Anni Albers

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Anni Albers , née Annelise Fleischmann (born June 12, 1899 in Berlin ; † May 9, 1994 in Orange , Connecticut ) was a German-American textile artist , weaver and graphic designer . She is one of the artists and teachers at the Bauhaus . After emigrating to the USA during the Nazi era , she taught weaving at Black Mountain College , North Carolina and worked as a freelance artist.

life and work

Origin, studies, Bauhaus and marriage to Josef Albers

Annelise Fleischmann was born into a middle-class family in Berlin-Charlottenburg and was baptized Protestant. Her mother, Toni Fleischmann-Ullstein, came from the German-Jewish publishing family Ullstein , her father, Siegfried Fleischmann, was a furniture manufacturer. During her school days, Anni Fleischmann received private art lessons. In Sten Nadolny's “Ullsteinroman” it says: “Anni ... was the most difficult in the Fleischmann family. She was also the most beautiful, a femme fatale of the first order… She wanted to be a Bohémienne, a revolutionary, an artist. ”At the age of seventeen she entered the painting and sculpture studio in Berlin led by Martin Brandenburg , where she completed a three-year academic training . After she, as a woman in art , was not admitted to the Dresden Academy for Painting , she went to Hamburg in 1919 to the arts and crafts school .

Finally, in 1922, Fleischmann began studying at the State Bauhaus in Weimar . After the preliminary course with Johannes Itten and Georg Muche , which from 1925 when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, alongside László Moholy-Nagy Josef Albers , whom she married in the same year, she entered the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus under the direction of Gunta Stölzl a. Since Stölzl in Dessau geared the weaving of textiles towards increasing industrial production and use, Albers created a tension material for her thesis in 1929/30 as "a light-reflecting, sound-absorbing and easy-to-clean material made of cotton and cellophane for the windows of an auditorium" . From 1931 on, Albers managed the weaving mill at the Bauhaus Dessau as the successor to Gunta Stölzl.

Emigrated to the USA, taught at Black Mountain College and worked as an artist

Black Mountain College was located in the Blue Ridge Estate with Robert E. Lee Hall and Former Youth Hostel (YMCA) from 1933 to 1941 ..

In 1933 after Hitler came to power , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his deputy Josef Albers had to give up the Bauhaus, which had been in an old wallpaper factory in Berlin-Lichterfelde since 1932; In the same year, Anni and Josef Albers, with the support and recommendation of the architect Philip Johnson, emigrated to the USA at Black Mountain College , North Carolina, which was founded in 1933 . In the style of the Bauhaus, teaching and studying were carried out here in the exchange of science and art in joint projects of visual design, theater, music, literature, mathematics and architecture. Anni Albers taught from 1939 to 1949 as assistant professor weaving. She also worked as a freelance textile designer of hand-woven and machine-made fabrics. After her first stay in Cuba and Mexico with her husband in 1935 , her work was increasingly influenced by the traditional weaving patterns and techniques of Latin America, which she collected and studied on her 14 trips.

In 1950, after moving from Josef Albers to Yale University , the couple moved to Connecticut . From 1950 to 1962 Anni Albers worked as a freelance weaver. Since she saw weaving as an outdated applied art due to the industrial production methods , she gave up the craft, turned to abstract graphics and designed series of abstract, geometrically patterned textiles for Florence Knoll's company from 1959 , and for Sunar textiles from 1978.

One of her main works is the Holocaust memorial Six Prayers (1966/67): “The almost two meter high and three meter wide fabric made of cotton, linen, raffia and metal thread [...] was commissioned by the Jewish Museum / New York. [...] It is an example of her great artistic achievement: the close interlinking of abstract art with the traditional cultural technique of weaving. Anni Albers wanted to create a meditative memorial for the victims of the Holocaust with this subtle weave of mostly gray, brown and beige threads, in which silver metal thread sets lighter accents. The artist has woven white and black threads into the ground, the traces of which seem like an indecipherable text ”(press release from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen ).

In 1949 the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored Anni Albers with an exhibition and in 1961 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) with a gold medal for her craftsmanship. The Tate Modern in London is presenting Anni Albers in the first major exhibition of her work in the UK as "overdue recognition of Albers' central contribution to modern art and design" from October 11, 2018 to January 27, 2019. Art critic Adrian Searle gave of the exhibition in its enthusiastic review in The Guardian five stars out of five. Organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and Tate Modern, London, the exhibition had previously been a guest at K20 Grabbeplatz in Düsseldorf for three months.

