Groundbreaking textile artist Anni Albers is among numerous women who studied at the storied Bauhaus art school. But unlike its leading men, she is little remembered. Her work is now being rediscovered in Düsseldorf.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst
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Anni Albers: Woven thread as a universal language
Anni Albers established weaving as a fully-fledged art form and has influenced generations of younger artists and designers. A long-overdue retrospective in her native Germany showcases her most important works.
Anni Albers was the first textile artist to whom the New York Museum of Modern Art dedicated a solo exhibition in 1949. She received numerous awards, yet often stood in the shadow of her husband, the artist Josef Albers, whom she studied under at the Bauhaus school. A retrospective at Düsseldorf's K20 Museum now showcases her textile and graphic design oeuvre mainly created with a weaving loom.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst
Study for Unexecuted Wall Hanging, 1926
Albers attended the Weimar Bauhaus school from 1922, where she studied and later taught weaving — the only course available to women. Experimenting with both traditional textile design and industrial weaving techniques, Albers was also influenced by the color theory of artist Paul Klee, who informed the Bauhaus color palette of gray, black, red and mustard that is evident in this work.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst
Bauhaus inspired: Do.I-VI, 1973
Klee also aroused Albers' interest in abstraction: "By looking at what he did with a line or a dot or a brushstroke ... I tried through my own material and my own craftsmanship to find my own way," said Albers in an interview in 1968.
Image: picture alliance/Photoshot
Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, 1961
Josef Albers joined the Bauhaus school in 1920 as a student but soon became a teacher, initially for his skill creating stained glass. Later, he was the temporary deputy director. His became famous for his painted geometric shapes and bright colors, as seen here in this 1961 work. Like Klee and Johannes Itten, Josef Albers was a role model for his student Anni. The two married in 1925.
Image: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
From Bauhaus to Black Mountain
After the National Socialists closed the Bauhaus school, Anni and Josef Albers left for the US in 1933 and initially taught at Black Mountain College. Anni Albers combined craftsmanship with modern art, establishing weaving as a fully-fledged and "useful" art form. For example, she had already experimented with synthetic fibers at the Bauhaus, to create curtains that were easier to wash.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/Helen M. Post
Two, 1952
Travel led the couple to Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Peru. In the "countries where abstraction originated," Anni Albers studied traditional weaving patterns and techniques. In 1965 she published her seminal work On Weaving, in which she explored the history and significance of the art form. While she also painted, drew and experimented with printmaking, her primary medium until 1968 was weaving.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/VG Bild-Kunst
Epitaph, 1968
While her woven pictures with abstract shapes were intended as works of art for viewing, Albers also created functional room dividers, carpets and curtain fabrics. But throughout, Albers saw the woven thread as a universal language. In the pictured work titled Epitaph, which was 1.5 meters in length and made of cotton, jute and Lurex, the woven lines symbolize an inscription.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/VG Bild-Kunst
Eclat (Navy), ca. 1976-1979
By the 1960s, Albers began experimenting with printmaking techniques including lithography and, as seen above, with screen printing. But until her death in 1994, she always remained faithful to the geometric abstraction instilled during her Bauhaus coming-of-age. The "Anni Albers" exhibition in the Düsseldorf K20 runs from June 9 through September 9, 2018.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Knoll Textiles/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/VG Bild-Kunst
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When the Bauhaus architecture and design school was founded nearly a century ago in Weimar in 1919, more women than men applied to enroll.
This fact symbolized a historic moment for women who had been granted the right to vote in Germany that same year. As the architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school, equality of the sexes was becoming a reality, with women no longer requiring permission from their husbands to attend such institutions.
However, Gropius' gender equality only went so far. The coveted painting, architecture and sculpture classes were reserved for men only. A special "women's class" was founded for the female attendees in 1921 that was predictably devoted to weaving.
Anni Albers took the mandatory preparatory course under Swiss painter and designer Johannes Itten before beginning her studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. But she could only take the weaving class, attended exclusively by women, a fact that was symbolic of the stark gender divisions in the supposedly progressive art school. Still, her resultant mastery of weaving would prove to be a twist of artistic fate.
Painter of textiles
Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was born on June 12, 1899 in Berlin and grew up in a bourgeois family — her German-Jewish mother was a member of the Ullstein publishing family, while her father was a partner in a Berlin furniture and interior decorating business. Having started with private art lessons during school, Anni had at first wanted to be a painter and did everything to ensure that the textiles and wall hangings she designed for buildings and interiors had the same artistic worth as paintings.
Albers became one of the most innovative textile artists of the time, transforming ancient weaving techniques via the modern design language typical of the Bauhaus. She explored and expanded the possibilities of weaving through experiments that created objects designed to hang like abstract paintings on the wall.
Anni Albers: Study for an Unexecuted Wall Hanging, 1926 Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst
Albers was highly impressed and influenced by the expressionist art of Paul Klee when at the Bauhaus, especially his approach to mixing diverse colors into his work — evident in the richly layered gouache and watercolor designs she also produced during her career.
Such innovation allowed Albers to become a teacher in the male-dominated Bauhaus school, a distinction she shared with other women like Gunta Stölzl, Otti Berger, Lilly Reich and Karla Grosch.
Josef Albers' 'wife'
Josef Albers, a painter of abstract "squares," took part in early Bauhaus courses by Johannes Itten and later became a professor at the Bauhaus. Josef and Anni were married in 1925 when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, but in 1933, after Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the couple emigrated to the US.
At the legendary North Carolina Black Mountain College, the Albers found a new spiritual and artistic home. The famous art institute pursued ideas based on those of the Bauhaus, trying to connect the fine arts with the latest design and architectural philosophies.
