Anni Albers A Life

Nicholas Fox Weber (author)

The first major biography on Anni Albers traces the complex personality and influential artistic career of the groundbreaking modern artist

Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers’s death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers’s life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision.

Capturing Albers’s extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist’s pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers’s trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in Connecticut. He considers her complex relationship with her world-renowned husband, Josef Albers, as well as her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Louise Nevelson. He also describes her torturous, late-life obsession with film star Maximilian Schell, thirty-one years her junior. Weber foregrounds Albers’s perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her.

“Brilliant anecdotes. . . . The first comprehensive biography of this fascinating artist, an indelible figure of not just textile art but modernism itself.”—Grace Edquist, Vogue

Nicholas Fox Weber is a cul­tural his­to­rian. He is the
 Exec­u­tive

Direc­tor of the Josef and Anni Albers
 Foun­da­tion and has writ­ten

exten­sively about each
 artist. He has curated many major exhi­bi­tions

and
 ret­ro­spec­tives of their work.

Weber is a grad­u­ate of Colum­bia Col­lege (B.A., major in Art His­tory)

and Yale Uni­ver­sity (M.A., Art His­tory; Fel­low­ship in Amer­i­can Art).

He is the author of four­teen books includ­ing The Bauhaus Group,

Le Cor­busier, The Clarks of Coop­er­stown, Balthus A Biog­ra­phy,

Patron Saints, The Art of Babar, and The Draw­ings of Josef Albers.