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Anni Albers
20th Century Modern textiles-collage, printmaker, designer
German, (1899–1994)
Born in Berlin, Germany, Anni Albers, whose birth name was Annelise Fleischmann, became a noted textile weaver, printmaker, designer, and craftsperson, considered by some critics to be one of the premier textile designers of the 20th Century.   She described her weavings as "visual resting places" (Worringer) and was unique in her methods because she did not confine herself to pre-planned designs but allowed her creations to evolve through the combining of process and medium or material---in other words, to let the special characteristics of the threads and fibers 'lead the way'.   Her output included both pictorial and industrial designs. As a child, she had art private lessons in her home, and from 1916 to 1919, studied at the Art School of Berlin with Martin Brandenburg.  In 1922, she enrolled at the Bauhaus, a design school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, and closed by Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a threat to Nazism.  The underlying Bauhaus philosophy was commitment to creativity that combined aesthetics and utilitarianism.   To meet curriculum requirements, Albers became a student in the weaving workshop because it seemed the least undesirable among the choices.  She absorbed the Bauhaus teachings of abstract styles and the creation of weaving designs by letting process rather than pre-determination lead the way.  In America, she was much influenced by the ancient arts of the Americas. Albers  received her diploma from the Bauhaus in 1930 based on a project for an auditorium in Bernau that utilized materials new to art expression such as cellophane, cotton fabric and chenille. In 1925, she had married Josef Albers, a fellow student.  After earning her degree, she was a Bauhaus instructor and free-lance textile designer.   When the Bauhaus closed in 1933, the couple left Germany for America, knowing the danger of persons with Jewish roots such as themselves, although she had been raised in the Protestant faith. Thanks to an arrangement made by Philip Johnson, New York architect whom they had met in Berlin, the couple were hired as faculty members at the newly established  Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina.   The curriculum philosophy was tied to the Bauhaus in Germany, and the couple remained there from 1933 to 1949.   With the title of Assistant Professor, she ran the weaving workshop and emphasized both hand and machine weaving and resisted the common methods of industrial design of pre-planning on paper rather than working initially with fabric.  In other words, she "drew on the loom".  (Heller 15)  She and her husband moved to New York City in 1949, and she had a solo exhibition of weavings at the Museum of Modern Art.   The next year, the couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers became Chair of the Art Department at Yale University.  For her career, this period was highly productive.  She became a prolific writer, and published two major treatises: Anni Albers: On Designing (1959) and Anni Albers: On Weaving (1965).  She also had numerous commissions for pictorial weaving including in 1966 and 1967, a memorial at the Jewish Museum in New York for victims of Nazi concentration camps. In her later years, she focused primarily on print making, an interest that began in 1963 when she went with her husband to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in California.   Fascinated with the processes of the technology, she returned the next year as an artist-in-residence.   In 1967, she did her last weaving, and three years later abandoned her looms all together, giving them away.  As a printmaker, she explored the processes of embossing, silk-screen, lithography and photo-off-set, and much of her enduring reputation is from her excellence as a printmaker. The first comprehensive retrospective of her work was held during the summer of 2000 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Sources: Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century, "Anni Albers" by Paula Wisotzki, pp. 14-15. Wilhelm Worringer, Art & Auction, August, 2000, p. 113. Phaidon, Dictionary of Twentieth Century Art, p. 6