The actor and film director Maximilian Schell, having purchased some of Josef’s paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery, had the idea of using an enlarged Homage to the Square as a stage set for Hamlet. Janis arranged for Schell to go to Orange and meet the Alberses. A friendship ensued; Schell and his partner, Dagmar Hirtz, were at the Alberses’ house for lunch on the occasion of Josef’s eighty-eighth birthday, which ended up being the same day that he went to Yale New Haven Hospital, where he died a week later. Schell maintained a close relationship with Anni, who, in the last years of her life, would often visit him on his farm in Austria and would attend his performances at the Salzburg Festival. Schell put on an exhibition of Anni and Josef’s work at the Villa Stuck in Munich in 1990 and included footage of Anni in the documentary film he made about Marlene Dietrich in 1984.
The association with Schell has not always been a positive one, however. In his upcoming biography of Anni Albers (Yale Press, April 2026), Nicholas Fox Weber describes some of the actor’s reprehensible behavior in relation to Anni, and his use of his personal seductiveness to try to obtain part of Josef’s estate. Moreover, since Schell’s death in 2014, there have been published allegations—first by Schell's niece and subsequently by his daughter—of sexual abuse of which they were victims. Such behavior is not inconsistent with Schell's comportment in relation to many of the people who comprised the group of people Anni referred to as “our circle,” and we cannot discuss his role in the Alberses’ world without mentioning his obscene grabs for power.
Narratives
