Anni Albers

Anni Albers was born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann on June 12, 1899, in Berlin, Germany.[5] Her mother was from a family in the publishing industry and her father was a furniture maker.[6] Even in her childhood, she was intrigued by art and the visual world. She painted during her youth and studied under impressionist artist Martin Brandenburg, from 1916 to 1919,[2] but was very discouraged from continuing after a meeting with artist Oskar Kokoschka, who upon seeing a portrait of hers asked her sharply "Why do you paint?"[7]^: 154

Fleischmann eventually decided to attend art school, even though the challenges for art students were often great and the living conditions harsh. Such a lifestyle sharply contrasted with the affluent and comfortable living that she had been used to. She attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg for only two months in 1919, then in April 1922 began her studies at the Bauhaus at Weimar.[8]

Design for Wall Hanging, 1925 (Harvard Art Museums)

Design for a Silk Tapestry, 1926 (Harvard Art Museums)

Design for a Jacquard Weaving, 1926 (Harvard Art Museums)

Design for a Rug, 1927 (Harvard Art Museums)

At the Bauhaus she began her first year under Georg Muche and then Johannes Itten.[9] Fleischmann struggled to find her particular workshop at the Bauhaus. Women were barred from certain disciplines taught at the school[10] and during her second year, unable to gain admission to a glass workshop with future husband Josef Albers, Fleischmann deferred reluctantly to weaving, the only workshop available to women.[2] Fleischmann had never tried weaving and believed it to be too "sissy" of a craft.[11] However, with her instructor Gunta Stölzl, the only woman 'master' at the school, Fleischmann soon learned to appreciate the challenges of tactile construction and began producing geometric designs.[12] In her writing, titled Material as Metaphor, Albers mentions her Bauhaus beginnings: "In my case it was threads that caught me, really against my will. To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over."[13]

The Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany

In 1925, Fleischmann married Josef Albers, the latter having rapidly become a "Junior Master" at the Bauhaus.[5] The school moved to Dessau in 1926, and a new focus on production rather than craft at the Bauhaus prompted Albers to develop many functionally unique textiles combining properties of light reflection, sound absorption, durability, and minimized wrinkling and warping tendencies. She had several of her designs published and received contracts for wall hangings.[14]

For a time, Anni Albers was a student of Paul Klee, and after Walter Gropius left Dessau in 1928 the Albers moved into the teaching quarters next to both the Klees and the Kandinskys.[15] During this time, the Alberses began their lifelong habit of traveling extensively: first through Italy, Spain, and the Canary Islands.[7] In 1930, Albers received her Bauhaus diploma for innovative work: her use of a new material, cellophane, to design a sound-absorbing and light-reflecting wallcovering.[16]

When Gunta Stölzl left the Bauhaus in 1931, Albers took over her role as head of the weaving workshop, making her one of the few women to hold such a senior role at the school.[17]

The Bauhaus at Dessau was closed in 1932 under pressure from the Nazi party and moved briefly to Berlin, permanently closing a year later in August 1933.[18] Albers, who was Jewish, made the move with her husband and the Bauhaus to Berlin, but then fled to North Carolina, where the couple was invited by Philip Johnson to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College, arriving stateside in November 1933.[5] Albers served as an assistant professor of art.  The school was focused on "learning by doing" or "hands on learning." In the early 1940s when Albers moved classrooms and the looms were not yet set up, she had her students go outside and find their own weaving materials. This was a basic exercise on material and structure. Albers regularly experimented with different material in her work and this allowed the students to imagine what it might have been like for the ancient weavers.[19] Anni and Josef Albers both taught at Black Mountain until 1949.[2] During these years Albers's design work, including weavings, were shown throughout the US. She received her US citizenship in 1937. In 1940 and 1941, Albers co-curated a traveling exhibition on jewellery from household with one of the Black Mountain students, Alex Reed, that opened in the Willard Gallery in New York City.[16]

In 1949, Albers became the first textile designer to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[5] Albers's design exhibition at MoMA began in the fall and then toured the US from 1951 until 1953, establishing her as one of the most important designers of the day. During these years, she also made many trips to Mexico and throughout the Americas, becoming an avid collector of pre-Columbian artwork.[20]

Tapestry, 1948

After leaving Black Mountain in 1949, Albers moved with her husband to Connecticut where she set up a studio in her home.[21] After being commissioned by Gropius to design a variety of bedspreads and other textiles for Harvard University, and following the MoMA exhibition, Albers was approached by Florence Knoll to design textiles for the Knoll furniture company.[22] For the next thirty years she worked on mass-producible fabric patterns, creating the majority of her "pictorial" weavings, some of which are still in production over fifty years later.[23] She also published a half-dozen articles and a collection of her writings, On Designing.[5] In 1961, she was awarded the Craftmanship Medal by the American Institute of Architects.

