Birthday Card: Josef Albers, 1943

In remembering some of Gropius’s closest friends, Ati wrote about Albers, “Old friends and colleagues, my father and “Juppi” to his friends shared glasses of German schnapps and almost identical views on the aims of art and education. Albers had been a master teacher at the Bauhaus from 1923 on. After emigrating to the U.S., he headed the art department at Black Mountain College and Yale University and became recognized as a world famous abstract painter. Juppi spoke an English of visual poetry, as though he invented it moment by moment, and kept his students spellbound as well as in giggles. No one’s life was ever the same after classes with Albers. In my father’s view, he was the greatest educator.”