Recently, I added this to one of my Pinterest boards.
courtesy of Art Resource
It's a woven wall hanging by Anni Albers made of silk and rayon, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
If you don't already know her name, I will tell you that Anni Albers was a member of the Bauhaus School, as you might have guessed from her last name. She was indeed married to Josef Albers, who is much more widely exhibited these days.
They shared a number of formal preoccupations, so much so that it interests me where one of them might have left off working out an idea, and the other began.
If you look at her wider body of work, you'll see what I mean. But Anni deserves to be recognized in her own right, and is one of those many women that your Art survey likely skipped over as your professor rushed to wrap up the 20th century in the time remaining in the semester.
As someone interested in textiles and the contemporary community that is grounded in their creation and celebration, I feel that I owe a debt to Anni for her book On Weaving, published in 1965, two years after I was born. Anni's work and her writing were part and product of the midcentury reevaluation of the beauty embedded in what had been historically marginalized as the "domestic arts". This new respect for hand work for which she was instrumental is the fertile ground out of which came interest in publishing books by Elizabeth Zimmerman, Priscilla Gibson Roberts, Barbara Walker, Mary Thomas, and Paula Simmons.
There's a Foundation for promoting Josef and Anni's work in Bethany, Conneticut, and they have a website. There's a very nice gallery there of her work which you can click around in. Take a moment to admire her work, and thank her for what she did for us all.
Love this. That wall hanging is really amazing. And yes! They ought to teach art history backwards. I mean, I love Giotto, but why not start at the end, where there are living artists to meet?
Posted by: Ann | May 01, 2013 at 12:17 PM