Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan

In his inaugural manifesto for the Staatliche Bauhaus, Walter Gropius proposed a new artistic agenda and pedagogical practice based on craft and artisanal principles. “Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts!” was his motto in 1919. This article analyzes how prominent Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers, entered into dialogue with a very specific kind of artisanal aesthetic: the pre-Columbian crafts he encountered on his many trips to Mexico. Revisiting a lecture (“Truthfulness in Art”) delivered in 1937, after his third trip to the country, the article studies the way in which Albers learned from the abstract tradition of pre-Columbian artisans, incorporating their knowledge into his own artistic and pedagogical practice.

With the closure of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers and Anneliese Fleischmann (Anni Albers) were among the first wave of Bauhäusler to flee the threats of the Gestapo. On the recommendation of Philip Johnson, director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albers were invited by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier to join the faculty of Black Mountain College, arriving in November 1933. Once in America, the couple fulfilled their long-standing desire to travel in Mexico, visiting the country fourteen times between 1935 and 1967.

Rather than to disseminate the foundational principles of the Bauhaus, Mexico offered both artists a laboratory for redefining the relationship between modern art and ancient craft. Whereas Walter Gropius asked in his inaugural Bauhaus manifesto for a generic return to the latter—“Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts!” was his motto in 1919—the Alberses had in mind a more specific agenda: to reconnect modern art with pre-Columbian artisanal philosophies, an aesthetic tradition they believed to be the cornerstone of modern abstraction.

Indeed, through their work the Alberses sought to reinvigorate a social philosophy in which matter and spirit intertwined, a constructive belief Anni identified in the weaving tradition of the Andean region and Josef in pre-Columbian architecture he documented while visiting various Mexican archeological sites. Inverting the traditional relationship between the modern avant-garde and primitivism, Josef viewed pre-Columbian craftsmen as his spiritual comrades and Mexico as a point of origin for the kind of truthful aesthetic experience modern abstract artists searched for. In a letter sent to his friend and former colleague Vasily Kandinsky, dated 22 August 1936, Josef describes Mexico as “truly the promised land of abstract art, [which] here it is already 1000s of years old.”^[1]

I Truthfulness in Art

Truthfulness was for Josef Albers the key concept establishing a spiritual bridge between modern abstraction and pre-Columbian artisans. In a lecture entitled “Truthfulness in Art” (1937), presented on 11 December 1937 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, he highlighted the spiritual materialism he perceived as an essential feature of the architectural and plastic works he found in Mexico, asserting: “Let us learn from the Mexican artist truthfulness to conception and material, truthfulness to art as spiritual creation … Let us recognize again the great discipline of the Mexican sculptor. It teaches us: Be truthful with materials.”^[2]

For various reasons, “Truthfulness in Art” marks a turning point in Albers’ career as an artist, catalyzing many of his future endeavors. The lessons he learned from pre-Columbian artists’ approach to materials guided his own return to oil painting, to which he had returned after several years away from the medium, beginning a series of abstract oils in the mid-1930s characterized by the exploration of what he described in his lecture as the irrational functionalism of art—an understanding of form, matter, and color that went beyond pure logical thinking. In works such as Angular (1935), Mexican (1936), Temple (1936), and Pyramid (1937) he confronted the dilemma of mixing colors, a pictorial technique he began to perceive as untruthful, potentially obscuring the spiritual materiality of painting. From then on, Albers emphasized the crafted tactility of color, inaugurating what I call his transcendental chromaticism: the spiritual revelation of form and matter through the truthful interaction of colors.^[3]

In his Harvard lecture, Albers also describes photography as an artistic medium capable of showing pre-Columbian plastic works as “active volumes.” For him, “active volume” is the capacity of matter to be animated from within with truthful emotions. Not having a specific word for evoking the half-physical, half-spiritual quality of the architecture and crafted objects he encountered in Mexico, Albers uses technical terms such as “turgescence” and “tumefaction” when explaining the material vivacity of pre-Columbian art.^[4] His photomontages of clay figurines and truncated pyramids—composed of fragments of contact sheets depicting objects captured from different angles—seem to have been produced in accordance with a rigorous visual syntax, a sequence of multiple perspectives that render cinematic the volume of the objects depicted.

