“Johnson was happy to see her they had met at the Bauhaus Dessau, which he had visited in the late 1920s. “One day during that fraught April when uniformed Nazis barred Mies’s entrance into the Bauhaus, Mies’s greatest admirer, the young American architect Philip Johnson, who was in Berlin, ran into Anni by chance as they were walking toward one another on a sidewalk in the center of the city,” writes Fox Weber. However, the author also explains that it was Anni, not Josef who cultivated the connection that led to them crossing the Atlantic so successfully. “The institution in which Anni and Josef Albers had enjoyed a wonderful new way of life and had taken art and design to new summits, was to become history,” writes Fox Weber.įox Weber suggests that Anni blamed herself for the couple having to leave Germany after all, she was Jewish, while Josef was German. Courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Josef Albers teaching, Yale University, 1955–56. “The Dessau government effectively closed the Bauhaus in 1932 by declaring that it would no longer pay faculty salaries,” explains Fox Weber though the Nazis didn’t physically shutter the school, the regime did cut off funds after the faculty refused to support the party’s politics. The transition from one school to another was not an easy one. However, Fox Weber also describes the tragic turn of events that led to the school’s closure, and the couple’s subsequent emigration from Europe.

In these pages we learn about Anni and Josef’s formative, though very different experiences at the Bauhaus, as both students and teachers. The text, by Nicholas Fox Weber, the long-standing executive director of the Albers Foundation, is a brilliant art-history document and an engrossing diptych-like biography, filled, as it is, with both personal recollections and meticulous research.

Indeed, our new book Anni & Josef Albers chronicles the couple’s decade-long involvement with the place. Our new book describes how a chance meeting in the street and the invention of Black Mountain College helped the couple escape Nazi Germanyįor many art lovers, Anni and Josef Albers will forever be associated with Germany and that seminal German art school, the Bauhaus. Drawing of planned campus building overlooking Eden Lake at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina (1938) Architectural design by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius (artist anonymous) Photograph with collage, ink, and gouache, on woven paper Scanned from exhibit at Harvard Art Museums How Philip Johnson and America saved Anni and Josef Albers

Josef albers book