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Thumbnail-size images of copyrighted artworks are displayed under fair use, in accordance with guidelines recommended by the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, published by the College Art Association in February 2015.

"Dotted" Weaving

Anni Albers (American (born in Germany), 1899–1994)
1959
Object Place: United States

Medium/Technique Wool; compound weave
Dimensions 23-3/4 x 11 inches
Credit Line The Daphne Farago Collection
Accession Number2012.1317
NOT ON VIEW
ClassificationsFiber arts

“I think [weaving] is closest to architecture, because it is a building up out of a single element—building a whole out of single elements.” -Anni Albers




The godmother of the American fiber movement, Albers is known for expressive weavings with innovative structures and pictorial elements. In 1949, she had her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; a decade later, she produced this work, with its distinctive weft knots appearing as “dots.”




Albers trained at the Bauhaus, the radical German art school that strove to unite art, design, and crafts to create a new material world appropriate for modern living. Like most female Bauhaus students, Albers was channeled into the weaving department—of which, in 1931, she took direction. In 1933, she (with her husband, Josef) emigrated to the United States to teach at the Black Mountain school, a highly influential and innovative art school in North Carolina, where she began to create experimental and expressive weavings, sometimes inspired by her studies of South American textiles, and embracing innovative structures and pictorial elements.

DescriptionAbstract weaving with design of red and black dots on cream wool ground.
ProvenanceAcquired from the artist by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (b. 1910 - d. 1989), New York; by 1973, given by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to Ralph Bettelheim (d. 1993) and Mildred Constantine (Mrs. Ralph Bettelheim; b. 1913 - d. 2008), New York [see note 1]; sold by Mildred Constantine to Donna Schneier Fine Arts, Palm Beach, FL; May 1992, sold by Donna Scheiner Fine Arts to Daphne Farago, Little Compton, RI; 2012, year-end gift of Daphne Farago to the MFA. (Accession Date: February 27, 2013)

NOTES:
[1] Published in Beyond Craft: The Art of Fabric, as in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Bettelheim. In a 1979 letter preserved in the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Mildred Constantine wrote to Anni Albers that she had received the weaving as a gift from Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.
Copyright© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York