Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain

by Virginia Gardner Troy. Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. 170 pp., illus. Hardbound, $59.95. ISBN 0-7546-0501-9.

Reviewed by Aaris Sherin, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: aaris.sherin@uni.edu.

German-born artist and designer Anni Albers (1899-1994) is well known for her textiles from the 1920s, when she was a student at the Bauhaus in the weaving workshop. Her subsequent artistic work, which is equally skilled but less well known, reveals her degree of indebtedness to traditional Peruvian weaving, and to various art-related European influences, including Paul Klee (one of her teachers at the Bauhaus), De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. As the title of this book predicts, it follows Anni Albers' life from the point of her arrival at the Bauhaus in 1920 to her immigration to the U.S. in 1933 (with her husband, Bauhaus painter Josef Albers), then traces her further development as an artist, writer, collector and educator at Black Mountain College (near Asheville, North Carolina), until the Albers moved to Yale in 1950. It begins with a discussion of Europe's apparent unquenchable thirst for non-western or "primitive" art during the final years of the 19th century and the early decades of the twentieth. Albers and her contemporaries may have been well acquainted with the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde, which housed a large collection of Peruvian weavings, numbering more than 7500 by the year 1920. While at the Bauhaus (initially as a student, later as a weaving teacher), Albers was (like her husband) intensely curious about the exploratory use of a wide range of materials, without regard for conventional use, in the context of inventing art. Her interest in Andean weaving began during this same period, and then gradually evolved into a lifelong interest in the forms, styles and techniques that characterize that tradition. Albers believed that Modern-era textile designers could benefit immeasurably from knowing more about the skillful mastery of design in Andean weavings. While teaching at Black Mountain, she encouraged her students to learn from these age-old artifacts, which she sometimes researched by taking actual works apart to determine the process by which they were made. While Albers' own work was influenced by Andean textiles, she did not emulate them directly, nor did she feel obliged to use antiquated processes. She willingly used commercial yarns, and eagerly embraced the loom as a modern tool that saved her time and labor. While teaching at Black Mountain, Albers began to conceive of herself not only as a designer, but also as an artist. One evidence of this is that she began to sign her textile art (with her initials), something she had never done with industrial prototypes. The 1950s and 1960s were among her most productive years, at the beginning of which she and her husband moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef joined the faculty at Yale University. It was during this period that Anni Albers frequently met and interacted with leading authorities on Andean and Ancient American textiles. Increasingly in her personal work, she became persuaded that woven fabric was well-suited for conveying meaning and implicit cultural coding within its repetitive patterns. By her own artwork, by her writings on textile design, and by the strength of her teaching, Anni Albers led the charge in slowly building up the role ascribed today to textile art (sometimes known as fiber arts). This book affords us an interesting look at a second-tier participant at the original Bauhaus. More importantly, it traces the growth of the interest in primitive and abstract work with such care and detail that readers cannot help but be captivated by the story of modern textile design as it evolves from a minor decorative art to its prominence at the Dessau Bauhaus and then onto its present (peripheral) role in the three-ring circus world of art. While there are scores of books about the Bauhaus, there is a smaller recent list that deals with lesser-known aspects of this exhaustively-studied historical time. Examples of these are Isabelle Anscombe, A Woman's Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (NY: Viking 1984); Sigrid Wortman Weltge, Women's Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993); and Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic's Premier Art Institute, 1919-1932 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2001) This particular volume about the life of Anni Albers is surely a welcome addition to this same list of scholarly studies.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, Winter 2003-2004.)