In the world of textiles, Anni Albers’ body of work is unparalleled. Her constant experimentation with pattern and materials redefined weaving and elevated its importance as an art form. But Anni Albers didn't just work with thread. Her exploration of printmaking in the later-half of her career showed the same commitment and openness to discovery.
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In 1933, Anni Albers and her equally groundbreaking husband, artist Josef, arrived in New York from Germany at the request of influential architect Philip Johnson. He wanted them to teach at the newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The College aimed to instil a freedom of thought and spirit akin to the Albers’ alma mater, the Bauhaus. Anni and Josef had fled the surge of the Nazis, and the resultant closure of the Bauhaus. Anni’s Jewish heritage had made it impossible to continue living there. Black Mountain College offered them the opportunity to continue their art and teaching. When they received the letter from Black Mountain College, Anni recalled that “Josef and I sat in our bedroom with our legs hanging over the edge of the bed and read the letter together, and when it came to the word experimental we both said ‘that is our place’.” Black Mountain would go on to produce abstract modern artists of the calibre of Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Willem and Elaine de Kooning.
When Anni and Josef first met in 1922 they were both students at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus transformed arts education, and promoted holistic principles to the teaching of art – ideas which are the foundation of arts training today. The Weimar Republic’s optimistic outlook, borne from the ashes of World War One, led to a new freedom in artistic vision and approach and the Bauhaus wanted to develop skills and craft to equip a new German society. With a focus on experimentation, the new direction embraced modernist principles with the aim of creating useful objects that were also aesthetically beautiful; ‘form follows function’ was at the heart of the Bauhaus’ ethos.
Although the Bauhaus promoted a new egalitarian approach to art and design, the reality was that it was a male-dominated institution in a male-dominated society. All the women who attended only had the choice of textiles, bookbinding or ceramics, with most placed in the weaving workshop after their foundation year. Gender politics prohibited them from architecture and design, and around the world women were only just starting to be awarded degrees and diplomas from universities and colleges. This discrimination was to dictate the careers of most of the women who were trained there.
Anni Albers was not happy about being placed in the weaving workshop. She had applied to be in the glass workshop, and felt that working with thread was ‘sissy’. With the same single-minded vision and determined rebellion that would define her career, she decided to approach weaving as art, rather than abide by the stilted, traditional view of it being ‘women's craft’. Together with her talented classmates, she would turn the weaving workshop into a highly respected, influential – and profitable – Bauhaus faculty. The workshop was to become more of a laboratory in the hands of these students, and they were producing products for manufacture. Albers felt exhilarated at the thought of being totally on her own to explore and discover weaving and to set the teaching perimeters herself. Students had to learn every element of the weaving process, something that continues in weaving training today. The workshop had the only female master at the Bauhaus, Gunta Stölzl. The women in the weaving class had actively pushed for Stölzl to have the job, over the incumbent male master who thought it was beneath him to touch a thread. When Stölzl left the Bauhaus in 1931 – again due to the rise of the Nazis – Albers took over her position until leaving for the US.
Anni Albers’ use of geometry and the grid defined her approach to design. She used the structured, linear form and slow process of the loom to dictate her visual styling. She wrote in One Aspect of Art Work from 1944, “The crafts? They have had a long rest. Industry overran them. We need too much too quickly for any handwork to keep up with. The crafts retreated, a defeated minority. We do not depend on their products now, but we need again their contact with material and their slow process of forming.” The perceived limitations of the weaving process informed her work, but the ordered, clean geometric shapes always had an element of chaos and non-uniformity to them. This abstraction had its basis in natural materials like quartz, whose imperfections produced imprecise geometric forms. This randomness was always tightly controlled, and not as easy as it appears. Her ‘Meander’ series of artworks, with their maze-like geometric constructions, are at once both formal and informal in approach. The simplicity of the design is always enclosed by detail. Either the detail of the pattern’s structure, the intricate nature of the fine weave, or the choice of materials and surfaces. The Albers’ loved traditional art, and particularly the art and craft of Mexico which they visited many times. The influence of geometric Aztec forms and tactile materials are obvious within Anni Albers’ work. The primitive vertical and horizontal nature of the loom dictated shape and form, as it had in her own work. Her play on unstructured thread or the rigid structure imposed by the loom would also go on to inform her experiments in printmaking.
In 1949, Philip Johnson, who was also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, invited Albers to exhibit her work. Her show was the first solo exhibition at the MOMA by a textile artist, and the first female solo exhibition ever held there. The exhibition travelled around the US until 1953 and it helped to bring her art and design to the public consciousness. Albers was a pioneer amongst woman artists, and despite having to contend with the prejudices women endured, she achieved great respect for her art and showed other women that their artistic 'voices' could be heard. She believed that “limitation from the outside can stimulate our inventiveness.” Albers didn't set out to be a role model for women, and she didn't like to be defined as 'feminist' or a female artist. She also didn't like to be pigeon-holed as a Jewish artist or a Bauhaus artist – Albers was an artist who wanted to be free of labels.
Anni and Josef left their teaching posts at Black Mountain College. Anni had been an assistant professor of art at Black Mountain. Her experiments with materials and shape informed the students of their importance in understanding the rhythm of design and the tactile dimension within their own art. As Albers wrote in her essay Designing, “A good listener is told what to do by the material, and the material does not err.” Josef Albers took up the position of Director at The Yale School of Art’s Department of Design in 1950, and he and Anni moved to Connecticut. Yale had a rule that no spouses of employed teachers could also teach there. As Fritz Horstman, curator of the exhibition In Thread and On Paper: Anni Albers in Connecticut comments, “If such a rule existed it almost certainly was aimed at keeping wives out of the classroom. Nevertheless, Anni was invited to give ‘unofficial’ lectures in the School of Architecture.” This move effectively ended Anni Albers’ formal teaching career but it would also coincide with a prolific period of productivity and exploration within her own art. The Albers’ move to Connecticut allowed Anni a view of ‘normal’ life for the first time. Her bourgeoise background in Germany, and communal living at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, had meant that she and Josef had never needed to prepare a meal or run a household. As always, they enjoyed the opportunity to explore something novel, and they were happy living there.
