BOOKS & ARTS
An, a survivor of Dien Bien Phu and in
1964–1965 one of the first NVA regulars to
trek down the then primitive Ho Chi Minh
Trail; Lieutenant Don Snider, an Ameri-
can who served three tours as an adviser to
South Vietnamese forces and like so many
Americans never really bonded with them;
Nguyen Van Uc, a South Vietnamese heli-
copter pilot who logged 6,000 flying hours;
and even Russian and Chinese techni-
cians who advised the North Vietnamese.
These portraits and many, many others are
appropriately nuanced and range over the
human experience.
The courage and heroism not evident at
the top are on full display in the lower ranks:
the Viet Minh soldier who placed his body
under a heavy gun to keep it from rolling
off a hillside at Dien Bien Phu; the Amer-
ican civilian, Doug Ramsey, who miracu-
lously survived seven years in a Viet Cong
prison camp; the US Marine colonel John
Ripley (a high school friend of this review-
er) who, with a fellow Marine, blew up the
bridge at Dong Ha to slow the advance of
North Vietnamese troops during the 1972
Easter Offensive.
At its best, Hastings’s book deftly inte-
grates decision-making with its impact
on policy and people. When the South
Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu
refused to sign a 1972 peace agreement
negotiated by Washington and Hanoi,
Nixon vented his wrath by bombing the
‘bejeezus’ out of North Vietnam, the infa-
mous Christmas bombing. Hastings takes
the reader from the bedlam of the Nixon
White House to the tension-filled briefing
room at the B-52 base on Guam; the ardu-
ous eight-hour flight to the living hell that
was the sky above Hanoi and Haiphong;
the terror of those Vietnamese being
bombed and the lusty cheers of US POWs
in the Hanoi Hilton; the return flight for
those aircraft that got through unscathed;
the near universally hostile reaction in
the United States and abroad; the hasty
return to the negotiating table in Paris;
and the signing of a treaty not significant-
ly different from that agreed upon months
earlier. ‘We bombed them into accept-
ing our concessions,’ one US official
cynically observed.
Although remarkably comprehensive in
its coverage, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy does
not touch all bases. Little attention is paid
to the civilian nation-building programmes
that consumed vast sums of money and
reveal much about US–South Vietnam fail-
ure. After the summer of 1967, the Amer-
ican home front became one of the most
critical theatres of the war, a reality Hanoi
recognised and at times played skillfully.
Immensely readable, sometimes quite
acerbic in its conclusions, Hastings’s book
admirably captures the experiences of
many different people at different times in
a long and complex war.
Albers the austere
Alastair Smart
Josef Albers: Life and Work
by Charles Darwent
Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pp. 352The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was
a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was
asked why — in the early 1960s — he had
suddenly increased the size of works in
his long-standing abstract series, ‘Hom-
age to the Square’, from 16x16 inches to
48x48. Was it a response to the vastness of
his adopted homeland, the United States?
A reaction to the huge canvases used by
the abstract expressionist painters in New
York? ‘No, no,’ Albers replied. ‘It was just
when we got a station wagon.’
In Charles Darwent’s new biography,
Albers (1888–1976) comes across as a man
as frill-free as the art for which he’s famous.
Apparently, he held — and all too often
shared — strong views about matters such
as how beer must be drunk (hitting the back
of one’s throat) and hot dogs be cooked
(on a stick over a fire). Robert Rauschen-
berg, a pupil of Albers’s at Black Mountain
College in North Carolina, called him ‘an
impossible person’.
Not the most promising subject for a
biography, perhaps. But that is to overlook
two important factors. First, that Darwent
(for many years critic on the Independ-
ent on Sunday) is a highly engaging writer
on the visual arts. And second, that Albers
lived through a remarkable period, mixing
with some extraordinary people.
The first son of a painter-decorator, he
was born in Bottrop, a country town in thenorth-west German region of West-
phalia. Tuberculosis kept him from
fighting in the first world war, but
not long after it, he took up a place
at the Bauhaus — where by 1923 he
was appointed to the teaching staff.
Giving 20 hours of class-
es a week (compared to László
Moholy-Nagy’s eight, Paul Klee’s
five and Wassily Kandinsky’s three),
he was the school’s busiest teacher.
He found time, too, to make art
of his own and was regularly seen
picking over the rubbish dumps of
Weimar, hammer in hand: his break-
through works, the ‘Glasbilder’,
were assemblages made from shards
of broken glass.
Where Darwent really piques
our interest is with the staff pol-
itics at the celebrated art and
design school. Bitchiness and back-
stabbing abound, perhaps most
memorably in 1930 (by which
time the institution had moved to
Dessau) when Albers and Kand-
insky contacted the city mayor to
denounce Bauhaus’s then director, Hannes
Meyer, as a communist. There was barely
a shred of evidence, but Meyer was sum-
marily dismissed all the same.
Three years later, the Bauhaus was
forced by the Nazis to close, and Albers
moved with his wife Anni across the Atlan-
tic, both of them taking up an offer to teach
at the experimental new arts college, Black
Mountain. They’d spend the next 16 years
there and miss most of the horrors that
descended on their homeland — though,
in an aside which Darwent frustratingly
fails to expand upon, we learn that one of
Albers’s Bauhaus students, Fritz Ertl, went
on to become an architect for the SS and
design the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
He also fails to explore Albers’s rela-
tionship with any of the avant-garde figures
who taught alongside him at Black Moun-
tain, from the composer John Cage and
artist Willem de Kooning to the choreog-
rapher Merce Cunningham. The college is
remembered today for its non-hierarchical
approach to education, where there were
no tests, no grades and everyone was con-
sidered equal. Not that that stopped Albers
developing a dislike for its director, John
Andrew Rice, and in 1940 demanding his
resignation on the pretext of an affair with
a female student.
This book is hard work, and not just to
read — in his preface, Darwent admits it
was a struggle to write too. How to deal with
a subject who professed a ‘dislike of groups,
kept no diary and batted away questions
about his emotions or past’?
But certain problems are of the
author’s own making. Anni Albers (cur-
rently the subject of a Tate Modern exhibi-
tion) was a textile artist of distinction and