Anni Albers: Camino Real
Texts by Brenda Danilowitz and T’ai Smith
The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art.
Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging Camino Real—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work.
In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging Camino Real is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,” it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs.
Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artists: Anni Albers
Contributors: Brenda Danilowitz, T’ai Smith
Publication Date: October 2020
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 × 10 1/2 in | 20.3 × 26.7 cm
Pages: 128
Reproductions: 60 color
ISBN: 9781644230428
Retail: $60 | £50
Status: Available
Anni Albers
Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a textile artist, designer, printmaker, and educator known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs. She was born in Berlin, and studied painting under German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919. After attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg for two months in 1920, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922 and joined the faculty in 1929. At Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1949 she elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. In 1949 she became the first designer to have a one-person show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition Anni Albers: Textiles subsequently traveled to 26 venues throughout the United States and Canada. Her seminal book On Weaving, published in 1965, helped to establish design studies as an area of academic and aesthetic inquiry and solidified her status as the single most influential textile artist of the twentieth century.
All Anni Albers books
Brenda Danilowitz
Brenda Danilowitz is an art historian and chief curator at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on the work of Josef and Anni Albers and has organized exhibitions of their work in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Latin America.
T’ai Smith
T’ai Smith is an associate professor of art history at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (2014), she has lectured internationally on textile media and design in modern art and philosophy.
