Rheinische Legende

Albers was still a student at the Bauhaus the influential art school (then located in Weimar, Germany), when he created this collage in glass and other non-traditional, mostly industrial materials, one of a small group of related assemblages he made in the early 1920s. An example of what Albers called a Fensterbild (window picture), Rheinische Legende ("The Myth of the Rhine") ranks among the more disorderly (by design) extant compositions within the group. Glass shards and bottle bottoms of various types, textures, and hues comprise a dense and dynamic composition emphasizing contrasting cool shades of blue and lavender with warm yellows and reds, all enhanced when the work is installed imbedded into a wall and lit from behind. The redolent title evokes the Rhine, the longest river coursing throughout Germany (and beyond), the subject and setting of much Germanic folklore and legend. In addition, Albers’ birthplace, Bottrop, sits near and just to the east of the Rhine, so the title perhaps connects to his hometown and its surrounding region.

Replete with artistic and cultural resonances both historical and modern, Albers’s media and technique recall the stained-glass windows illuminating churches and cathedrals; the prevalence of blue invokes the palette medieval glaziers often employed to suggest divine spaces. In this regard, the work subtly evokes the aura of medievalism that pervaded the initial phase of the Bauhaus under the leadership of its founder, architect Walter Gropius, who modeled pedagogy and training at the school after Late Gothic craft guilds. More precisely and personally, it harkens back to Albers’s first and formative commission, a stained-glass window he created in 1917–18 for Bottrop’s St. Michael Church. Titled Rosa mystica ora pro nobis ("Mystic rose pray for us"), this window was destroyed during World War II, but revived in 2012 in the form of three exact reproductions sponsored by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, one of which was installed in the original location in the church.

In a 1970 interview, the artist attributed his reliance on scavenged materials during this early period to Germany’s economic devastation following World War I: "We were very poor. It was just after World War I and all of Germany was very poor. So-called ‘art materials’ were scarce and very dear. So I took my knapsack on my back and went off into the mountains to look for glass shards; these were bottles that I broke or samples that I got from glass works in the area." Borne out of necessity, Albers’s experimental construction, somewhat an elaboration on the precedent of cubist collage, also manifests the avant-garde ethos of the Bauhaus, crossing boundaries of craft and art, utility and decoration, the ordinary and the transcendent. Moreover, his use of found materials, including refuse, puts his work into dialogue with other European modernists of the period, including Kurt Schwitters and other Dada artists, who likewise incorporated discarded ephemera, such as pages from journals and paper tickets, into their art.

An opportunity to teach at the fledgling Black Mountain College in North Carolina—and to evade increasing Nazi hostilities toward modern art and artists—lured Albers and his wife, Anni, an accomplished avant-garde artist in her own right, to the United States in 1933. The couple became American citizens in 1939 and following Josef’s appointment as chair of the Department of Design at Yale University in 1950, settled in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1971, The Met mounted a survey of Albers’s art, the first retrospective the Museum granted a living artist, in which Rheinische Legende appeared with another early glass collage, titled Figure. The next year, likely as a gesture of gratitude for this exhibition, the artist extended both assemblages as gifts among a group of twelve total works to The Met. This gift also included key examples from his renowned series, Homage to the Square, an intensive exploration of color and proportional relations—much like his early Fensterbilder—that extended throughout his career.