Anni and Josef Albers

" …art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness." - Anni Albers

Lifelong artistic adventurers Anni and Josef Albers were leading pioneers of twentieth-century Modernism. Guided by Josef’s theory of colour and Anni’s formal exploration of pattern making and weaving, the exhibition brings together prints by both artists from the National Gallery’s Kenneth E. Tyler Collection along with paintings and archival materials.

The Bauhaus was a brief but monumental modernist project. Across 15 heady years, students and masters came together in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin under the common goal of renewing artistic endeavour, rejecting the academies of the past to embrace a new spirit ‘dependent upon the cooperation of many individuals, whose work reflects the attitude of the entire community’.1 Two figures in particular stand steady in the unsettled life of the school. Enrolling as students at the Bauhaus in 1920 and 1922 respectively, Josef and Anni Albers became two of the most persistent forces dedicated to implementing the Bauhaus vision until the school was shuttered in 1933.

For the Albers, principles absorbed during their time at the Bauhaus crackled like embers beneath their mature art practices in America. In 1963 the couple were introduced to up-and-coming printer Kenneth Tyler during a residency at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Anni, Josef and Tyler connected with great intensity over a shared commitment to innovation through practice, the marriage of craftmanship and industrial processes, collaborative thinking and high-quality art accessible to the masses.

Anni and Josef Albers is a Kenneth E. Tyler Collection exhibition. The National Gallery gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Exhibition Patron Penelope Seidler AM.

Curator: Imogen Dixon-Smith, Kenneth E. Tyler Curator, International Prints and Drawings