Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The only source in print of the key essays of a pioneer of modernist design.

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) was one of the most influential textile designers of the 20th century. Born in Berlin, in 1922 she became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she met her husband, Josef Albers. From 1933 to 1949 Albers taught at Black Mountain College. The fifteen essays gathered here illustrate Anni Albers's concept of design as the pursuit of wholeness ? "the coalition of form answering practical needs and form answering aesthetic needs." This beautifully illustrated book addresses the artistic and practical concerns of modern design and considers the ever-changing role of the designer.

Albers's work is in private collections and in those of leading museums both here and abroad. Among them are the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum Neue Sammlung in Munich, the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. Her previous books include On Weaving (1965) and On Designing (1961), both published by Wesleyan

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword
• Introduction
• A Start
• Weaving at the Bauhaus
• Work with Material
• Art
• A Constant
• Designing
• On Jewelry
• One Aspect of Art Work
• Constructing Textiles
• Design: Anonymous and Timeless
• Review of Ben Nicholson's Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings
• The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture
• Conversations with Artists
• Weaving, Hand
• Designing as Visual Organization
• Tactile Sensibility
• Material as Metaphor
• Bibliography

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Most of Anni Albers's essays, now collected and edited by Danilowitz, a colleague of Albers's and a scholar on her work, were written as public lectures. They were later published in journals or in Albers's books On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965). Seeing written language and visual language as parallel systems of communication, Anni Albers began her writing in the Bauhaus, Weimar, where she had enrolled as a student in 1922. A pioneer designer of the modernist movement in the aftermath of WW I, she formulated her philosophy with the lucidity, rigor, and depth of thought found in her weaving. She continued to write in the US where she had moved to teach at Black Mountain College. The modernist idea of art's embodying universal principles that give meaning and wholeness to life comes through in her essays. Albers discusses the creative process, the role of material in it, and her nonhierarchical idea of fine art and applied art; all of this still resonates as it was profoundly thought out and grounded in her own experience as a designer and artist. Includes 20 color pictures of Albers's work; bibliographical notes. Recommended for artists and designers interested in textiles. General readers; upper-division undergraduate and graduate students; professionals. M. Tulokas Rhode Island School of Design