As far as we know, this lecture was one of the few occasions in which Albers publicly presented his photographs of Mexico. Rather than constituting ethnographic evidence, his photomontages of pre-Columbian art were for Albers a sort of secret repertoire of “active volumes,” allowing him to archive a vocabulary of forms to use later in his own art. Interestingly, towards the end of his lecture Albers describes an aesthetic revelation experienced during his third trip to the country. It is possible that Albers granted himself rare license to share these images at Harvard in order to offer students a glimpse of this Mexican epiphany. Contrasting slides of pre-Columbian Mexican architecture, ceramics, textiles, and clay figurines with Egyptian, Greek, Cretan, Roman, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese examples, the talk ends with the following pithy epigram:

    “In connecting this talk on old art with my talks of last year on modern art problems I would like to give you to consider a formulation that occurred to me in Mexico:

    Rational functionalism is technique,

    Irrational functionalism is art.

    Art is creation

    It can be based on but is independent of knowledge.

    We can study art through nature,

    but art is more than nature.

    Art is spirit

    and has a life of its own.

    Art in its nature is anti-historical

    because creative work is looking forward.

    It can be connected with tradition

    but grows, consciously or unconsciously out of an artist’s mentality.

    Art is neither imitation nor repetition

    art is revelation.”^[5]

His Harvard lecture makes clear Albers possessed a great admiration for Mexico’s pre-Columbian culture. Albers not only acknowledged the innately abstract thinking of the pre-Columbian artisan throughout his talk, by using expressions such as “I believe no other country, no other period has such a rich and vital plastic work,”^[6] he also emphasized his own fascination with the spiritual materialism of the pre-Columbian crafts.

II Art as spiritual creation

The profoundly intimate connection between Josef Albers and Mexico has not gone unnoticed among scholars and curators. Series such as Graphic Tectonic (1942), Structural Constellation (1955), or his well-known Homage to the Square (1950–76) have been characterized as formal transpositions of Mesoamerican architectures and Mexican pyramidal volumes.^[7] However, the spiritual or even religious correlation between his oeuvre and pre-Columbian aesthetics has been systematically disregarded, mainly because of the popular belief that his work is cold, secular, and rationalist. This misconception contradicts his notion of “art as spiritual creation,” as well as his assertion that the “aim of art [is the] revelation and evocation of vision.”^[8] As Nicholas Fox Weber has argued, “He was not totally secular; although Albers may not have used known religious imagery, what he evoked through color is magical and intensely spiritual.”^[9]

From this point of view, far from simply evoking ancient diagrammatic architecture projected from a bird’s-eye perspective, his Homage to the Square series (fig. 01) can be properly described as a spiritual revelation involving pre-Columbian architecture—that is, an attempt to visually unfold the interior of matter, color, and form from the metaphysical foundations of pre-Columbian art, allowing the beholder to look the external world from within. In accordance with his idea that “Art is not to be looked at; art is looking at us”^[10] my argument in this text is that his Homages synthetize his Mexican epiphany: a Bauhausian encounter with the very essence of pre-Columbian artisanal philosophy. Though Albers never explicitly connected the symbolism of the Mexican pyramids he obsessively photographed with his Homages, the series seems to suggest a chromatic journey to the center of the pyramid, to the ritual architectonics of matter and color.

In speaking of a ritual tectonic experience revealed throughout his constructive implementation of color, I am not suggesting Albers attempted any sort of ethnographic or archeological transposition in this series. Instead, I argue that what it truly reveals is the cumaltive somatic experiences Albers captured—sometimes literally through the photomechanical lens—when visiting places such as Mitla, Tenayuca, Uxmal, and Monte Alban. (fig. 02) What Josef Albers learned from the pre-Columbian sculptor was not a formulaic constructive technique. Rather, he was inculcated in a philosophical principle derived from the intersection of artisanal crafting and aesthetic thinking.

