Anni Albers
The great textile artist of the Bauhaus.
Anni Albers studied in the Bauhaus weaving workshop and made weaving a modern art. She was married to Josef Albers.
Anni Albers was born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899 into a wealthy Jewish family. She studied art but found the teaching inadequate, and in 1922 she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar. There women were as a rule directed to the weaving workshop. She was dissatisfied at first, but the loom became her lifelong tool.
In 1925 she married the artist and teacher Josef Albers. At the Bauhaus she experimented with new materials and with the structure of weaving. Her diploma work in 1930 was a wall covering for a trade union school in Bernau, woven from cotton and cellophane, which both absorbed sound and reflected light. She ran the weaving workshop for a short period.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the couple moved to the United States, where they taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental school that became important for American post-war art. From there they travelled to Mexico and Peru, and pre-Columbian textiles came to mean a great deal to her. In 1949 she became the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Her weavings are geometric and abstract but let the threads and structures speak. She made both textiles for industrial production and woven images that she called pictorial weavings. The work Six Prayers of 1965–67 is a memorial weaving for the victims of the Holocaust and is in the Jewish Museum in New York. She wrote the influential books On Designing and On Weaving and from the 1960s devoted herself increasingly to printmaking.
Anni Albers died in 1994. A major retrospective was shown at Tate Modern in London in 2018–19. Today she is counted among the most important textile artists of the 20th century and as the one who gave weaving a place in modern art.