Anni Albers was a textile designer, weaver, and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as art.

Anni Albers was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1899. In 1922 she went to the Bauhaus, an experimental design school, which would shape her life from that point forward.

Anni Albers, Orange Meander, 1970. Part of the Paintings in Hospitals collection.

Anni enrolled in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus. Her talent and skill on the loom were such that soon after graduating she was appointed as head of the weaving workshop in 1931.

Her artistic style plays with the strict limits that the loom has on the design. The loom is the structure that helps you to build the textile, and you need to build up colour horizontally or vertically only in straight lines. Experimenting with different patterns, rhythms and repetitions, she made each unique woven item a work of art, just like her modernist friends working in art, architecture and design. She was also an expert in weaving traditions across the world, frequently travelling to Central and South America where the study of the amazing objects and their uses was a huge inspiration.

Weaving on the loom

Her husband, who she met and married during her time at the Bauhaus, was the artist and teacher Josef Albers. The Albers’ had been living in the USA since an invitation to teach at the Black Mountain College, another experimental art school, gave them a route away from Nazi Germany in 1933. Josef was already an established printmaker when, in 1963, Anni joined him on a trip to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in LA. When there, the Director, June Wayne, encouraged Anni to try printing for herself. She shifted her artistic practice towards printmaking from the late 60s onwards.

Anni Albers, Red Meander, 1954. On display as part of the Anni Albers exhibition at Tate Modern in 2018-2019

Orange Meander is a screenprint. The version we have is an ‘AP’, an Artist’s Proof, from a set of prints that checked the design for print and colour accuracy. Albers made many different ‘meanders’, starting with 1954’s hand-woven Red Meander. Red Meander was inspired by her research and study of the ancient weavers of Peru. By mixing the patterns she was reading about with the inspiration of an ancient maze, she created this iconic work that ‘took the thread for a walk’ as she famously asserted. Her meander pattern was returned to and transformed through many different colours, sizes and styles, over the later years of her career, just as with our Orange Meander from 1970.

Orange Meander was kindly donated to Paintings in Hospitals in 2008 by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Since it joined our collection it has been enjoyed by patients, service users and staff at; the St Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing (London), the NIHR/Wellcome UCLH Clinical Research Facility (London) and Pocklington Group Practise (Yorkshire).

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