In 1963, while at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles with her husband for a lecture of his, Albers was invited to experiment with print media. She immediately grew fond of the technique, and thereafter gave up most of her time to lithography and screen printing. She was invited back as a fellow to Tamarind in 1964. Here she created the six print portfolio titled, Line Involvements. Albers wrote an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1963, and then expanded on it for her second book, On Weaving, published in 1965. The book was a powerful statement of the midcentury textile design movement in the United States.[24] Her design work and writings on design helped establish Design History as a serious area of academic study.[25]

In 1976, Albers had two major exhibitions in Germany, and a handful of exhibitions of her design work, over the next two decades, receiving a half-dozen honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement awards during this time as well, including the second American Craft Council Gold Medal for "uncompromising excellence" in 1981.[26] In 2018, the Tate Modern Gallery in London paired with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Düsseldorf (Germany) for a retrospective exhibition and book of Albers's work.[19]

Albers continued to travel to Latin America and Europe, to design and make prints, and lecture until her death on May 9, 1994, in Orange, Connecticut.[5] Josef Albers, who had served as the chair of the design department at Yale University after the couple had moved from Black Mountain to Connecticut in 1949, predeceased her in 1976.[27]

In 1971, the Alberses founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation,[16] a not-for-profit organization they hoped would further "the revelation and evocation of vision through art."[16] Today, this organization not only serves as the office Estate of both Josef Albers and Anni Albers, but also supports exhibitions and publications focused on Albers works. The official Foundation building is located in Bethany, Connecticut, and "includes a central research and archival storage center to accommodate the Foundation's art collections, library and archives, and offices, as well as residence studios for visiting artists."[28]

Albers was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.[29]

Albers was a designer who worked primarily in textiles and, late in life, with printmaking. She worked with multiple techniques, primarily lithography, embossing, silk-screening, and photo-offset.[30] She produced numerous designs in ink washes for her textiles, and occasionally experimented with jewellery design. Her woven works include many wall hangings, curtains and bedspreads, mounted "pictorial" images, and mass-produced yard material. Her weavings are often constructed of both traditional and industrial materials, not hesitating to combine jute, paper, horse hair, and cellophane.[31][32] Albers's early works, such as Drapery material (1923–26) and Design for Smyrna Rug (1925), display some of the characteristics that lasted throughout her career, notably her experimentation with colour, shape, scale and rhythm with abstract, crisscrossing geometric patterns.[33] Her work in printmaking was also experimental as she would "print lines multiple times, first positive then negative, [and print] off-register...She would explore the limits and possibilities of her tools."[30] To Albers, "there is no medium that cannot serve art."[30]

• On Designing. The Pellango Press, New Haven, CT, 1959. Second edition, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1962. First paperback edition, Wesleyan University Press, 1971 (ISBN 0-8195-3024-7).
• On Weaving. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1965.
• Albers, Anni, and Gene Baro. Anni Albers. Brooklyn, N.Y. : Brooklyn Museum, Division of Publications and Marketing Services, 1977.

• Fiber art
• Gunta Stölzl
• Margaretha Reichardt
• Otti Berger
• Friedl Dicker-Brandeis
• List of German women artists

• Anni Albers: Prints and Drawings. University Art Gallery, University of California, 1980.
• Colburn, Mae (March 16, 2014). "Weaving Outside the Lines". Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Coxon, Ann, Briony Fer, and Maria Müller-Schareck, eds (2018). Anni Albers. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300237252.
• Troy, Virginia Gardner (2002). Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain. Ashgate. ISBN 0754605019. OCLC 49640549.
• Weber, Nicholas Fox (2004). Josef + Anni Albers: designs for living (1st publ. ed.). London: Merrell. ISBN 1858942640.
• Albers, Anni (July 5, 1968). Interview with Sevim Fesci. Archives of American Art. New Haven, Connecticut.

• The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, extensive official site
• Anni Albers at the Alan Cristea Gallery
• Anni Albers at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
• Anni Albers at the Museum of Modern Art
• Anni Albers at the National Gallery of Art
• Anni Albers in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection
• Oral history interview with Anni Albers, 1968 July 5 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• Anni Albers papers, 1924-1969 from the Archives of American Art