Anni Albers

Bauhaus 1919 to 2023

Radical innovations in design education

James Volks & Susan Harrison

Anni Albers Bauhaus materiality

CON TEN TS

Chapter 1

Early life

Joining the Bauhaus Black Mountain College

Chapter 2

Rethinking the grid

Reinventing materiality

Reorienting as a functional discipline

Chapter 3

Timeline of artworks

Anni Albers working on one of her designs in Black Mountain College, 1947

Anni Albers was the designer I chose to talk about in this monograph. What initially sparked my interest were her textile works for how she combined colours and simple shapes to create innovative compositions. Besides her talent as a designer, learning more about her story made me admire her for how she was able to endure different hardships in her life whether it being having to work with what she didn’t want to (and becoming a pioneer in the sector) or flee from her home country to escape the nazi regime. Although these events happened to her she still found away to make the best of it and make it work. It’s definitely a very inspiring character for designers in the way she deals with design problems and always manages to find a way to make things work, but honestly for people in general. I chose to focus more on her work and her innovations rather than her personal life, as I feel that’s what she should be highlighted for though there’s still some general information to give context and perhaps a better picture. I hope whomever read this monograph will see why I admire this designer and will take something out of it even if just something small.

INTRO DUCTION

Production and teaching in the workshop

When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in March/ April 1925, it first had to make do with provisional premises in on old deportment store in the Mauerstrasse. Only a proportion of pupils - albeit many of the most talented - followed the school from its idyllic setting in Weimar to the dirty, industrial city of Dessau. And although Lyonel Feininger, the previous head of the graphic printing workshop, moved to Dessau with the Bauhaus, it was no longer as on active member of the Bauhaus teaching staff. The commercially ineffective workshops of the Weimar Bauhaus were now abandoned (glass, wood, and stone). The graphic printing workshop was also left behind since, although lucrative, it was only capable of reproduction work. In its place a printing workshop was set up in which creative work was also possible. The woodcarving and stone-sculpture workshops were effectively modernized under the single heading of ‘sculpture’ workshop. Both financial and pedagogical arguments were thus respected. The most far-reaching changes were to be felt in two workshops in particular: the printing workshop under Herbert Bayer, with its entirely new orientation,

and the weaving workshop. The weaving workshop hod been fully re-equipped from the technical point of view; It also become the earliest workshop to offer a proper training course, designed and implemented by Gunta Stölzl. In both workshops young people were being trained for professions which had effectively never existed before. These Bauhaus years saw not only the production of new industrial designs for furniture, metal, textiles, and modern printed materials but, at the same time, the formulation of new training courses and the preparation of new professions which would operate at the interface of design and technology in the widest possible sense.

The textile workshop

While the printing and advertising workshop hod no registered apprentices, articles of apprenticeship were required in the weaving workshop before students could commence its three-year training course. At the end, students could take their apprentice’s final qualifying examination as well as get a Bauhaus diploma. Although Gunta Stölzl was not mode Young Master of the weaving workshop until 1927, both the organization and content of the weaving course rested in her hands as from 1925. Master weaver Wanke was responsible for technical

matters. Gunta Stölzl introduced a very wide range of loom systems suitable for both learning and production purposes, as well as designing the three-year training course. This course was divided into two stages, the first in a teaching workshop and the second in on experimental and model workshop. Gunta Stölzl also taught classes in weave and material theory and – since the Bauhaus had its own dye-works - in dyeing.

With the start of work in Dessau, the weaving workshop moved over to industrial design . The design process was in part systemized with e.g. one warp worked by a number of students and one material woven in different colours. Woven fabrics were mounted as marketing samples and numbered consecutively together with details of their price and measurements. Students were thus taken through every stage of the production process - from dyeing, through weaving, right up to ordering materials. At the same time, in Klee’s form classes, they learned the rules of patterning and colour design. A profession was thus created within the textile industry which had rarely been found before - designer. Thanks to their basic training on the hand loom, however, students were equally very much able of running small, artistic crafts workshops. Self-employment was at that time something which many women were leaning more towards instead of a full-time position in trade and industry.

