Anni Albers (1899-1994)

"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials." - Anni Albers Reflecting […]

"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials." - Anni Albers Reflecting back on her career, Anni Albers recalled how “threads…caught me…against my will…. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over.” When she began her studies at the Bauhaus, a German art, design, and architecture school, Albers aspired to become a painter. Upon her arrival, she was disappointed to find herself, like most female students, steered toward weaving. But the Weaving Workshop proved to be among the most technically innovative and commercially successful of the school’s departments and Albers’s textiles helped revolutionize 20th-century modern design and art. “I learned to listen to [threads] and to speak their language.” This language coincided with the goals of the Bauhaus, where Albers spent a decade studying and teaching. The school encouraged experimentation with fundamental elements and their inherent structural qualities, liberating both artistic imagination and materials to develop design for modern living. Her Design for a Wall Hanging (1927) serves as a visual guide of this approach. The annotated diagram indicates which of the yellow, black, or white threads the weaver pulls forward or pushes back simultaneously across three separate layers on the loom to build a three-dimensional structure with a multicolored surface pattern. These early wall hangings reflect diverse creative influences—including her teacher Paul Klee’s color theories and ancient Andean multiweave textiles she encountered at Berlin's ethnographic museum—that continued to influence Albers throughout her career. For her 1929 diploma project, Albers was tasked with developing a multifunctional Wall-Covering Material as a prototype for manufacture that could both absorb sound and reflect light. She contended that the “quality of inner structure is, above all, a matter of function and therefore the concern of the scientist and engineer”—and the textile designer. She maintained that the “good designer is the anonymous designer” who “sends his products…to a useful life without an ambitious appearance.” The beauty of the wall covering emerges from modern synthetic fibers and their structural treatment, enabling their practical properties to manifest. The chenille backing absorbs sound, while the cellophane sheen on the front surface is “active only through the slight optical vibration of intersecting raised and lowered threads: shiny and dull, lighter and darker, tan and white. This material will be quiet yet alive.” Albers didn’t prioritize handmade goods over manufactured ones. Throughout her career, she maintained ties with industry to produce affordable, practical textiles. For 30 years, she designed textiles for Knoll, some of which remain in production. After the Nazi regime pressured the Bauhaus to close in 1933, architect and MoMA curator Philip Johnson helped Albers and her husband, artist Josef Albers, secure passage to the United States to teach at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where they spent 16 years.7 Inspired by the college’s intimate artistic community and by her extensive travels across the Americas, Albers propelled weaving into uncharted territories. In 1949 an innovative series of five Free-Hanging Room Dividers appeared in Albers’s solo retrospective at MoMA, the Museum’s first devoted to a textile designer or artist. Unlike conventional textiles, these “pliable planes” were re-conceived as integral structural elements of architecture; they shape and transform space, but with greater conceptual sophistication and flexibility than walls. These highly complex open-weaves and connectors, derived from Albers’s extensive study of ancient Peruvian weaving, allow varying degrees of translucence or transparency, and add an “intensified note of airiness” well suited for modern, open-plan spaces. Albers turned to printmaking in 1963. It became her primary artistic focus in 1970 when the physical toll of loom weaving proved too cumbersome. She wryly noted that “when the work is made with threads, it's considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” Much like the Weaving Workshop itself, Albers’s textiles challenged gendered distinctions between art and craft. Unbound by traditional artistic hierarchies or conventions, Anni Albers’s sustained investigation of fibers combined ancient crafts with Bauhaus principles, reshaping modern industrial design, architecture, and art. Dara Kiese, art historian, 2024