Anni Albers, near Black Mountain, North Carolina, 1938. Photograph by Josef Albers © 2021 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
No modern weaver is better known than Anni Albers. Together with her husband, Josef, she emigrated from Germany in 1933, fleeing the Nazis. They brought with them the theory and practice that had been developed at the Bauhaus, where Anni had taken a leading role in the weaving workshop. Once in America, they first taught at Black Mountain College, the famed avantgarde school in North Carolina, then settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef taught at Yale University. Frequent travel to Mexico and South America exposed the Alberses to the abstract wonders of Mesoamerican textiles and folk art; Anni counseled beginning weavers to consider the leap of imagination it took their prehistoric forebears to develop the first looms and basic weave structures.
Her books On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965) are classics, transcending the genre of how-to, using technique as a way to explore deep questions about aesthetics and ethics. Her weaving, similarly, finds in the interplay of warp and weft, of contrasting materials, sufficient vocabulary for infinite abstraction. Face-to-face with Albers’s work, it is easy to believe that the ultimate modernist medium was not painting or architecture, but textile.
Drawing for a Rug II in gouache and diazotype on paper. Designed and made by Anni Albers, USA, 1959.
24.5” L x 1.5” W x 11.75” H
62.2cm L x 3.8cm W x 29.8cm H
SM8051
Courtesy of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.