Following this hypothesis, I argue that the Homages derive from the chromatic condensation of an abstract visual concept: the stepped-fret motif known as xicalcoliuhqui in Nahuatl.^[11] (fig. 03) This motif was for Albers the most eye-opening architectural element of the Oaxacan archaeological site Mitla, excavated by Alfonso Caso and Daniel Rubín de la Borbolla in 1934–35. Albers extensively photographed this motif and composed photomontages with the resulting images. (fig. 04) His Homages cannot be detached from his understanding of the motif as a grounded signifier; that is, as the spiritual gateway to the architectonic center of the pyramid, conceptually represented in the woven steps and rhythmic openings of this ancient abstract form.

II Tectonics of the Xicalcoliuhqui

Found throughout North America, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region, the xicalcoliuhqui is a sophisticated abstract concept with no definite archeological meaning. This Nahuatl expression could be translated as “volute of the curcubit basin” (voluta de jícara). For some scholars it evokes aquatic elements such as waves and seashells or atmospheric phenomena such as storms, clouds, and hurricanes. For others, the cosmographic symbolism of the xicalcoliuhqui is closely linked to the underworld of Mictlán (or Mitla, in Spanish), the abode of the dead.

Formally, the xicalcoliuhqui divides into three, four, or five different elements, depending on the interpretation of the motif as a whole and the specific variant in question. Archaeologists have recognized at least thirteen versions of the motif in Mitla, the site where Albers was exposed for the first time to xicalcoliuhqui.^[12] In the pattern located in the central panel of the Palace of Columns (photographed by Albers), art historian Mauricio Orozpe identifies five distinct elements: the stairs, the spiral, the hook, the center, and the column.^[13] (fig. 05) For Orozpe, most interpretations focus on the positive sign of the isolated symbol, overlooking the multidirectional complexity of the xicalcoliuhqui when presented unfolded and duplicated, intertwining the positive space of one motif with the negative space of a contiguous rotated one. By means of accumulation, the serial tableau adds meaning to the symbol, embedding high and bas-reliefs, active and passive forms, in a non-hierarchical arrangement. In doing so, the symbolism of the xicalcoliuhqui becomes unstable, polysemic, expansive, and rotatory: descending stairs suddenly appear as ascending passages; the deepest core of the spiral unexpectedly becomes the access door to a new journey.

Basing his analysis on the correspondence between the geometric pattern of the xicalcoliuhqui and the numeric composition of the tonalpohualli, the 260-day ritual calendar widely used by the Zapotecs, Orozpe argues that most interpretations fail to understand its significance because they are blind to the architectural background, the negative space hidden in the relief. “Surprisingly none of the examined studies embrace the natural graphic relation between shape and background of this design,” he contends. “Devoted to solving the mystery of the form and its symbolism, those studies disregard the background, an inexcusable omission for artists and graphic designers.”^[14]

Orozpe’s observations are based on the same visual insights that allowed Albers to revamp the Vorkurs in 1923, establishing him as a prominent meister at the Bauhaus. Familiar with gestalt principles such as figure-background proportionality and passive-active forms, Albers asserted in 1928, in the second Bauhaus school bulletin, that “the activation of negativa (of remainders, intermediate, and negative values) is perhaps the only entirely new, perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary interest in forms … If one gives equal consideration and weight to positive and negative values, then there is no ‘remainder’.”^[15]

Unusual in Western art, the overwhelming presence of active negative designs across Mexico encouraged Albers to feel at home as a Western abstract artist in search of pre-modern visual truths. As he posited in 1939, pre-Columbian plastic works “present form problems very little known in [the] Western tradition (but alive again in abstract art). For instance, the problem of equal activity of form and rest-form.”^[16] Thus it is unsurprising that after visiting Mitla and Monte Albán, among other places, Albers was amazed at the sophisticated nature of the activated negative space of the xicalcoliuhqui. As he states in his Harvard lecture:

There we can study again a very modern art problem. The relationship between active and passive, a certain proportion between positive and negative elements, a proportion very rare throughout all European and Oriental art work. … It teaches us a very high social philosophy, namely, real democracy in this way: Every part serves and at the same time is served.^[17]

