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Bauhaus Beginnings

Anni Albers entered the Bauhaus in Weimar in the spring of 1922 when she was twenty-two years old. Students didn’t receive much instruction when she began. “It was a good thing because you knew nothing, you weren’t taught anything, and you really dabbled around until something happened. ... It was, I think, what I call to myself now a ‘creative vacuum.’” By 1925, she had completed her first large-scale wallhanging (1924), entirely symmetrical in composition, and had written her first published essay, “Bauhausweberei.”

Albers learned from her peers and especially from older students Gunta Stölzl and Benita Koch-Otte. Albers said that the work of the weaving workshop “as a whole was the result of the joint effort of a group, each member contributing his interpretation of an idea held in common.” Those ideas centred handweaving and materials as creative catalysts, from which Albers generated rhythmic, asymmetrical compositions in her wallhangings of 1925 and 1926.

Paul Klee, who taught pictorial form theory in the weaving workshop, once said, according to Albers, “‘... after all, textiles are serving objects.’ He meant to give a warning not to make fabrics that act too independently but to make fabrics that assume a proper place in their surroundings.” Albers designed her first architectural commissions, including a stage curtain for a housing estate in Opole (Poland) and window curtains for a Dessau theatre, as well as her wall-covering fabric for the Federal School of the General German Trade Union Confederation in Bernau. From these experiences, Albers first learned to “listen to threads and to speak their language.”