Anni Albers, born Annelise Fleisch-mann in Berlin in 1899 into an assimilated Jewish family of great wealth, was drawn in 1922 to the recently formed Bauhaus (1919–33), the values of which must have seemed the antithesis of her privileged upbringing. She joined the art school during a time of deep unrest and turmoil in Weimar Germany, marked by anti-Semitism fuelled by the rise of the Nazi Party. Hoping for artistic equality, she found that women were directed to their own department, a place that swiftly evolved into a weaving workshop. Her fellow students, led by Gunta Stölzl and Otti Berger, were enormously talented. During her nine years at the Bauhaus, Albers carried out creative research into weaving, enriched by the teachings of artists like Paul Klee and by her colleagues’ own theoretical writings. Albers’s work included her abstract double- or treble-weave wall hangings, her gouache drawings for similar abstract designs and industrial applications of weaving such as her light-reflective and sound-absorbing wall covering for Hannes Meyer’s Trade Union School auditorium near Berlin at Bernau.

In 1925, while still a student, she married Josef Albers, a Bauhaus alumnus and teacher at the school. She and Josef were invited to the United States to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; they left Germany in 1933, the year that Hitler took power. Stölzl was forced out of the Bauhaus in 1931 and struggled to make a living thereafter, eventually running a weaving mill in Switzerland. Berger – who was, like Albers, Jewish – was banned from running her textile atelier in Berlin in 1935. Refused a visa to the United States in 1938, she died in a concentration camp. Other alumnae, like Margaret Leischner, joined the artistic diaspora, fleeing abroad to find work as teachers or within industry. In the United States, as her husband became increasingly respected, Albers had the freedom to think, make and write. She and her Bauhaus peers had been aware of ancient Andean weavings, but only Albers was able to study them in depth on visits to Peru and Chile in the 1950s. Still earlier, she had been inspired by the tombs of Monte Albán in Mexico, which led to her first named wall hanging of 1936. 

The experience of teaching at Black Mountain College was demanding but liberating. And in North America Albers was able to concentrate on an ongoing series of non-functional weavings – ‘pictorial weavings’ – mounted and framed like graphics or paintings. These were of great beauty – colouristically subtle, employing fancy yarns,