Anni Albers: a life

Abstract

"Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers's death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers's life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision. Capturing Albers's extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist's pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers's trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in Connecticut. He considers her complex relationship with her world-renowned husband, Josef Albers, as well as her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Louise Nevelson. He also describes her torturous, late-life obsession with film star Maximilian Schell, thirty-one years her junior. Weber foregrounds Albers's perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her" -- Publisher's website.

Contents

Beginnings -- A childhood of privilege -- Starting at the Bauhaus -- Dedication to weaving -- The call of abstraction -- To Dessau -- Pivotal influences -- Living in luxury -- In the upper echelons of the Bauhaus -- Salvation -- Settling in at Black Mountain -- An eloquent essayist -- Ted and Bobbie Dreier -- To Mexico -- Saving her parents -- Fighting segregation -- Cage and Cunningham -- Moving on -- To New Haven -- Work for synagogues -- Printmaking -- Conflicts and alliances -- A new horizon: photo-offset -- Friendships and feuds -- Married for fifty years -- Reviving -- Sheila Hicks, Marlene Dietrich, and other leading ladies -- Further travels.