modern Art

By Phyllis Eckhaus

ANNI ALBERS, Orchestra III, 1980 © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

Colors and shapes have power—in the hands of artists, they can combust like fuel cells.

Affinities, at the David Zwirner Gallery at 537 West 20th Street through April 19th, is a revelation of color, shape, and materiality. Illustrating how painter Paul Klee inspired and influenced artists Josef and Anni Albers, it shows his generative impact, and the three’s collective pioneering artistry.

The works are grouped to show the affinities among the three—Klee, for example, with his grid-like compositions in paint and Josef Albers with his actual grids of luminous glass, wrapped in wire that seems calligraphic in effect.

But because the works by Klee typically pre-date the works by the Albers, what I perceived was Klee’s influence on them. And for me, that was part of the fascination of the exhibit. To view Anni Albers’ Orchestra III (1980), with yellow, red, and cobalt blue triangles and quadrilaterals angled together and apart against a black background, is to “hear” a vibrant symphony of shapes simultaneously singular and merged. To appreciate Josef Albers’ various versions of Homage to the Square—where three squares are placed within each other, seeming to distend their shape and illuminate their contrasting hues—is to renew one’s understanding of perception. The work by Josef and Anni Albers, in proximity to Klee, helped me to deconstruct Klee’s work, which is less accessible than theirs.

JOSEF ALBERS, Homage to the Square, 1951. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

And suddenly, I could see that Klee is “great.” My late friend Karl Bissinger, an artist and art aficionado, characterized a great artist as one who compels you to see the world through their eyes. I can’t say I personally like Klee’s watercolor and pencil Lattice Dance (1934), with its distorted pastel grid animating the childishly-drawn-yet-dimensional dancers within—but it makes my head explode. And his 1923 work, Pictures of Houses with Flight of Steps, with its vivid painted grid and pen and ink details, both makes my head explode and makes me happy. It’s simultaneously representative and abstract, flat and dimensional. And the dark square near the center anticipates Josef Albers’ thrilling experiments with color.

Arguably, all three artists are great by Karl’s standard—and quintessentially modern. Their works remind me of an Escher drawing or a lenticular image—each shifts depending on how you look at it. But the shift is more profound than an optical illusion—you are nudged to think about the skill, craft and materials that produced each work. This is true whether it’s Anni Albers’ eloquent woven wall hanging Epitaph (1968), where cotton, jute, and glints of gold Lurex seem to sum up a life, or whether it’s Klee’s ludicrously cartoonish portrait, Aunt from England (1938), where the colored paste and watercolor squiggles have a sophisticated dimensionality that belies the flatness of the work.

PAUL KLEE, Gitter Tanz (Lattice dance), 1934. Private collection, New York. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner. 

Klee taught at the Bauhaus, the progressive German art school that broke new ground by merging art and architecture with craft. Anni Albers was his admiring student. Both Albers later taught at the Bauhaus before fleeing the Nazis in 1933, and joining the faculty at Black Mountain College, the experimental art school in North Carolina where Josef led the visual arts program and Anni taught weaving.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Black Mountain College on 20th century modern art and performance. To give just one example, it’s where composer John Cage, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, and artist Robert Rauschenberg launched their groundbreaking collaboration. One can draw a direct line from Klee’s aesthetic to the “question everything” ethos of Black Mountain. Thus, this engaging exhibit is exceptionally suggestive, foreshadowing the generations of artists influenced by Black Mountain College and Josef and Anni Albers.

JOSEF ALBERS, GITTERBILD (GRID MOUNTED), c. 1921-1922 © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.