Anni Albers

During her time at the Bauhaus, Anni Albers already begins designing a wide variety of textiles for specific functions, carefully selecting suitable fibres for each purpose. Over the course of her long career, she develops fabrics for curtains, room dividers, wall coverings, upholstery, and even clothing. In her 1949 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Albers presents her versatile creations to the public for the first time. In choosing her materials, she always keeps their intended use in mind, often employing – or even developing – new textiles made from special material blends. These include materials that are, for example, light-reflective, washable or flame-resistant. In 1947, she comments on this as follows:

“The more we avoid standing in the way of the material and in the way of tools and machines, the better chance we have that our work will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old-fashioned some day … And it will outlast fashions only if it embodies lasting, together with transitory, qualities.”

Many of these functional textiles are designed by Anni Albers on commission from companies. From 1951, she produces designs for the textile division of the company Knoll for around thirty years. In the late 1970s, she begins collaborating with Sunar Textiles and later with S-Collections. For the latter, she designs the cotton fabric Melfi in around 1982–83. It is a semi-transparent textile featuring a zigzag pattern that is machine-embroidered and treated with an acid-etching process. The embroidered threads are also machine-cut. Albers’s designs are produced by these companies as machine-made, mass-market products. What she had called for back in her Bauhaus days she is now able to realise: an experienced weaver with outstanding knowledge of materials and techniques creates and shapes textiles for industrial production.