IV Squaring the Stepped Gateway

At some point between his first two sojourns in Mexico (1936–37), Albers started a new series of drawn and painted works devoted to exploring his encounter with Tenayuca, a set of ruins located northwest of Tenochtitlan, dated as having been built between 1200 and 1521. Based on modulations of color, juxtaposed volumes, and displaced perspectives, his Studies for Tenayuca reiterates geometric drawings similar to those of the Linear Constructions. The ruins of Tenayuca that inspired Albers’s work consist of a double pyramid projecting from a large platform base, bordered on three sides by 138 stone sculptures of snakes. The pyramids sit side by side, their facades marked by ascending dual stairways that lead to twin temples at the pyramid’s apex suggesting from above a mirror image. (fig. 06)

Tenayuca has been evoked as concrete proof of the direct link between Albers’ art and pre-Columbian architecture, where most of the cases providing formal juxtapositions between ancient and modern abstract designs. Scholars such as James Oles, have argued that pieces such as Variation on Tenayuca (ca. 1938) literally represent the diagrammatic profile and three-dimensionality of the double pyramid.^[18] (fig. 07) Art historian Kiki Gilderhus suggests that rather than the architectonics of the pyramid Variation on Tenayuca depicts the stone sculptures known as xiuhcóatl, the coiled solar serpents surrounding the whole Tenayuca complex, guiding the sun’s journey along the coatepantli (wall of serpents). She argues: “The painted Tenayuca motif is actually inspired by the serpent sculptures at the base of the pyramid rather than of the pyramid itself … He translated the tightly coiled serpent body and spiral shaped head into two stylized squares.”^[19] (fig. 08)

Both interpretations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I sustain that in Variation on Tenayuca the architectural base and the stone serpents coexist in dialogue with other elements of the xicalcoliuhqui. In other words, Variation on Tenayuca represents the symbolic interaction of components of the stepped-fret motif instead of schematizations of isolated parts. As previously asserted, Albers understood art as neither imitation nor repetition but revelation instead. He never intended to literally translate Mexican forms into his own abstract art, and explicitly rejected literal extrapolations based on his admittedly toponymic titles. On the contrary, Albers endeavored to reveal aesthetic truths and to give form through his oeuvre to impossible compositions. Since the arrangement of the coatepantli (column), the devouring entrance-mouths attached to the bottom of the pyramid (stairs), and the squared composition of the coiled serpents orienting the calendric function of the double structure (spiral – hook) are components of the xicalcoliuhqui, it is my belief that all these elements collide visually in the Tenayuca series.

More to the point, Albers aimed in this series to disassemble the xicalcoliuhqui, splitting up and distributing in different planes the five elements of the motif: stairs, spiral, hook, center, and column. Confronting one part with another, Albers offers a mirror image in which figure-ground spaces, negative-positive areas, and passive-active lines combine in a floating constellation. In the same way that his Linear Constructions produce visual paradoxes, his Studies for Tenayuca make use of tectonic volumes, folding and unfolding in zenithal, frontal, and diagonal directions. In this way, the viewer’s gaze is invited to meander, traverse the portals, scan the murus (Latin for “wall”), circle the columns, and climb the stairs of the multilayered constellation.

Instead of functioning as a technical study of the xicalcoliuhqui, the series reflects an experience of the motif’s transcendental and spiritual basis. His Studies for Tenayuca function as tectonic multilayered excavations of the xicalcoliuhqui in the sense that they allow the viewer to see the inside of the stepped-fret motif, comprehending both the whole and the parts as if beholding a rotating image. The application of color emphasizes the painting’s deceptive construction as a spatial suspension of form. Albers’ photomontages featuring the architectural materiality of the xicalcoliuhqui allowed him to create a montage chain for animating and disassembling the stepped-fret motif—a sort of slow-motion cinema he developed for revealing the functional irrationalism of the motif.

After several years dissecting the visual morphology of the xicalcoliuhqui through his photomontages, Albers came across an obvious but audacious proposition: to reverse the strategy—condensing the sections of the xicalcoliuhqui in a single frontal chromatic formulation instead of breaking them up into sequences. In this way, the floating images of the Tenayuca series inspired the transition of the xicalcoliuhqui into pared-down chromatic propositions, the Homage to the Square series. The activated chromatic volume of this series are the end result of contorting the five elements of the xicalcoliuhqui, subsuming each one into another and forcing them to coexist in a confined visual universe. The quasi-concentric composition of the Homage series subsumes three attributes characteristic of ancient Mesoamerica’s symbolic architecture under one single chromatic superposition: the fauces-gate, the core-tomb, and the serpent-base. (fig. 09)

V The Hidden Code of the Square

As early as 1956, Jean Charlot, a member of the group of Mexican mural painters and a good friend of Albers, had the intuition that, as reversible or deceptive pyramids, his Homage series contained a hidden mystery.

