When I was first taken to the Connecticut home of Anni and Josef Albers, in the spring of 1971, I expected to see a place resembling the Bauhaus: a flat roof and lots of steel and glass. Imagine my surprise when we pulled up to an ordinary suburban raised ranch, clad in artificial beige shingles, its concrete foundation boldly visible because there was no planting in front of it. I soon realized that the Bauhaus was more a mentality than a style.
Anni and Josef were like a two-person religious sect: austere but refined, robust for their ages (she was 71; he was 84), exuding charisma. After about an hour of chatting amiably, the two of them interrogating me about my studies at Yale and my artistic taste, Anni said we should go pick up lunch—at Kentucky Fried Chicken. On the way there in their Chevrolet station wagon (recently upgraded to accommodate Josef’s larger Homages to the Square), she explained that “Ken-TUCK-ee” was like traditional Viennese fried chicken; it also reminded them of picnics at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where Josef was head of the painting program for 16 years.
With her Berlin accent, Anni specified “Extra Kah-rispy” at the drive-through window, having said that “texture makes all the difference, as in weaving, the brittle against the soft.” When we were back home, she arranged the chicken artfully, leaving lots of space between the pieces on an oval platter of plain white porcelain. It was like alchemy, the everyday transformed into an elegant rarity.
In the following years, I worked on a biography of Anni, and when she told me about her childhood Christmases, I realized that it hadn’t all been KFC. Her family had been wealthy, and on Christmas Eve they would go by carriage to dine with her high-living Uncle Hugo. There was a table covered with wonderful gifts, and dinner was always the same. Served by Hugo’s butler, who memorably flirted with Anni and her sister, they would eat “beluga caviar, rock lobster, and an ice-cream bombe.”
Anni and Josef’s Christmases in Connecticut were quieter. They spent the holiday just the two of them, and always listened to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In 1975, with Christmas approaching, I knew that, as usual, they would have unequaled gifts for me—original prints inscribed for the occasion—and that no object I could bring them would feel adequate. So that December, I suggested to Anni that she leave their Christmas Eve dinner up to me and prepare nothing herself.
I bought a jar of Romanoff beluga caviar and had the local fish market steam two lobsters. I hardly knew how to cook, but I boiled a lot of new potatoes. I picked up some of Josef’s favorite dark-black Westphalian bread and went to Baskin-Robbins for an ice-cream cake.
On the afternoon of the 24th, I told Anni that I had put the lobster in the fridge and the approximated bombe in the freezer. I explained to Josef that my present to them was what Anni had eaten as a child at Uncle Hugo’s. Josef, born into a humble family of craftsmen in the industrial city of Bottrop, liked stories of Anni’s luxurious existence in Berlin, before she and Josef were forced out of Germany by the Nazis, in 1933, with the rest of her family fleeing in 1939.
Anni telephoned me on the afternoon of Christmas Day. It was “perfect,” she said. “And it gave us two meals.” On the eve, they each ate half a lobster, and for Christmas dinner they had the rest of everything, having even managed to save some caviar. “And do you know what Josef’s favorite part was?” she asked me. “The potatoes.”
Josef died the following March, in great health until his 88th birthday and creating art right up to the end. When he finished an Homage with a large blue center, he told me it reminded him of the cosmos—“which I feel is getting nearer.” Anni lived another 18 years.
To this day, at Christmastime, I crave the pure tastes of the Alberses’ last Christmas together and must have one such atavistic meal. And I listen to Glenn Gould playing that phenomenal music of Bach, aware that in Leipzig, Josef had made wonderful stained-glass windows very near to the church where Bach had long been organ master, and that the sublime intelligence of Bach suited the Alberses perfectly.
Nicholas Fox Weber is the executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and the author of several books, including Le Corbusier: A Life and Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928–1943
