Anni Albers & Ancient American Textiles

Anni Albers was a founding member of the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Her teachers and colleagues at the Bauhaus included Itten, Kandinsky and Klee. Their intellectual study of the achievement of what was called primitive art, then rapidly filling German museums, was crucial both in making the case for the status of that art, and in establishing a model for the discussion of modern abstract work. Albers's own investigation of the techniques and abstract designs of ancient American weavers led her to argue that their skill was unsurpassed in the modern world, and to employ those techniques in her own work.' Virginia Gardner Troy continues Albers's story beyond the Nazis' closure of the Bauhaus to her emigration to America, with her husband Josef, where she took up a teaching post at Black Mountain College. There Albers was able to build up a significant collection of ancient Peruvian textile art, now housed in the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, U.S.A., and to establish an international reputation for her own textiles. Extensively illustrated, this book offers a fascinating insight into Anni Albers's work and the history of the re-evaluation of ancient skills and techniques in weaving.