“Anni Albers once put the great dilemma of her life in a nutshell. 'When a work is made with threads, it is considered a craft; on paper it is seen as art, '”said Hannah Pilarczyk in 2018 in the Spiegel . Because “although founding director Walter Gropius had given equal treatment as a maxim, only the male students could choose whether they wanted to specialize in working with wood, metal, clay, paper or glass. In a sense, women were assigned the textile workshop. ”What if Anni Albers,“ who only turned to printing in the last third of her life, had found paper earlier? ”Speculates Pilarzcyk. “The major exhibition that the K20 in Düsseldorf is now dedicating to her before the start of the Bauhaus anniversary year 2019 suggests: Albers should not only have been an outstanding craftsman and most important artist at the Bauhaus, but also one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century inscribed in history. "

Black Mountain College: Project Study and Experiment

The artistic legacy of Anni and Josef Albers has been preserved and conveyed by the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation since 1971

Bibliography (selection)

  • Anni Albers: On Designing. Pellango Press, New Haven 1959, 1965, 2003
  • Anni Albers: On Weaving. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1965
  • Anni Albers, Ignacio Bernal u. a .: Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures. The Josef and Anni Albers Collection. Praeger, New York, Washington 1970
  • Anni Albers: picture weaving, drawing, printmaking. Exhibition catalog. Dusseldorf. Art museum; Berlin Bauhaus Archive, 1975

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bauhaus women - masters in art, craft and design, Ulrike Müller, ISBN 978-3-938045-36-7
  2. ↑ Maria Becker: Where should art arise, if not in nature? Black Mountain College was one of the most momentous schools of 20th century art. Students should learn more than just art. NZZ, May 9, 2018, accessed on May 13, 2018 .
  3. ^ Kunstsammlung NRW: Press release: "Six Prayers" by Anni Albers can now be seen. Retrieved December 12, 2018 .
  4. ^ Tate: Anni Albers - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate. Retrieved October 9, 2018 .
  5. ^ Adrian Searle: Anni Albers review - ravishing textiles that beg to be touched. October 9, 2018, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  6. ^ Art collection NRW: Anni Albers. Retrieved December 12, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Hannah Pilarczyk: exceptional artist Anni Albers: your threads lead into the future . In: Spiegel Online . June 24, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 12, 2018]).
  8. ^ The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation: Mission. The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, accessed May 13, 2018 .

literature

  • Charlotte Fiell, Peter Fiell (eds.): Design des 20. Jahrhundert , Taschen, Köln 2012, ISBN 978-3-8365-4107-7 , p. 28.
  • Brenda Danilowitz, Heinz Liesbrock (Eds.): Anni and Josef Albers. Latin American Journeys. (Catalog for the exhibition "Anni and Josef Albers. Encounter with Latin America" ​​Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid et al. 2006–2008), Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2007, ISBN 978-3-7757-2057-1 .
  • Annelie Lütgens: Anni Albers. In: The hidden museum I. Documentation of the art of women in Berlin public collections, Hentrich, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-926175-38-9 , pp. 223-224.
  • Josef Helfenstein, Henriette Mentha: Josef and Anni Albers. Europe and America ( Kunstmuseum Bern , November 6, 1998 to January 31, 1999, translated from English by Manfred Allié), DuMont, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-7701-4795-2 (book trade edition) / ISBN 3-7701-4796- 0 (museum edition) (= artist couples - artist friends ).
  • Maximilian Schell : Anni and Josef Albers. A retrospective Villa Stuck , Munich, December 15, 1989 to February 25, 1990; Josef-Albers-Museum , Bottrop, April 29 - June 4, 1990 / Stuck-Jugendstil-Verein / Villa Stuck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-923244-13-5 .
  • Nicholas Fox Weber, Pandora Tabattabai Asbaghi: Anni Albers. New York 1999, ISBN 0-89207-218-0 .
  • Nicholas Fox Weber: The Bauhaus group. six masters of modernism. Knopf, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-26836-5 .
  • Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann: Women's work. Textile art from the Bauhaus. Chronicle Books, San Francisco 1993, ISBN 0-8118-0466-6 .
  • Ann Coxon, Briony Fer, Maria Müller-Schareck (eds.): Anni Albers , exhibition catalog. Hirmer, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-7774-3104-8 .
  • Anni Albers . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 56-57.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Albers, Anni
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fleischmann, Anneliese (maiden name); Albers, Anneliese (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American textile artist, weaver and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1994
Place of death Orange , Connecticut