March 24 to May 24, 1999
Preview: Tuesday, March 23, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Remarks will begin at 12 p.m.
Opening reception: Tuesday, March 23, 6.30 p.m.
Commemorating the centenary of Anni Albers’ birth, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, is presenting Anni Albers, the first retrospective of Albers’s work to be held in Europe.
Anni Albers (Berlin 1899 - New Haven 1994) is considered by many the foremost textile designer of our century. One of the central figures of the Weaving Workshop at the Bauhaus, she had an enormous effect worldwide on the design of yard materials and on the creation of singular weavings and wall hangings. Anni Albers studied art in Berlin, Hamburg and at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, receiving her Bauhaus diploma in 1930. In 1925 she married Josef Albers, with whom she emigrated to America in 1933. She taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, from 1933 to 1949, and in 1937 took US citizenship. From the 1960s, Anni Albers, by then living in New Haven, Connecticut, received numerous awards and honors for her achievements in the arts.
Anni Albers includes a wide selection of Albers’s weavings, drapery materials and wall coverings as well as the preparatory studies and graphic works that accompanied them. The focal point of the show are her individual weavings. Of the approximately 70 that she produced, about 35 individual pieces will be on display, including the five extant Bauhaus period wall hangings which will be exhibited together for the first time, and her most important commission, Six Prayers, 1966-7 (Jewish Museum, New York). In addition the exhibition reproduces some of the jewelry that Anni Albers made at Black Mountain College in the 1940s, when she used safety pins, paper clips, upholstery springs, sink strainers, angle braces, and other ordinary objects from hardware stores in marvelous arrangements as pendants or necklaces.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Orange, Connecticut, and is curated by Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi and Nicholas Fox Weber, Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibition is designed by Gae Aulenti. Major loans are being generously contributed to the project by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as well as The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. In addition to several private collections, the following institutions are also lending works to the exhibition: the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Busch-Reisinger Museum (Harvard University), the Cunningham Dance Foundation, the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, Temple Emanu‘El, Dallas, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The Jewish Museum, New York, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Munich, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven/CT.
Anni Albers will travel to the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop/Germany (June 13 – August 29, 1999), the musée des arts décoratifs, Paris (September 20 – December 31, 1999), and to the Jewish Museum, New York (February 27 – June 4, 2000).
The exhibition catalogue (Guggenheim Publications, New York, 184 pp., designer Nathan Garland) will include a personal memoir of Anni Albers by Nicholas Fox Weber, essays by Virginia Gardner Troy , Kelley Feeney and Jean-Paul Leclercq, a selection of writings by the artist and an extensive biography by Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi. The catalogue is the most comprehensive publication on the artist currently in print.
Official airline carrier for the exhibition in Venice is Alitalia.
The exhibitions of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the support of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board, the Regione Veneto and Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim.