Search Versus Re-Search: Recollections of Josef Albers at Yale, a film by Anoka Faruqee

[Music] [Music] none of us I don't think uh knew alers [Music] really he kept his distance he was very much a European uh master in the situation was the master in the student and we did not have discussions back and forth he talked you listened uh and if you disagreed you disagreed with him uh among your fellow students and so on and I he provoked a lot of discussion much more than if he engaged in discussion with us in class he was a very great [Music] showman he would do things like middle of a crit he would get up on top of a table to make a point be talking about German expressionist theories that they thought was a good idea to slant the stage he said but as you see you fall off and he'd be teetering they were very celebrated courses at Yale and so they attracted all the Architects and lots of people from across the campus who were simply curious he designed these courses so that anyone could learn from them and do the work do the work well enough that they could learn something I learned a lot from his color course just from what we did and some of it served me well as a patr some of it uh some things were missing I'm very tonal and it took me years to realize that that's my nature everything he did had to do with with Hugh most of the problems dealt with Hugh looking back on it I think it's all very good I think it's good to have a teacher who whose enthusiasms don't match your own exactly right talking about teaching one day he said um yeah boy he said he called everyone boy he'd be calling me boy today right yeah teaching you got to know when to Pat them on the back or kick them in the ass very important that you know when to do these things he fooled everyone people thought that he was uh he would dry up when he wasn't teaching anymore but uh one time I talked to him about that he said I don't miss it at all and I know exactly what he means he was always working and uh I think he was a model for us in that in that way too we had no expectation that we were going to make a living being artist there wasn't such a thing really I'm interested in paintings that are transcended what that means how it's attain is a mystery that keeps me painting I I don't know uh what it is the longer I paint the less I'm sure of anything I thought it would be the other way around I just I've always found it a very mysterious process and I'm not sure that it is Art I mean you you know I I think that history decides whether it's art or [Music] not [Music] [Music] [Music] one one of my points of concern is that I'm trade is an Alba's product and I'm definitely not i' never heard of him in Europe I had never heard of the PowerHouse in Europe at the end of World War I Germany had been cut off and I had been hospitalized so it took a while to get to know what was going on and then I made a trip to New Haven to Yale looking for a teaching job that's where I met alus and how old were you then 29 he he looked at my portfolio and he like what he saw has about the teaching position he said well what I can offer you is is special student status for women year there are few things you can still learn and I did his strategy was to give the students in advance like money startup money but it it was in terms of ideas and then he would he would ask for interest steep interest when the results were brought in it wasn't all that good so he gave them more he elaborated give them a little more for advanced advanced money and it it got better but on the way back to Street H he expressed his disappointment and it wasn't disappointment with the students but his disappointment with himself he blamed himself for not having done better introducing the problem the way he he presented the initial ideas and the way he responded to the students work was Synergy he would always line up the students work their homework saying the color always gave homework he lined it up and commented on it it didn't say who did what that didn't matter but where he saw an idea he picked it up and elaborated on it that sort of made the lesson that this one student learned in his homework or her homework a lesson for all so you were expected to contribute by giving alas good examples to point that truth truth to the material and for a Potter that's the clay and I used clay as as a sculpture material and it if it needed support while it was soft I gave it that support and and that was the aring but that's what could Joseph really rattled he had taken a student Armature who a student who had D us an Armature he took it through across the room he was not a good listener at [Music] all just about all my GE geometric work is made of Saddle surfaces the saddle surface is called an anticlastic surface and the Dome shape is called a synclastic surface I got into higher mathematics that way but I don't know math I happen to be in parallel par with mathematics I did not try to study mathematics but I continued working on in my intuitive Manner and then mathematicians told me what it was that I had been doing Design One became a container a container for a void inside or you could say a container of light timelessness is one of my ambitions [Music] [Music] alar was in trouble alar was teaching at Yale I think he was there a year or two and he had inherited students that were uh painting you know gold leaf butterflies and very academic and they did not understand what the hell Albert was talking about you know he was talking modernism and he thought if he imported a couple of avant guard Rebels we would revolutionize the school for him so they went to Cooper uni and they said who do you have and there I was you know painting way up there throwing paint and dripping and stuff he was using me and he was smart because I'm there throwing paint from 30 ft away you cannot paint with a brush with two hairs in it on in Gold Leaf next to me you know and and it infiltrated the school so there was an excitement that built up and Alber got control of the [Music] school he was a very powerful man somewhere you felt he was a great man and in his own way tyrannical first of all you wanted me to paint in a skirt I wore tight jeans I was a sexy kid you