“Albers favors these deceptive figures that the mind apprehends in one way, only to discover at a second reading new terms incompatible with the first ones, and equally valid … Pyramidal shapes will be at first convex, as monuments surveyed from a plane in flight, only to reverse themselves, become concave shells, their sides receding to the caved-in tip, as if it were a mummy’s outlook from the burial chamber to the pyramid’s outward slopes.”^[20]

This early observation proposes a journey deep within the pyramid. By descending inside the painting, Charlot induces the viewer to see the world from within the square. His interpretation of the series also coincides with understandings of the pre-Columbian pyramid as a “sacred mountain” falling under the custody of Cocijo, the owner and provider. As archeologist and art historian Robert Markens asserts, “Considering their characteristics, the temples of the Columns Group at Mitla were arranged and perceived as models of the ‘Sacred Mountain’ (Cerro Sagrado) or ‘Provision Mountain’ (Montaña de Sustento).”^[21]

Charlot’s description of the Homage paintings as tombs also intersects with Mauricio Orozpe’s interpretation of the xicalcoliuhqui at Mitla, in which the stepped-fret motif represents a two-way (ascending-descending) ritual journey. In Orozpe’s words, “entering Mictlán means you must be swallowed by the stepped fauces of Cipactli, graphically represented with the downward spiral of the xicalcoliuhqui,” only to take “the reverse path, that is, the upward stairway toward the place where clouds and winds are formed, represented with an ascending stair.”^[22] In the same vein, art historian Maria Teresa Uriarte describes a variety of stepped elements in pre-Columbian architecture as facilitating purifying immersions into the realm of Mictlán. She asserts, “stairways, caves, and the centers of ball courts serve as gateways for accessing and at the same time for leaving the underworld; so much as a celestial body finds its way to a rebirth at the end of the descending nocturnal journey.”^[23]

If the xicalcoliuhqui symbolizes a mythical stairway, the quasi-concentric stepped squares of the Homage series should be approached as spiritual gateways granting access to the very center of the pyramid. In other words, if the motif condenses the entire symbolism of the pyramid, Albers’ chromatic volumes serve as gateways for those in search of universal aesthetic truths and timeless abstract forms. It is not coincidental that the earliest prototype for the series, a painting dated 1936 (the exact moment when he began the Studies for Tenayuca, Graphic Tectonics, and Linear Constructions), is titled Gate (1936), as if he were preparing his initial descent through the passages of pre-Columbian architecture. (fig. 10)

Following his Harvard lecture, Albers produced a number of important paintings, woodcuts, and drawings illustrating core gateways—including To Mitla (1940) and Study for Airy Center (ca. 1938)—forms that anticipate the architectural openings of his Variant/Adobes, such as Luminous Day (1947–52), and the penetrable squares of the Homage paintings. Photomontages from this period also suggest his interest in gates and passages. In various photomontages featuring Mitla, Albers included shots in which a portion of Anni Albers’s body appears, standing under lintels. In one surprising shot, Theodore (Ted) Dreier seems to be entering the interior chamber of the Palace of Columns, as if about to be devoured by the architecture.^[24] As Neal Benezra asserts, “As seen by Josef Albers, this is an architecture of mystery; while the outermost stones are bleached with light, the interior spaces are shrouded in darkness and ambiguity.”^[25]

Josef Albers’ former Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer once called him a “frustrated architect.” Indeed, there are many clues about his fascination with architectonic woven volumes as well as stonemasonry. A mystical architect of vision, his devouring squares are gateways to the spiritual realm of the Bauhütte and the constructive foundations of the pre-Columbian sculptor. From positive to negative, descent to ascent, the terrestrial to the eternal, the xicalcoliuhqui and its gestalt require a reconciliation of parts to the whole, epitomizing many lessons within Albers’s lifelong quest for a truthful, modern abstract art.