Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann (Parents: Siegfried Fleischmann, a furniture manufacturer, and Toni Ullstein; Spouse: Josef Albers)
Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a preeminent textile artist and printmaker who was instrumental in elevating “craft” to the status of “fine art.” She is widely considered the most influential textile designer of the 20th century, known for her ability to synthesize ancient weaving traditions with modern abstract theory.
Born into a wealthy Berlin family, she defied her bourgeois upbringing to pursue art. In 1922, she joined the Bauhaus in Weimar. Due to the gender restrictions of the time, she was steered away from painting and into the weaving workshop. Though initially reluctant, she quickly mastered the loom, seeing the grid of the warp and weft as a structural equivalent to the geometric abstraction of her mentors, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. At the Bauhaus, she met and married the artist Josef Albers in 1925.
In 1933, following the Nazi-forced closure of the Bauhaus, the Alberses emigrated to the United States. They were invited to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. During her sixteen years there, Anni developed a revolutionary weaving curriculum. Her style was deeply transformed by numerous trips to Mexico and South America, where she studied pre-Columbian textiles. She famously referred to these ancient works as her “true teachers,” adopting their use of “thread as text”—a way to communicate complex ideas through woven patterns.
In 1949, Albers became the first textile artist to be honored with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In the 1960s, she transitioned away from the loom to focus on printmaking (lithography and screenprinting), where she continued to explore the rhythmic, interlacing lines that had characterized her textiles. Her seminal books, On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965), remain foundational texts for artists and designers today.
Active in others filds : Art Education, Jewelry Design (using everyday hardware), Industrial Design, Essayist/Author.