Over the course of her artistic career, Anni Albers’ art sits in two categories: the structured and the unstructured. The geometric stylings created in her weaving were recreated and explored further in her prints. She worked in etching, lithography, photo-offset and screenprinting, and she revisited earlier weaving designs and reinterpreted them for print. What is interesting, is how the unstructured thread became a further inspiration and form of discovery within her printmaking. Albers created a series of works that follow the line of thread and explore the random nature of its continuous curves and loops. Her first prints were created in 1963 – 40 years into her art career – and she was pleased with the more immediate nature of the process and the possibilities that new methods held. Nicholas Fox Weber, the Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and friend of Albers explains that “Nothing thrilled Anni more than to learn from process and technique, to absorb and take direction rather than impose.”
Her Line Involvement series of six lithographic prints was created in 1964 and these explore the rhythm and form of thread. Albers once said, “threads caught my imagination”. The materials which she had first dismissed in 1922 now consumed her approach to art and formed the basis of her desire to go beneath the surface of art, and subject matter, to explore the abstract nature of shape, touch and structure. She wrote in One Aspect of Art Work, “We learn patience and endurance in following through a piece of work. We learn to respect material in working it. Formed things and thoughts live a life of their own; they radiate a meaning. They need a clear form to give a clear meaning. Making something become real and take its place in actuality adds to our feeling of usefulness and security. Learning to form makes us understand all forming.” This need also resulted in the use of different natural materials and fibres: wool, cotton, metal and silk. Albers furthered her exploration of material through traditional weaving techniques and experimenting with found material. Her prints embrace the tactile quality of printmaking and the impression the different techniques make on the surface of the paper. She created works of art using only blind-embossing where the design was transferred without applying ink.
Anni Albers, like her husband, was also an expert in colour and colour combination. Her geometric prints demonstrate how colour can change the emotion of a piece when the visual elements between them remain unchanged. She understood how colour interacts with materials and how combining different materials can create new structures and solve problems. Her diploma project at the Bauhaus – the first in weaving – was the creation of a light-weight, sound-proof fabric which could be used on auditorium walls. She combined cellophane and chenille which resulted in the fabric not only being sound-proof, but also being light-reflective. Philip Johnson called this project her “passport to America”. Albers was just as open to the use of new technology as she was learning from the traditions of the past. This natural sense of wonder, and desire to explore, informed her life in and outside of art. She was fascinated by new experiences and showed a spirit to question and innovate. She loved the idea of free expression and freedom of thought – first nurtured at the Bauhaus and strengthened through her direct experience of the Nazi’s suppressive regime.
Anni Albers always said, “When it's on paper, it’s considered art.” She decided to create a number of ‘pictorial’ weavings, which were intended not to be viewed as wall tapestries or rugs, but as pieces of fine art in their own right. She did this to make the point that weaving should be seen as an art form, and tried to use her reputation and position of influence in the art world to make this understood. Perhaps her use of weaving ‘vocabulary’ within her printmaking – and her replication of weaving designs through print and vice-versa – was another way of letting the art world know that regardless of the medium, art is art. The piece of work considered her masterpiece is Six Prayers, a pictorial weaving from 1965, commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York as a reflection on the Holocaust. The six-panelled piece represents the 6 million Jews who were killed at the hands of the Nazis and is a complicated work of floating black and white threads above a brown, grey and gold background. She used the flowing black and white threads to reference sacred Jewish texts. It is the largest work Albers produced, and once again the order and disorder of the piece rightly challenges the viewer.
Anni Albers didn’t let anything get in the way of her need to explore art and its relationship to the world around her. Rather than being discouraged by being perceived as secondary to her famous husband in a male-dominated art world, she was more interested in looking at the world in a unique and ultimately child-like way. Seeing endless possibilities in colour, touch and form. In her later years, she said that she often felt like the youngest person in the room and – as Nicholas Fox Weber observed, she was. He also said that, “when asked publicly what it was like being married to such a famous man she would reply ‘I enjoy buying his socks’.”
Art was everything to Anni and Josef, and they gave their lives to exploring its unlimited potential and sharing that knowledge. Like many of the Bauhaus alumni, their escape from Germany gave the rest of the world access to their revolutionary teaching and the art and design it produced. The holistic approach they had been taught ultimately informed the rest of their lives, As Anni reflected, “Art makes you breath easier. It gives you space.”
Anni Albers, ‘Designing’ in Craft Horizons, Vol.2, No.2, 1943
Anni Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, published under the title 'We Need the Crafts for their Contact with Materials' in Design, Vol.46, No.4, 1944
‘Anni Albers: A Life in Thread’, BBC4, 2019
Ann Coxon, Briony Fer, and Maria Müller-Schareck, Anni Albers, 2018
In Thread and On Paper: Anni Albers in Connecticut, Curator Interview for the 2020 exhibition from the New Britain Museum of American Art website
Jonathon Keats, ‘A Blockbuster Retrospective Shows how Anni Albers
Transformed Painting and Architecture with Weaving’ in Forbes, 2018