know I wore jeans how do you paint in a skirt but I I don't think I could have done I I couldn't have done what he wanted I couldn't have it was just not my nature he knew and he and I think he had respect for me I think he's a poet I think he extracted it down to you know you take a whole bunch of grapes and you just get it down to one drop and there's something wonderful and exquisite about that but it's a poem it's not a symphony it's not a coral I like Baroque I like 17th century Spanish Baroque that nobody's looking at now it was out of fashion it's still out of fashion so what happens is you get modernism flattens everything out destroys the Baroque anything colorful and anything Baroque is called kitch and lower class and it's wiped out of the history books and I think it gets to be a kind of class system too and what happens in art history what happens with photo realism it's defined by a male it's defined by Ivan karp as removed like the camera cool you tell me what woman is going to fit into that and I did not fit in and and the subject matter didn't fit [Music] in you know my painting Jolie Madame it's a huge still life it's at the Cana Museum and I painted a bottle of perfect it started with a bottle of Jolie Madame it was called the ugliest painting of the year in the times and then it was called the ugliest painting of the decade and then I realized that it was it was the subject matter that was [Music] female then it got in trouble with the radical feminist because you're not supposed to wear perfume or jewelry or you know you burn your bra so it was I got caught in a [Music] thing so take pliable planes where threads are crossing colored threads colored lines then it starts moving then it becomes three-dimensional and also invades the territory of sculpture environment costume theater performance all of the things we've spread our wings to discover in the last three decades that's in it's the infinite [Music] Fascination have you ever been in a place where you're one of the only you know two or three women in a group of 40 boys 40 young men where they're always joking and always very SN and always have remarks that uh are not necessarily to your benefit I think it's very difficult for women to uh be in all boys swimming pool so Elber was really a wonderful leader of or keeping order and keeping your eye on the ball you this may be tough you may have to go through a lot but don't lose sight of why you're here and what you're doing he was uh a force to be dealt with and in the good sense you sat up or you stood up and you listened when you had something to say since he struggled with English you listened extra carefully you listened very carefully because he spoke slowly and clearly but sometimes looking for vocabulary and in a very creative way allowing the students or whoever he was speaking to to finish his sentence you could sense where he was leading you and he paused and let you finish the thought and the sentence and would make sure you got it it was a very interesting technique a way of teaching he came in to the area where I was painting and he saw struggles or trials or exercises of things I was trying to to do to teach myself how to weave and I didn't even didn't think of weaving I thought of crossing of threads Crossing of colored lines he called me girl AO girl bus is D and I couldn't explain bus is D I showed it to him and he said um after school I don't know if it was Wednesday or Thursday come down to the office and I'm going to take you to meet my wife cuz she will be interested to see what you're trying to do that's how I met Annie because he drove me out to their house did you feel was Annie an important role model to you as a woman artist I didn't think of her as an artist I thought of her as this poor wife stuck out there in the suburbs I didn't want to end up in a situation like that ever to be the wife of a successful artist performing and out in the world doing things and waiting at home and opening cans of things to eat for dinner he would bring me once a week out there and I was to update her on my research of what I was doing and how I was progressing and then afterwards I'd be deposited the bus stop out there and it all happened at this bus stop it was a long wait for this bus it's a kind of Eureka experience I can navigate between what I'm learning about color and the phenomena of color with him and what I can learn about structure and complexity that when two Dimension becomes three dimension and bring it all together into something and I thought well I don't think anybody's really done that this might be really a kind of fun [Music] trip [Music] but he'd send me up to the Blackboard and expect give me tasks which I could do I was surprising myself I didn't know I could do these things it contributed to my way of thinking and drawing and working and eventually weaving too [Music] so he asked me I put my paintings out and he asked me what they were all about and so I started expounding on abstract expressionism you know oh it's about my feelings and this he ah I don't want to hear that stuff he said what are the paintings really about and I said well that one's about a field and that one's about a say ah that's good you're in well he transformed the school obviously from an from the old Boart tradition to to something that you know became very quickly the number one art school in the country he had his nose in almost every class that was being taught he would run around and peek in what was going on everywhere and on one day a week on Wednesday he would gather everybody together in the The Graduate painting studio and he would have selected two or three works from somewhere around the school and it would be interesting because here we were in The Graduate Studios but he might bring a painting from a freshman class you know and point out something in it that you know would teach us make us look closely at things we wouldn't ordinary look at when when I was his ta and he knew that I would probably continue you know teaching he said to me one day says you know what the most important thing is I said what he says you know art is going to take care of itself you have to care about the student what what are you going