Anni Albers: A Life

The first major biography on Anni Albers traces the complex personality and influential artistic career of the groundbreaking modern artist

Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers's death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers's life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision.

Capturing Albers's extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist's pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers's trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in New Haven, Connecticut; considers her relationship with her famous husband, Josef Albers; discusses her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee; and foregrounds Albers's perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her.