Fresh Off The Boat Analysis

A most poignant document of Black Mountain College's early years is the snapshot of Josef and Anni Albers's arrival, published in Nordi Carolina's AsheviUe Citizen on December 5, 1933 (Fig. 1). "Germans to Teach Art near Here" the caption reads, though "Fresh Off the Boat" would do just as well; the grainy newsprint depicts the couple posed tensely in formal attire - he in tie and jacket, she in fur, cloche, and veil. Tightly angled in a corner, they look very much the anxious, recent immigrants. While Anni's mild gaze seeks out the viewer, Josef averts his eyes, his stiff bearing and tightly clasped hands registering trepidation, even strain. Fleeing the Nazi regime, the couple left Berlin for the site of a newly founded experimental school in rural Appalachia, a quite

In their first years, she would serve double duty as both faculty member at the recently founded college and as his patient translator. The newspaper article does not mention this, nor does it quote his famous response to their welcome ceremony. Rallying his scant English when asked what he hoped to accomplish in the United States, Josef declared simply, "I want to open eyes."2 Typical of his plain and frank manner, Albers's pronouncement nonetheless encapsulates two concerns that characterize his years in the United States. Most obviously, it indicates the centrality of his pedagogical commitment (the same newspaper article proclaimed Albers "internationally known . . . for his unusual method of art instruction"). His statement also focuses on the dominance/superiorityforegrounds the preeminence of a study of vision in his pedagogy and in Bauhaus teaching more generally-it is eyes he wants to open, after all.3 Pedagogy and vision; together, his words represent a desire to craft an audience for abstraction and, more particularly, for his art, an audience that would be tutored in the perceptual strategies he was developing in his