“I heard Klee speak and he said take a line for a walk, and I thought, ‘I will take thread everywhere I can.”

Anni Albers

Annelise and Lotte Fleischmann, Berlin, ca. 1908

Early Life

Anni Albers is born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann at 5 Lessingstrasse in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin on June 12, 1899. She is the eldest of three children born to Siegfried Fleischmann (1873–1963) and Toni Ullstein Fleischmann (1877–1946). Around 1912, the family moves to a large apartment at 7 Meinekestrasse, near the Kurfürstendamm, and Anni’s mother arranges for her to have an art tutor, Toni Meyer, who comes to the house and has her draw nude figures. As a teenager, Anni knocked on famed Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka’s door and asked him if she could apprentice under him. In response to the young woman and the paintings she had brought with her, Kokoschka scoffed, barely giving her the time of day. From 1916 to 1919, Anni studies painting with Martin Brandenburg, an Impressionist painter. In 1921 she attends the Kunstgewerbeschule (school of applied arts) in Hamburg for two semesters. She considers the textile methods there “sissy stuff.” A friend, Olga Redslob, gives her a brochure for the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1922 Anni moves to Weimar and applies to study at the Bauhaus, where she was initially turned down.

Group portrait of male students in the Bauhaus and women weavers in the Weaving Workshop (Webereiwerkstatt), 1927

Joining the Bauhaus

After the initial rejection a student in the Bauhaus glass workshop, Josef Albers (who will then later become her husband), helps Anni prepare more thoroughly for the entrance exams, and she’s admitted.

Anni enters the mandatory Vorkurs (preliminary course) at the Bauhaus on April 21, 1922, studying with Georg Muche in the first semester and with Johannes Itten in the second. Though the Bauhaus preached inclusivity, women were allowed entrance only into the bookmaking studio and the weaving workshop. And as the bookmaking workshop shuttered soon after the Bauhaus’ founding, women found that their only option was to enter as weavers. (Ironically, it was the commercial sale of the fabrics they produced that kept the Bauhaus financially secure.)

After completing the Vorkurs, Anni enters the weaving workshop in 1923. There she assists in dyeing yarns and makes her first wall hangings and yard materials. She and her fellow students participate in the first official Bauhaus exhibition in 1923. Between 1926 and 1927 she begins working on her double and jacquard looms as well as different wall coverings and curtains. In 1928 Anni becomes an assistant in the weaving workshop under Stölzl’s direction, and from September to December the following year and again in the fall of 1931 she replaces Stölzl as acting director. Anni is awarded her Bauhaus diploma in 1930 for the wallcovering material for the Bernau auditorium. Using cellophane and cotton, she managed to create an innovative material which could reflect light and absorb sound, and could not be stained. The same year, two of her works are shown in Ausstellung Moderner Bildwirkereien, an exhibition of Modern textiles. On April 11 1933, the Bauhaus closes its doors for the final time. Anni meets, by chance, the American architect Philip Johnson, who is particularity impressed by Anni’s textiles. On August 17, Johnson writes to the Alberses, inviting them on behalf of the trustees of Black Mountain College, to come to the United States and so they do.

Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College was an experiment in education, inspired by the writings and teachings of John Dewey. Dewey’s philosophy preached of an artistic education as the means to educating democratic citizens capable of exercising individual judgment. Anni Albers was an assistant instructor at Black Mountain, where she taught students in the weaving studio. Her own philosophy was derived from the importance of understanding of material. We touch things to put ourselves in close contact with reality, to remind ourselves we are in the world, not above it, she wrote. From Black Mountain, Anni and Josef would drive to Mexico, sometimes with friends, where they would study the ancient culture through sculpture, architecture, and craft. Both had much to learn and began collecting figurines and examples of ancient cloths and ceramics which would then influence Anni’s work.