to do to help the student get better that made made me I think uh more i i a little bit more understanding he always brought in you know a Critic from New York who was the opposite of him but they were never there in the same day but he liked the idea that on a Friday you know this person would come in and go around and give his or her point of view it's like Albert seem to understand that there are some students who who needed you know this other thing there's something connected to seeing things in black and white in a fluid way that can get transferred I think into Rich color for me the most telling exercise that he uh that he invented was what's called the four World project the Four Color project that means you have to select four Hues that when combined in four different studies create completely different worlds now you first of all you have to select four colors that are going to have built-in variety you can't select four different Reds because you're always going to get a for the red world right it turns out that you know what the best four colors probably are red green and blue yellow is a is a mixture you see of what red and green and then the third one would be black because you can't get black additively so you use those four colors red green blue and black and you can start creating yellows and purples and all all the other colors one of the things that Albert insisted on in his drawing class you know was uh no erasing in order to show how you improved you have to get another color pencil out to show the correction and the reason is he said sometimes when you erase you make the same mistake again I think he liked line because it was efficient and he liked the idea of being being able to describe volumes with a line now how do you do that you see how do you how do you describe something with weight you know with a line in the spring when daffodils came out he made us draw daffodils and he would draw them on the board you know everything he asked us to do he would often do himself you know with great great flourish and style but the thing about a daffodil is that it wasn't just its geometry but its life and he would talk about the way things spring to life and he wanted your drawings to depict that that's what he means by opening eyes and if you open your eye you're opening your brain [Music] [Music] the course was in the spring and somehow daffodils came into the discussion I don't know whether he actually brought some daffodil into the class but he asked us to somehow do the essence of daffodil without any representation of a daffodil the essence of if you want def ability I don't know that whether that was the work that he used or the I kind that word but uh but that's what you were supposed to do you're supposed to do da ability that's something that I have had always been fascinated by that you could do something with which obviously relates to the outside world but not in an obvious representational way but by finding an abstract language he thought of himself as an educator I think that was his his self understanding he had a lot invested in that itan who was also a great teacher and iton had a great teacher in Herzel there is a tradition of I think uh great teachers he continued that tradition in that sense he was almost unique I think at that point in the country he really opened your eyes I think that's the most important contribution I guess that alas made to my education and how do you think that agenda of opening eyes fit into the broader liberal arts context or did it in some ways challenge other things that you were learning I have to say I learned more in that class in a way than I did in most of my other classes it challenged an emphasis on Theory and especially on science that is what is it made you think about what is reality really I mean if you follow an understanding of reality which is ruled by science we have to say that reality as a really is has no colors and yet there's something unreflective about wanting to say the sky really is blue the rose really is red that from a scientific perspective superficial understanding became suddenly sort of the ground floor that's where meaning really resides you have to recognize the legitimacy of Science in order to make sense of the world we live in but if that becomes your total understanding of reality you lose an awful lot one thing you lose news is persons science knows nothing of persons here that is when I encounter you as a person there's no good scientific account of that and similarly there's no good scientific account of those experiences with color that Alber tracks with this am to the square [Music] Series in the end it leads to questions about what do we really mean by reality does science give us a key to reality or is science too just a reconstruction which is legitimate but also limited uh and I think that uh taking a course like Alber forces you to think about the limits uh without necessarily challenging the legitimacy of the scientific project and that has been since then one of the centers of my philosophical thinking philosophy has been marked both the phenomenological and the analytic tradition by what has been called the linguistic term recognizing the importance of language and that I think is indeed something very important to have happened but on the other hand I think we have been too impressed by that term and here something like alur or office or something like a corrective language is not like a house in which everything that we experience can find its proper place no what we experience floods as it were that house and in this sense one could say that uh Al helps to open windows in the house of language if you want to use that metaphor so a lot more was at stake than just learning how to draw or how to see [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Anoka Faruqee

Views: 49,295

Keywords: Josef Albers, art education, Sheila Hicks, color theory, William Bailey, Erwin Hauer, Richard Lytle, Audrey Flack, Yale School of Art, Karsten Harries, Anni Albers, Black Mountain College, Bauhaus, art, art school, modernist art, modernism, education, philosophy, Anoka Faruqee

Id: cC7671N76_Q

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016