Anni Albers: A Life

Biographer Weber (Mondrian) offers an impressively detailed portrait of Anni Albers, a weaver whose 1949 show at the Museum of Modern Art marked the museum’s first solo textile exhibition. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1899 Germany, Albers had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder that prevented her from playing sports, but spurred her to develop her natural artistic abilities. In 1922, she was accepted to the Bauhaus, an institute founded by Walter Gropius that merged artistry and craftsmanship, where she developed her weaving skills and met her future husband Josef Albers, an artist who became a Bauhaus faculty member. After the Nazis shuttered the institute in 1933, Josef was recruited to join the faculty of North Carolina’s Black Mountain College and the couple headed for the United States, where they spent the rest of their lives. Albers eventually took up printmaking, in part to overcome the inherent physical limitations of and low public regard for textile work. Drawing from extensive interviews with his subject, the author carefully situates Albers’s career against a vivid depiction of the WWII-era art world and the Bauhaus, bolstered by brief portraits of key figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. It’s an intimate study of an overlooked artist and the creative milieu from which she emerged. (Apr.)