Anni Albers and a student, Black Mountain College, ca. 1944

“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

Anni Albers

Anni Albers Card Weaving at Black Mountain College

Rethinking the grid

A weaver always has to think structurally instead of simply designing the patterns that appear on the woven surface. As the loom becomes an extension of the weaver’s working body, weaving is embodied in her intellectual and physical capacities. What made Albers a philosophical weaver were her attempts to work against the grid. It is impossible for someone as creative as her to be restricted to a form that was pre-set by someone else. If the loom was to be her tool, she needed to bring forms into an agreement to the structure law. She deconstructed the gendered politics of the weaving industry, where men often involve with an industrialised mechanical aspect of weaving and women rooted in pre-loom practice and thread making,

by perfecting the manipulation of the loom. As Albers mastered her instrument, she injected freedom into the grid. Josef and Anni Albers’s fascination in the pre-Columbian culture led them to visits across Mexico, Peru and Chile, where Albers studied in depth the weaving with backstrap looms from the ancient civilisations. Backstrap looms are the most down to earth weaving instruments used by women across the world. Balancing body movements and the few pieces of personally shaped wooden pieces, it is only complete with the body and pushes the boundaries of a pre-set grid. Albers’s choice of adopting and teaching with these looms was the best illustration of challenging the structures and advancing freedom in her weaving. Her inventive approach to each stage of the textile making was an act against the concept of division of labour, seeing the loom is not a mechanical tool to perform based on set guidelines, but that it is part of the body, an instrument for the weaver’s artistic expression.

Anni Albers photographed at her weaving studio at Black Mountain College in 1937

Reinventing materiality

Albers kept an intimate relationship with the materials. Across the work of her lifetime, she redefined thread-making with unconventional components, and reinterpreted mathematical theories and ancient texts with new technical weaving. In 1929, when the Bauhaus won a commission for the Trade Union School in Bernau, Germany, Albers developed a collection of textiles for the Hannes Meyer’s auditorium, incorporating various types of synthetic fibres and cellophane to create acoustic panels. Her research on these sound-absorbing materials influenced the manufacturing and new innovations in theatre design. During her teaching at Black Mountain College, where the rural environment provided plenty of natural materials, Albers encouraged her students to experiment with new sensory balances using textures such as grass, paper, corn kernels and metal shavings to explore “the stuff the world is made of”, as she put it. Her sensibility to a haptic and tactile experience in weaving has resulted in the involvement in thread makings and manipulations both on and off the loom. Combined Paul Klee’s teachings at the Bauhaus with her study of textiles and ideographic signs of the ancient world, Albers incorporated linguistic characters and systems into her weavings, intending them to be read visually with semiology. She understood that the PreColumbian textiles were made for communication, especially in Peru, where there was no written language. Ancient Writing (1935) was the first in a series of Albers’s pictorial weavings, including Haiku (1961), Code (1962) and Epitaph (1968), whose titles refer specifically to texts and coded or ciphered character languages. Albers made clear that her pictorial weavings are to be considered

works of art, a tactic to address the Beaux Arts hierarchy by putting textiles and crafts in the fine art category. These works displayed what the artist described as ‘a form of weaving that is pictorial in character, in contrast to pattern weaving, which deals with repeats of contrasting areas’. In short, they are artworks made by the materials and processes of weaving. Take Red and Blue Layers (1954) as an example of technical and artistic triumph, Albers used the technique known as leno or gauze weave, where the vertical wraps twist over each other around the horizontal wefts.

“To let threads be articulate again and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at…”

Ancient Writing, 1936. 149.9 × 111.1 cm. Rayon, linen, cotton and jute. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Open Letter, 1958. Cotton. 58.4 × 61 cm.

Red and Blue. 61.6 × 37.8 cm.

