JOSEF & ANNI ALBERS
Paintings, Tapestries & Woven Textiles
C. E. B. [Charles E. Burchfield, introduction]
C. E. B. [Charles E. Burchfield, introduction]: JOSEF & ANNI ALBERS [Paintings, Tapestries & Woven Textiles]. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1953. Original edition. Slim quarto. Printed stapled wrappers. [16] pp. 5 black and white illustrations. Checklist of 95 items. An uncirculated, fine copy of this elegant little catalog.
6 x 9 stapled catalog with 16 pages and five black and white illustrations for the exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum from July 8 to August 2, 1953. A nice vintage souvenir from Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, the first museum in the United States to acquire a piece of artwork produced at the Bauhaus: Chick Austin, Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944 acquired a Marcel Breuer B-34 chair in 1934 for its permanent collection. Alfred Barr, Director of MoMA, wrote to Austin in 1944, "You did everything sooner and more brilliantly than the rest of us." Austin studied at Harvard with Barr and was close friends with Philip Johnson.
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century.
Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts.
In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.
With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing.
The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans.
Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design.
Anni Albers (née Annelise Fleischmann; 1899 – 1994) was a textile artist, designer, printmaker, and educator known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs. She was born in Berlin, and studied painting under the tutelage of German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919. After attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg for two months in 1920, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922. She was assigned to the Weaving Workshop, and she came to approach the discipline with relentless experimentation, regularly incorporating nontraditional materials into her compositions. Upon completing her course of study there in 1929, Anni Albers joined the Bauhaus faculty.
In 1933, Anni and her husband Josef emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. At Black Mountain College, she elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. It was during this time that she began to avidly collect Pre-Columbian art, in particular textiles. In 1949, she became the first designer to have a one-person show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition Anni Albers: Textiles subsequently traveled to 26 venues throughout the United States and Canada. Following the Alberses' move to New Haven in 1950, Anni Albers shifted her focus primarily to her workshop, spending the 1950s creating mass-reproducible fabrics (including a commission from Walter Gropius for Harvard University), writing, and developing her "pictorial weavings," culminating in the exhibition Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings at the MIT New Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959 (traveled to Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh; Baltimore Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston).