Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-four years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he was a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography). The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as with these figures' lesser-known wives and girlfriends. In this extraordinary group biography, Weber brilliantly brings to life the pioneering art school in Germany's Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s and early 1930s, and captures the spirit and flair with which these Bauhaus geniuses lived, as well as their consuming goal of making art and architecture.
Journal Article Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928–1943. By Nicholas Fox Weber. (New York: Knopf, 1992. xii + 398 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-394-57854-6.) Get access Martin Green Martin Green Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages 730–731, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079993 Published: 01 September 1993
In 1963, in the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, Albers was attracted by the printing process and the creative potential offered by lithography. Over the next twenty years she created a series of prints that translated her innovative textile work into this new medium, introducing Mexican colors into her work and freeing herself from the strict limitations of her Bauhaus production. She explored new lithography techniques, offset printing, photographic processes, and silkscreen, creating a body of work that is published here in its entirety for the first time. Anni Albers worked primarily in textiles and, late in life, as a printmaker. She produced numerous designs in ink washes for her textiles, and occasionally experimented with jewelry. Her woven works include many wall hangings, curtains and bedspreads, mounted pictorialA images, and mass-produced yard material. Her weavings are often constructed of both traditional and industrial materials, not hesitating to combine jute, paper, and cellophane, for instance, to startlingly sublime effect.