Anni Albers. Constructing Textiles

Introduction

Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.
Anni Albers, 1968

Although the name Anni Albers immediately brings to mind the artist’s well-known practice of weaving, this exhibition aims to shift the emphasis away from the act of weaving and toward textile design, materials, and Albers’s collaborations with architects and other fabricators. The exhibition title takes its inspiration from Albers’s 1946 essay “Constructing Textiles,” her response to the increasing industrial production of textiles that questioned the Bauhaus definition of handweaving as a structural process.

Anni Albers’s consideration of weaving as the first technology and its proximity to architecture is rooted in nineteenth-century German architect and art theoretician Gottfried Semper’s idea of textile as the origin of a wall. Semper described textile art as Urkunst—primordial art—and considered it as the very beginning of architecture, since textiles had provided shelter and divided spaces long before buildings were constructed of more permanent materials.

The exhibition is loosely structured in six chapters which focus on Anni Albers’s education at the Bauhaus; the lessons she learned from pre-Columbian weavers; the role of geometry; experiments with new materials; the design of functional materials; and the relationship between weaving and writing. Seven projects are at the core of the exhibition, highlighting Albers’s collaborations with architects and her invention of new fabrics in response to specific architectural spaces.

In all her endeavours, Anni Albers pursued the goal of understanding weaving as a construction with threads, as a constantly evolving experiment with new materials, and as an integral part of architecture. She regarded her work as an adventure and argued in her writing for designers to embrace “the power of creation.” It is our hope that this exhibition will continue to inform, ignite, and provoke creative minds and inspire thoughtful and innovative production in art, design, and architecture.

The exhibition is organized by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT, in collaboration with Belvedere, Vienna.

Chronology

1899
Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann, eldest of three children, is born to Siegfried and Antonie Fleischmann in Berlin on June 12.

1922
Albers enrolls as a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar in April. After completing the preliminary course, she is accepted into the weaving workshop in winter 1922/23.

1924
Albers weaves her first large-scale wallhangings. In November, her first essay, “Bauhausweberei,” is published.

1925
The Bauhaus moves from Weimar to a new campus in Dessau. On May 9, Anni and Josef Albers are married and Annelise Fleischmann becomes Anni Albers.

1929
Albers designs a sound-absorbing, light-reflecting wall-covering material for the auditorium of the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbunds (Federal School of the General German Trade Union Confederation) in Bernau, Germany.

1930
In February, Albers receives the first diploma awarded for weaving at the Bauhaus for her “experimental use of new materials and her mastery of structural possibilities in textiles.”

Albers assists curator Ludwig Grote with the travelling exhibition Moderne Bildwirkereien (Modern Tapestry). Two of Albers’s wallhangings are included.

Albers opens her own independent studio in Dessau and later moves it to Berlin. She designs cellophane wall-covering materials, upholstery fabrics, and other textiles for industrial production.

1931
In July, Albers is awarded the Honorary Prize of the City of Berlin for her textiles in the Deutsche Bauausstellung (German Building Exhibition). Her work is seen by Philip Johnson, who at the time was head of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In September, after Gunta Stölzl, master of the Bauhaus weaving workshop resigns, Albers becomes acting director until Lilly Reich is hired in January 1932.

1933
On April 11, the Bauhaus, relocated to Berlin, closes under pressure from the Nazi authorities. In August, Philip Johnson telegrams Josef Albers inviting him to form an art department at the newly created Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Anni and Josef Albers arrive in New York on November 24 and travel on to Black Mountain College.

1934
Albers initiates a weaving program for students at Black Mountain College. In December, Anni and Josef Albers travel to Havana.

1935
Anni and Josef Albers make their first journey to Mexico, visiting Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Acapulco, and the archaeological sites of Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, and Mitla. They begin to form their collection of pre-Columbian objects and textiles.

1936
Anni and Josef Albers travel to Mexico where they spend June through August. Anni Albers creates two large wallhangings, Monte Albán and Ancient Writing.

1937
Anni Albers’s parents visiting from Berlin join them in Mexico. The two couples travel together from mid-June through mid-July.

1938
Albers writes her first published text in English about the Bauhaus weaving workshop for the catalogue of the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1928 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Albers’s fabrics are featured in the show.

