Anni Albers
Anni Albers (born Annelise Fleishmann) was a German-Jewish textile artist, designer and art theorist who is renowned for bringing ancient textile craft into the visual language of modernist abstraction. She attended private art classes as a child before initially studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Hamburg. In 1922, Albers chose to enroll at the Bauhaus in Weimer to embark on a more radical path. As a woman student at the Bauhaus, she was limited in which classes she could take and so enrolled in the weaving workshop, where textiles became her primary interest. Albers’ experience at the Bauhaus influenced her radical understanding of weaving as a medium for art, design and architecture. It was here that she and her colleagues created wall hangings that were distinctive for their patterns that followed the grid structure of weaving, as well as experimental fabrics for interiors and tubular steel furniture. In 1933, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus school to close and Albers and her husband Josef Albers emigrated to the USA, where they taught at the newly founded experimental art school, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was in the USA that Albers began to make her ‘pictorial weavings,’ that were hand-woven artworks to be hung on a wall, distinct from fabrics for everyday use, that she described as ‘a form of weaving that is pictorial in character, in contrast to pattern weaving, which deals with repeats of contrasting areas.’ In 1949 Albers became the first textile artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
