Obituary: Anni Albers

Annelise Fleischmann, weaver: born Berlin 12 June 1899; assistant professor of art, Black Mountain College 1934-49; books include Anni Albers: on designing 1959, Anni Albers: on weaving 1965; married 1925 Josef Albers (died 1976); died Orange, Connecticut 9 May 1994.

MENTION Anni Albers to any weaver today and they will know her name and her association with the Bauhaus. Yet she rose to prominence very slowly, favoured by luck and longevity, the features which - together with tenacity and skill - have set a handful of weavers apart from the rest.

Born Annelise Fleischmann into a German world of wealth and culture in 1899, she was 23 years old when she became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Her surviving student work of 1925 includes wall-hangings with strong, geometric compositions that critics likened to the work of Josef Albers who, in the same year, became Anni's husband and a master at the school. When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau soon after, Albers wove fabrics and wall-hangings for the new quarters designed by Walter Gropius.

Otherwise, there was no clear sign of her destiny; she was overshadowed by Gunta Stolzl (an older student and from 1925 to 1931 the guiding light in the Bauhaus weaving workshop). While she substituted occasionally for Stolzl, Albers' main achievement in these years was her development of a sound-proof, light-reflecting walling fabric - for which she received her diploma in 1930. Three years later the Bauhaus moved to Berlin, but did not survive under pressure from the Nazis; realising that although a confirmed Protestant she was, as she put it, 'in the Hitler sense, Jewish', she and Josef (who was a Catholic) accepted an offer from the American architect Philip Johnson of teaching positions at the experimental, newly formed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Arriving in the United States at the end of 1933, Anni became weaving instructor and, perhaps more crucially, translator for Josef, who struggled for some time to learn English. Both taught until 1949, during which time Anni Albers was one of only two Bauhaus- trained weavers teaching in the US. (The other was Marli Ehrman, at the Chicago Institute of Design.) These were also the years when, for both political and ideological reasons, the perpetuation of Bauhaus philosophy became a cause celebre in the US, two of the consequences of which were the 1949 solo show of Anni's work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (the first of its kind), and Josef's appointment as chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University in 1950.

While at Black Mountain, Anni Albers made prototypes for industrial production as well as what she called 'pictorial weavings'; both were hand-woven studies in weave structure, colour and texture. In 1941 she argued in the magazine the Weaver that the primary role of hand-weaving was as the servant of industry and architecture, beginning a long and far-reaching relationship with the written word that eventually made her the acknowledged spokesperson for many professional weavers. Later, in her entry in the 1963 Encyclopaedia Britannica, she defined hand-weaving as 'an art discipline able to convey understanding of the interaction between medium and process that results in form', adding a voice of legitimacy to the young 'fibre arts' movement. This was the concept behind her own 'pictorial weavings', which dominated her output from 1950. Even after she had given away her looms in 1970, her books were reprinted, and for the next 20 years she combined continued work in graphics and printmaking (which she started in 1963) with designs for printed textiles and the supervision, after 1976, of her husband's estate. In the same period she received six honorary doctorates including her last, in 1990, from the Royal College of Art. Perhaps most telling, however, was the gold medal she received from the American Crafts Council in 1980; the second such medal awarded in 25 years, it was presented to Albers for her 'uncompromising excellence'.

Both enigma and legend, she was known personally by very few; yet through her teaching and writing she cast a long and influential shadow over the landscape inhabited by generations of weavers. This is particularly true in the United States; but enter the library of almost any institution that teaches weaving and there will inevitably be books by or about Anni Albers. The dustjacket to the first edition of On Designing described Albers as 'the conscience of contemporary textile design', a role which was uniquely hers for nearly half a century.

(Photograph omitted)