Anni Albers

Anni Albers was sent to the weaving workshop because the Bauhaus would not let women into the others, and turned it into the most interesting department in the school. She was born Annelise Fleischmann to a wealthy Berlin family, arrived at Weimar in 1922 wanting to paint, and found that women were routed to weaving as a matter of policy. She stayed, married Josef Albers, and worked out what the loom could do that nothing else could - a sound-absorbing, light-reflecting wall covering she developed as her diploma work was installed in a trade union school and is a genuine piece of engineering. When the school closed in 1933 the couple went to Black Mountain College, where she taught for sixteen years and where the Mexican trips gave her the pre-Columbian textiles she studied for the rest of her life. She distinguished between weaving as cloth and as picture, made both, and wrote On Designing and On Weaving, which are still the standard texts. She was the first weaver given a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1949. She took up printmaking in her seventies. She and Josef made fourteen trips to Latin America and she collected pre-Columbian textiles, writing that the weavers of ancient Peru had solved problems modern designers had not yet posed. Her commissions included a memorial for six million Jews at a Manhattan synagogue. She designed textiles for Knoll and for mass production, holding that a weaver should make things people could afford. Her reputation stood in her husband s shadow for decades and was substantially rebuilt by a 2018 Tate Modern retrospective. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation carries both names deliberately.

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