1939
In May, Albers becomes a naturalized US citizen.

1946
In October, Anni and Josef Albers begin a year-long sabbatical from Black Mountain College. They travel extensively, with stops in Canada, the Midwest, California, Texas, and an extended stay in New Mexico before continuing to Mexico until late October 1947.

1947
With the weaving La Luz, Albers inaugurates a new phase of her work—“in the direction of art”—that continues through the next two decades. She later calls these works “pictorial weavings.”

1949
In February, Anni and Josef Albers resign from Black Mountain College. They spend the summer in Mexico City where Josef Albers teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In the fall, they move to Manhattan.

Walter Gropius commissions Albers to design textiles for Harvard’s new Graduate Centre.

Anni Albers Textiles opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on September 14. The exhibition travels to twenty-six venues over three years.

1950
Philip Johnson selects one of Albers’s copper thread and chenille fabrics for the Rockefeller guest house in Manhattan.

Josef Albers is appointed chair of the newly created Department of Design at Yale University. In the fall Anni and Josef Albers move to New Haven, Connecticut.

1953
From June until September, Anni and Josef Albers travel to Chile and Peru.

1954
Albers meets rug-maker Gloria Finn Dale and begins a collaboration with her.

1955
Albers designs machine-woven curtains for private homes.

1957
Commissioned by György Kepes, Albers designs eight ark panels for Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, her first synagogue project.

Albers designs fabrics, including open-work casements in fiberglass and linen, for Knoll Textiles. The collaboration continues for twenty years.

1958
Albers designs curtains for the sanctuary of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York.

King-lui Wu, associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Yale University, invites Albers to present a public lecture, “Designing as Visual Organization.”

1959
Albers’s On Designing, a collection of ten essays from 1937 to 1957 is published.

In May, the New Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge organizes the exhibition Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings. The exhibition travels to several other venues in the US.

1960
In August, Albers sends her English translation of Paul Klee’s 1924 lecture in Jena, Germany, to art historian Charlotte Weidler. Albers writes, “It was never published. I tried to preserve the rhythm along with the senses and also some of [Klee’s] special ways of saying things, strange even in German . . . Should the Wittenborns be interested in publishing it, that would be an enormous pleasure for me and would give me a feeling of having said at last in some way THANK YOU to Klee.” Her translation remained unpublished.

On September 23, Anni and Josef Albers embark on a four-month-long visit to Europe. It is Anni Albers’s first return to Europe since 1933.

1961
Albers handweaves six panels and designs a glittering open-weave curtain for the ark of Congregation B’nai Israel’s new synagogue in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

1963

Albers creates her first prints at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

1965
Wesleyan University Press publishes Albers’s On Weaving. She dedicates the book “to my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.”

1967
Albers’s Six Prayers, commissioned in June 1965 to commemorate the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust, is exhibited for the first time in the lobby of the Jewish Museum in New York.

1968
Albers creates her final pictorial weaving, which she appropriately titles Epitaph. She then shifts her attention from weaving to printmaking and works on paper.

Commissioned by architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán, Albers designs a monumental wallhanging for the new Camino Real hotel in Mexico City.

1969
In October, Albers’s wallhanging We 791, also known as Black-White-Red, and her pictorial weaving Tikal are featured in the landmark exhibition Objects: USA. The show, which travels for three years to thirty-three venues in the United States and Europe, is a touchstone for understanding craft as fine art.

1970
Anni and Josef Albers move to Orange, Connecticut. Albers donates her remaining two looms to a local college and makes significant gifts of her textiles to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

1975
Knoll Textiles produces a series of printed fabrics based on Albers’s prints.

1976
On March 25, after a brief hospitalization, Josef Albers dies in New Haven.

1977
The Brooklyn Museum organizes Anni Albers: Drawings and Prints.

1979
Albers designs a line of draperies based on her drawings and prints for Sunar Textiles (later S-Collection).

1984
Albers’s print portfolio Connections is published in Milan by Fausta Squatriti Editore. The nine screenprints are based on works that Albers created over nearly six decades.

1985
The Woven and Graphic Art of Anni Albers, a retrospective exhibition, opens in June at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and travels to the Yale University Art Gallery.

1994
On May 9, the sixty-ninth anniversary of her wedding, Anni Albers dies peacefully at her home in Orange, Connecticut.

Video: Anni's Loom (duration: 4:54 Min.)

Accompanying programme

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