Reorienting as a functional discipline

As Albers created a space for textiles in architecture, she proved that her work was functional and accessible. During her time there, the Bauhaus school was led by a core circle of upper-class men. Robin Schuldenfrei argued that ‘While modernism was publicised as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served’ . Seen from the 1925 school sample catalogue, the designs were achieved by handcrafting skills, hard to be reproduced by mass production, and were items that already had a place in the upper-class households. As one of the few profitable workshops, the weaving workshop was regarded as essential to maintain for the Bauhaus Art School’s vision as a laboratory for industrial innovations. Furthermore, Albers’s commercial and innovation successes, seen in mentioned commission projects as well as the designs for the student dormitories for the Harvard Law Faculty in 1949. Albers’s designs were approachable and affordable, broadening social engagement with her textiles. In fact, she started giving samples to museums’ collections from the early 50s when no one was interested in textile art. To a certain extent, she took command of the historical records of this discipline. While the Bauhaus Art School was a leading ideological and well connected institution, Albers was committed to teaching at the Black Maintain College with a practical and avant-garde approach, leaving a legacy of knowledge with her students. She reoriented the narrative of woven textile as both an art and a functional disciplines.

Bedspread Material for Harvard Graduate Center Dormitory. 1949

CHAP TER

Anni Albers, Wall Hanging, 1924

Anni Albers, design for wall hanging, 1926

Anni Albers, wall hanging 1926

Untitled wall hanging (1926)

Decorative wall hangings of this sort comprised some of the Bauhaus weaving workshop’s most successful products, along with shawls and blankets, yet this was also a space for Albers to experiment and innovate. Unlike her colleagues, she adopted a palette of neutral threads and focused her attention on complicated weaving techniques and modern geometric design. This reflects, in part, her intention to create designs that could eventually become models for industrial mass production. This pattern is based on repeating and interlocking forms of stripes and blocks, created with a triple-weave technique. In the sketches for her wall hangings, Albers reveals this combination of weaving technique and modernist design. Her limited use of color was influenced by contemporary theories of color relationships.

Six Prayers (1965-66)

In 1965 The Jewish Museum commissioned Albers with the challenging task of memorializing those who died in the Holocaust. In this series of six abstract panels, she brings together a limited palette of brown, black and white with silver threads to create a quiet and contemplative installation. Faced with the impossible task of capturing the lives of millions, she instead creates a space for thought and allows the viewer to find more specific meanings. The vertical panels recall the shape of burial markers or scrolls of text, but can also be read as pure abstractions of line and color. The number 6 is again a reference to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The panels are not woven uniformly, but rather the black and white threads vary against the structure of the grid. They create a pattern that meanders, ebbing and flowing to suggest any number of individual paths within the whole. The process of weaving takes on additional significance in this work as a reference to tikkun, the notion of “social repair” central to Jewish identity.

Anni Albers, Red Meander, 1954

Anni Albers, Rug, 1959

Anni Albers, Dotted, 1959

Bibliography

1. Rockefeller, H.W. (2018) The life and art of Anni Albers, master of modernist weaving, ThoughtCo. ThoughtCo. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/anni-albers-biography-4175259

2. Lyster, S.T.-de (2021) Anni Albers “ weaving a discipline of resilience, The Textile Atlas. The Textile Atlas. Available at: https://www.thetextileatlas.com/craft-stories/anni-albers

3. Chronology (no date) Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. Available at: https://www.albersfoundation.org/alberses/chronology

4. Anni Albers Art, bio, ideas (no date) The Art Story. Available at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/albers-anni/

5. Droste, M. (2012) Bauhaus: 1919-1933. Köln etc.: Taschen.

Photographs

P1. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

P6. Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

P8. Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

P10-11. Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

P14-15. Helen M. Post , The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

P17. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation , Smithsonian American Art Museum

P18. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

P21-22. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

P23. Jewish Museum, New York.

Published in 2023

Edited by Aisling Reitano

for the German Museum of technology at the Institute of Art, Design + Technology Kill Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland, A96 KH79

Phone: + 353 1 239 4000Email: info@ iadt.iehttp://www.iadt.ie

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Text & cover design: Aisling Reitano