Anni and Josef Albers

Anni and Josef Albers were pioneering artists and influential educators, responsible for the flowering of Bauhaus pedagogy and modernist design principles in the United States, primarily at Black Mountain College, where they both taught from 1933 until 1949. These two educational institutions profoundly shaped their trajectories and placed them at the center of artistic networks in Europe and the United States.

Anni and Josef met at the Bauhaus in its first iteration in Weimar in 1922, drawn to its interdisciplinary, experimental approach to artistic education, which promoted the exploration of form and material and aimed to dissolve the boundaries between the fine and applied arts. This philosophy encouraged students to break from habitual thought and, in the school’s later years, generate innovative designs for industrial production. Josef had enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1920, the year after it was founded by architect Walter Gropius, and Anni enrolled in 1922. They married in 1925, the same year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. After three years as a student, Josef taught at the school for ten years, leading the glass workshop and teaching the mandatory preliminary coursecalled the Vorkurs. Anni trained in the weaving workshop (the section initially designated for female students), where she subsequently taught design theory. In 1929 she served as assistant to the head of the workshop, Gunta Stölzl, and later became its acting director.

The Alberses remained at the Bauhaus until 1933, when faculty voted to dissolve the school rather than adhere to Nazi party cultural policy. They left Germany after Josef was recruited by Theodore Dreier and John Rice to become the head of the art department at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, planning the curriculum and teaching design, drawing, color, and painting. This newly founded progressive school drew on the ideas ofeducational reformistJohn Dewey, especially his celebration of hands-on learning and pedagogy as a social process. Anni singlehandedly established the college’s weaving program, which explored weaving as art, craft, and design, and had a major influence on midcentury textile design in the United States. A spirit of openness and experimentation defined the Albers’ teaching, inspiring a generation of artists whom they taught as students—including Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Susan Weil—as well as colleagues whom they invited to join the faculty, like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jacob Lawrence.

After leaving Black Mountain College in 1949, Josef taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and spent ten years at the Yale University Art School, where he was head of the Department of Design from 1950 to 1960. Anni continued to teach privately while guest lecturing and developing designs for Knoll’s textile department.

Their immigration to the United States, where they spent the rest of their lives, also marked the beginning of frequent travel and engagement with Latin America. They visited Mexico together thirteen times and traveled to Cuba, Chile, and Peru. Deeply interested in Pre-Columbian art and archeological sites, they assembled a collection of nearly 1,400 Pre-Columbian objects, most of which was donated to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Anni put together the Harriet Engelhardt Memorial Collection of Pre-Columbian and modern textiles, named in honor of one of her students at Black Mountain College and now housed at the Yale University Art Gallery. These collections testify to the Albers’ interest in placing modernism in dialogue with global traditions.

Both Anni and Josef also achieved great success as artists during their lifetimes: Anni as the first woman and first textile artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (which then traveled to twenty-six venues across the United States and Canada), in 1949, and Josef as the first living artist to receive a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1971. Their pedagogical philosophies live on in books that have been widely influential for students since the time of their publication: Anni’s On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965), and Josef’s Interaction of Color (1963).