As the saying goes, when one door closes another one opens. For Anni Albers that open door led to her life as a textile designer.
Annelise Fleischmann was born in Germany in 1899. She took painting lessons when she was young and hoped to become a painter. Discouraged by a harsh review and as rebellion against her mother’s desire she become a traditional housewife, she enrolled in the Bauhaus School in 1922. Bauhaus was an innovative new school that combined the principles of craft and fine arts with mass production and functionality. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school’s last director, would coin the phrase “less is more.”
Even though the school was progressive, many disciplines were closed to women. Albers reluctantly entered the weaving program, the only option open to her. She soon came to love weaving, writing “In my case it was threads that caught me, really against my will.” She would go on to receive her diploma for her innovative work, in particular her use of the new material cellophane which she wove into a sound-absorbing and light-reflecting wallcovering.
The Bauhaus School is also where she met and married painter Joseph Albers. Together they worked and taught alongside other Bauhaus luminaries like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. The turbulent political times forced the school to move briefly from Dessau to Berlin until the Gestapo forced it to close permanently in 1933. Unhappy with the modern vision of the school, the Nazi Party decreed it a hotbed of communism and Jews.
Fleeing to the United States, the couple were recruited by architect Philip Johnson to teach at the new experimental design school Black Mountain College. There she continued experimenting with alternative materials and encouraged her students to envision new ways of seeing the ancient art.
Albers was also gaining national recognition for her work, becoming a master at using textiles to forward the vision of mid-century modern design. Her use of strong colors and geometric patterns became a visual representative of the Modernist movement, making her one of the most influential textile artists of the 20th Century. In 1949 she became the first textile designer to have a solo exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Her exhibit travelled around the United States for two years bringing her increased attention and, with it, commissions. For much of the next decade she worked on mass-producing fabrics based on her weavings. When she was invited to experiment with printmaking at a workshop in Los Angeles in 1963, she turned her attention to lithography and printmaking for much of the remainder of her career.
After leaving Black Mountain College, the couple relocated to Connecticut where her husband served as the chair of the design department at Yale. Before his death in 1976, they founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation which preserves their work and promotes their legacies through exhibitions, workshops, residencies and archives. This brief video shows how important her legacy is to current textile artists. Anni Albers died in 1994 at age 94.