On Designing. Slipcased with #4260.
Albers, Anni. On Designing. (New Haven, CT: The Pellango Press, 1959.)
8vo.; black and white illustrations; black and white paper-covered boards; dust-jacket printed in imitation of the cover; lightly rubbed; two minor closed tears..
Boxed together in a specially made cloth slipcase with:
Albers, Anni. On Designing. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
8vo.; black and white illustrations; black and white paper-covered boards.
First and second edition of Albers’s first book, a collection of ten essays, most of which had been seen periodical publication in revised states: “[I]nstead of the previously printed, sometimes condensed, versions, the original manuscript has been used for this presentation. Here and there I have made corrections and changes to clarify a meaning. …” (prefatory note). The second edition, adding two essays (“Designing” and “Conversations with Artists”) is a presentation copy, inscribed by Albers on the front endpaper to Buckminster Fuller, with whom she developed a close friendship while at Black Mountain College where she was an assistant professor of art from 1933-49: “For Bucky and Anne with love, Anni A.” Fuller provided one of the dust-jacket blurbs for the first edition:
From aeronautical altitudes, the criss-cross grids of Earth’s cities seem to be two-dimensional planar arrangements, as do woven fabric surfaces, seen from a distance. Seen from inside the city streets or within the loom, both cities and fabrics disclose multi-dimensional structuring of great complexity.
Anni Albers, more than any other weaver, has succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structuring of fabrics. She has brought the artist’s intuitive sculpturing faculties and the age-long weaver’s arts into historically successful marriage.
Among the most respected female artists of the twentieth century, Anni Albers (1899-1994) began her distinguished career at the Bauhaus, as both a student and as a teacher, where she met and married the famed artist, designer, and writer Joseph Albers. When the Nazis disbanded the Bauhaus in 1933, the couple emigrated to the United States, where both became instructors at Black Mountain College. Though trained in several disciplines—the dust-jacket notes that she was “known for her work in the field of textiles as an artist, a designer for industrial production, a lecturer and teacher”—Albers focussed her attentions on weaving, and was in fact the first weaver to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. She received the Gold Medal award for Craftsmanship from the American Institute of Architects, and the Decorative Arts Book Citation for her second book, On Weaving (1965). In 1964 she attended the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles on a fellowship; by 1970, after years of increasing experimentation with printmaking, she was devoting all of her energies to this pursuit.
(#4259)
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