Max Bill and Josef Albers —Mutual Appreciation

Josef and Anni Albers fled Germany in the same year of the Nazi take-over, in 1933, becoming U.S. citizens in 1939. They first taught at Black Mountain College, where they invited Bill to come and work as a visiting lecturer. Bill turned down the invitation, however, to pursue his own projects in Europe.

In 1950, Bill tried to persuade Josef Albers to take up a permanent teaching post at the Ulm School of Design and preside over the foundation course there. But by this time Albers was installed as the head of the design department at Yale. One of the reasons he gave for turning down Bill’s offer was “because he wanted to remain a U.S. citizen” and feared he would risk losing his newly gained citizenship by returning to the defeated country of his birth. 29

In June 1953, the Albers met Bill and his then-wife in the Peruvian capital, Lima. They looked at preColumbian textiles, whose color designs were of particular interest to Josef. The two couples then toured the highlands, visiting the ancient Inca capital Cuzco and the ruined city of Machu Picchu, situated on a saddle between two mountains, high above the Urubamba Gorge.

In November of that year, five months after their joint Peruvian trip, Josef Albers came to Ulm at Bill’s behest, on a short-term contract as visiting lecturer to teach the foundation course on color theory. Albers stayed in Ulm for sixty-one days, from November 24 to January 23, 1954. Bill was thrilled. In a letter to the widow of his old Bauhaus master Vasily Kandinsky, he described how Albers’s teaching of the foundation course was “fabulous, lively, interesting, funny. He’s