Anni Albers

Anni Albers – Studies at the Bauhaus; marriage to Josef Albers

Anni Albers was born Annelise Fleischmann on 12 June 1899 in Berlin. The daughter of an upper-class furniture manufacturer, she was able to take private art tuition as a school student, and at the age of 17, attended the Studienatelier für Malerei und Plastik (Study studio for painting and three-dimensional art) run by Martin Brandenburg. The writer Sten Nadolny reflected that Anni Albers was beautiful and difficult, a young woman who consciously rebelled against the pressures of her time and who wished to break with conventions. Despite her three-year academic education, Albers’ application to the Dresden Academy of Painting (today the University of Fine Arts Dresden) was rejected because of her gender, and she thus enrolled at the Hamburg School of Decorative Arts in 1919, followed in 1922 by the State Bauhaus in Weimar. Albers initially attended the Preliminary Course run by Johannes Itten and Georg Mache, and following the Bauhaus’ move to Dessau in 1925, she was taught by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers; that same year, Josef Albers and Annelise Fleischmann married. 

Abstraction as artistic means of expression

Anni Albers shared her husband’s fascination for abstraction, which had been introduced to the rebellious young woman by Paul Klee. It was in abstraction that Albers found the artistic means to depart from established paths and to set new trends. Following internal clashes, she took over Gunta Stölzl’s position as director in the weaving workshop of the Bauhaus. As well as her great expertise in crafts, Anni Albers had an instinct for innovation and new approaches; she had already earned her Bauhaus diploma in 1930 with a unique light-reflecting and sound-absorbing curtain of cotton and cellophane. Despite her success, she was overshadowed by her husband for a long time, which she also attributed to the fact that weaving was considered a craft whilst painting was seen as art. Albers spent much time and energy changing this false perception.

Great success as a textile artist in the USA

With the help of the architect Philip Johnson, Anni Albers and her husband Josef Albers emigrated to the USA in 1933, and found a position at the art school, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Trips to Cuba and Mexico brought Albers into contact with traditional weaving techniques which she threaded into her own design concepts. The increasing industrialisation of the craft of weaving led Anni Albers to doubt her artistic perspective and to turn to abstract printing, a decision which was enforced also by her arthritis. She designed a whole series of abstract patterned textiles for the designer Florence Knoll, and in 1966/67, produced the almost two by three metre holocaust memorial, Six Prayers, made of cotton, canvas, raffia and metal thread. Commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York, it is considered one of Anni Albers’ primary works. In 1965, Albers summarised her collected findings and reflections in relation to the art of weaving in her important foundation work, On Weaving. In 1949, she became the first ever female textile artist to receive a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Anni Albers died on 9 May 1994 in Orange, Connecticut.