ANNI ALBERS: AN ARTIST INDUSTRIOUSLY INSPIRED

When the Bauhaus accepted her into its weaving workshop in 1922, Anni Albers initially turned down the offer. Now 87 and a noted weaver, designer and printmaker, she then thought the craft was “sissy” stuff.

“I wanted to do a real man’s job in building the New World, in constructing the New Society,” said Albers by phone recently from her Connecticut home.

But she reconsidered. “It was my only way to get into the Bauhaus (the German art school), which was a very exciting, forward-looking place.”

“The Woven and Graphic Art of Anni Albers,” at UCLA’s Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery through Sunday, abundantly illustrates her better intentions. About 90 mostly earth-tone works compose gridlike, geometric or meandering-pattern wall hangings, fabric samples designed for industry and prints.

UCLA professor of art Bernard Kester, who helped install the exhibit, said the works are non-pictorial, wholly unlike traditional tapestries.

“All Albers’ weavings speak directly of construction,” he said touring the gallery. “Though they have content, the content is manifest in form and structure. For instance, this piece, ‘Under Way,’ exploits the brocade technique. The roving white-and-orange puffy wool is really a brocade method of developing a linear scheme.”

Albers embraced a dual aesthetic, Kester said, creating artfully designed utilitarian pieces and individual artworks for art’s sake only.

“The Bauhaus philosophy was to merge art and industry, so she adapted weaving to industrial and architectural situations and designed for power loom production. She designed draperies for office buildings or rooming houses, for example.

“And she made ‘pictorial weavings’ she set on her loom in a contemplative spirit. She felt these were paintings with threads.” Albers said that both forms “had their place in my development and it was important to go through with the (industrial) production until I found a more satisfying solution with the singular (non-mass produced) pieces.”

Born in Berlin, Albers also taught weaving at the Bauhaus, where she met and married Josef Albers, a renowned painter who died in 1976. The couple came to America in 1933 to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Later, both received fellowships at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles (founded by artist June Wayne, it’s now an institute in Albuquerque, N.M.). There Albers first took up printmaking, in 1963.

In her weaving she experimented with unusual materials, such as cellophane and metallic threads, as well as natural fibers, and is considered a pioneer of contemporary experimental weaving. In 1970 she “gave away her looms” to concentrate on her prints. Now partially confined to a wheelchair, she occasionally creates graphic designs.

“She was an important woman artist and writer,” said Kester who knew both Annie and Josef Albers. “She wrote two books on weaving and design, and was the first weaver to have a solo show, in 1949 at the (New York) Museum of Modern Art, and was among the very first women to have a solo show there. She also managed to bridge the gap between applied art and fine art.”

However, like other couples in which the husband worked in fine arts and the wife in applied arts (Albers’ contemporaries the Delaunays and Arps among them), Albers never attained her husband’s prominence.

Did she feel her gender was the cause? “No,” Albers said. “It didn’t affect me at all. Art is art, good work is good work and a utilitarian piece is a utilitarian piece, no matter who uses it. I don’t make a distinction between exhibits for men and exhibits for women.”

Kester, who helped UCLA develop its textile program, said, “I urged UCLA to get this exhibit for one reason: It’s timely. Right now students in the field of textiles are concerned about how to make it in the fine arts without the stigma of applied or ‘place mat’ art. Albers was able to do that early on and at a high level.”