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Anni Albers

Anni Albers (Berlin 1899–Orange, CT, 1994) was one of the most influential textile and graphic artists of the 20th century. She trained in the weaving workshop of Walter Gropius’ innovative Bauhaus school, and in 1933 moved with her husband Josef Albers to the United States. There she taught at Black Mountain College until 1949, the year MoMA gave her a solo exhibition – the first devoted to a woman designer. The following year the couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Anni continued to weave and to write. In 1959 the collection of her essays, On Designing, was published, followed in 1965 by her most important and groundbreaking text about textile art, On Weaving.After Josef’s death in 1976, Anni continued to focus on textile design and graphic art, untiringly striving to create new expressive languages until the day she died, in 1994.

Author's books

Sul design

At Black Mountain College, the experimental school in North Carolina that had welcomed the Albers fleeing Nazism, Anni would tell her students: “We have to go where no one was before us.” A bold attitude that did not stop her from looking back over things to gauge the progress made in the arts and design. Only by knowing exactly where we stand can we dispel the confusion that prevents us from consciously experiencing the creative act and opening up new paths. This collection of writings, with a foreword by Nicholas Fox Weber, gives us access to the enlightened thinking that she developed over 50 years – from her time at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau to the 1980s in the United States – drawing on her experience in the field as well as her theoretical and philosophical readings. Anni Albers returns to various themes she found particularly meaningful: the supremacy of timeless and anonymous design that is functional and not self-referential; the importance of struggling with the material; the idea that limitation from the outside stimulates inventiveness; the value of audacity; and the belief that the act of creation is the strongest emotion there is. Her writings on design and the art of weaving are still studied in universities throughout the world and her teaching continues to be an inexhaustible font of inspiration.

Sul design

Anni Albers

pages: 128 pagine

At Black Mountain College, the experimental school in North Carolina that had welcomed the Albers fleeing Nazism, Anni would tell her students: “We have to go where no one was before us.” A bold attitude that did not stop her from looking back over things to gauge the progress made in the arts and design. Only by knowing exactly where we stand

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