This Anni Albers series of screenprints from 1973 (Do.I-VI) symbolized her lifelong commitment to fusing painting and abstract design motifsImage: picture alliance/Photoshot
In 1949, Anni Albers became the first designer to be given a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. But while the "Anni Albers: Textiles" exhibition traveled around the US, she has been less remembered as a textiles pioneer than the "wife" of her more illustrious husband — partly because her work has been deemed more craft than arts, an unfair distinction suffered by many in the applied arts to this day.
Nonetheless, she became an authority on textile and design in the US, publishing numerous articles and the influential book, On Weaving, in 1965.
Little known at home
While Josef Albers received recognition not only in the US, but also in Germany, only connoisseurs tend to be aware of Albers' artistic achievements in her home country.
While Josef Albers' striking geometric paintings are celebrated in a museum named in his honor in his hometown of Bottrop near Essen, and his works are displayed in Germany's largest art museums, one searches in vain for works by Anni.
Josef Albers: Homage to the SquareImage: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
But the artist, who died in 1994 in Connecticut as an American citizen, is well-represented in other international galleries such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and is especially well-renowned for her commissioned works for architects that explore the dialogue between architecture and textiles.
But recognition in Germany is finally coming with a wide-ranging retrospective at Düsseldorf's K20 museum at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
The 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019 will also hopefully increase exposure for such pioneering women of the Bauhaus.
"Anni Albers" is organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Tate Modern, London, and runs at the K20 Grabbeplatz from June 9 to September 9, 2018.
Bauhaus UNESCO World Heritage Sites
It was the 20th century's most important art, design and architecture school: the Bauhaus. Many buildings are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with two more just added to the list.
Image: DW / Nelioubin
Weimar: Where it all began
They wanted to change society - and created a completely new, radical architecture. To this day, the modern ideas of Bauhaus School teachers and alumni remain influential. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar. Its first director was Walter Gropius. The school buildings in Weimar, designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, are now World Heritage Sites.
The Haus am Horn in Weimar is also a World Heritage Site. Built in 1923, it now looks simple and unspectacular. But back then a commitment to simplicity was revolutionary: bright, modern, affordable, and built with a functional layout and innovative materials. The building is the prototype for an estate to house the relatives of Bauhaus members.
Image: DW-TV
New location in Dessau
In 1925 the Bauhaus School had to move to Dessau. The new conservative government in Weimar cut the school's funding because it considered it "left-wing." Dessau marked the start of its cooperation with industry and creation of the first tubular steel cantilever chair, the Wassily chair. The school building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius, is now considered a key European modernist work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Model homes for the Bauhaus masters
In Dessau three double houses were built in which the Bauhaus masters lived, including Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee. They were also bold visions for modern living: functional, with large windows that were meant to create a link between exterior and interior. In 1928 Walter Gropius resigned as Bauhaus director. He was succeeded by Hannes Mayer and in 1930 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Image: Förderverein Meisterhäuser Dessau e.V.
Berlin modernist housing estates
In 1932, Mies van der Rohe moved again with the Bauhaus: in Berlin he ran it for a year as a private institution before the Bauhaus School had to close in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Nonetheless, between 1913 and 1934 several modernist housing estates were built in Berlin. Six of them are now World Heritage Sites, among them the Siemensstadt Estate, on which Gropius also worked.
Image: picture-alliance/ ZB
A first by Gropius: the Fagus factory
The Bauhaus members brought elegance and light into the world of work. The Fagus factory in Lower Saxony was designed by Walter Gropius together with architect Adolf Meyer. Its cubist forms, abundance of steel and glass and bright factory rooms are typical. It's considered a forerunner of the later Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and is a World Heritage Site. Shoe lasts are still produced here.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Carsten Janssen
Rammelsberg mines in the Harz region
Industrial mining architecture: the buildings of the Rammelsberg ore mines in Goslar are preeminent examples of the Bauhaus-inspired Neues Bauen (New Building) style. The architects Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer designed them in 1936. Ore was extracted here until 1988. The Rammelsberg complex is now a museum and visitors' mine.
Image: picture alliance / DUMONT Bildar
Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen
Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer are also responsible for designing the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen. This gigantic industrial complex was built between 1927 and 1932. Now the Zollverein complex is protected by UNESCO as testimony to the heyday of heavy industry in Europe. Coal was mined here for 135 years. The mine was decommissioned in 1986.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/H. Ossinger
The Villa Tugendhat in Brno
The Bauhaus architects also exported their artistic and innovative ideas abroad. In 1930 in the Czech city of Brno, the Villa Tugendhat was finished according to plans by the later Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe. It was commissioned as a home by industrialist Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Grete. The villa is now an icon of modernist architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Image: picture alliance / dpa
The White City in Tel Aviv
After Hitler took power in 1933, many Jews fled to Palestine, among them Bauhaus alumni. Affordable housing had to be created for the many new immigrants. In Tel Aviv, the White City, a collection of more than 4000 buildings, was created between 1933 and 1948, designed mainly by German Jewish architects. It, too, is a World Heritage Site.
Image: Getty Images
Le Corbusier buildings in Stuttgart
Germany's newest World Heritage Sites are two homes in the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, a housing estate in the Neues Bauen style. Both houses were designed in 1927 by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, whose 17 building projects in seven countries are on the World Heritage list. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius also designed houses in the Weissenhof Estate.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/N. Försterling
The Trade Union School in Bernau
The ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, near Berlin, was completed in 1930. The second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer and his partner Hans Wittwer designed the complex. It was built by the Bauhaus construction department. The Trade Union School in Bernau has now been included on the World Heritage list as an extension of the already-listed sites in Weimar and Dessau.
Image: Brenne Architekten
Dessau's Laubengang Houses
These now hold "World Heritage status": the Laubengang Houses in the Törten district of Dessau. The five apartment blocks were built under the supervision of Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer.