Anni Albers

Anni Albers is born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin in 1899. Her family is part of the Ullstein publishing dynasty, and she enjoys a privileged upbringing. She later remembers bright, fresh flowers decorating her childhood bed and visits to the opera dressed in black velvet with lace collars made by the family dressmaker. In 1916, she begins training as an artist at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, among other places, before moving to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. Later, she remembers:

“Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here at the Bauhaus … was confusion, too … but certainly no hopelessness.”

After attending the Bauhaus preparatory course, Annelise begins in the weaving workshop. In 1925 she marries Josef Albers, a fellow student, takes his surname and shortens her first name to Anni. In the winter semester of 1927/28, she studies design theory under Paul Klee. She graduates from the Bauhaus in 1930; her graduation piece is an innovative textile wall hanging for the school building of the General German Trade Union Federation in Bernau near Berlin.

When the Nazis shut the Bauhaus down, the Albers take up an invitation from Black Mountain College and move to North Carolina where they are employed as teachers at the college. In 1935, they travel to Mexico for the first time, returning several times later in their lives, and also visiting Cuba and Chile. On these trips, Anni Albers collects pre-Columbian as well as contemporary textile fragments and uses them in her classes at Black Mountain College.

In 1949, Anni Albers has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – the first woman textile artist and weaver to receive this honour. She and her husband move to New Haven in Connecticut the following year when Josef is appointed professor at Yale University. Anni Albers starts working as a freelance artist full time and in the 1950s begins designing patterns for the company Knoll, later for other companies as well. In the 1960s, she creates major works for religious spaces including a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. By this time, she is working less and less on a loom and is focusing more and more on graphic art. In 1965, she publishes On Weaving, perhaps her most important and influential book.  Anni Albers dies in the United States in 1994.