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  • KnollTextiles Designer Anni Albers

Knoll Designer Bios

Anni Albers

b. Berlin, Germany
1899-1994

Anni Albers was one of the most influential textile designers of the last century and a leader of the modern weaving movement. In 1922 she began studying weaving under Gunta Stolzl at the Bauhaus where she would remain, teaching and experimenting, until the school was closed in 1933. It was then that she and her husband, painter Josef Albers, moved to North Carolina to teach at the newly founded experimental art school, Black Mountain College.

In 1949 The Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-woman show featuring Albers’ designs, the acclaim from which would confirm her standing as one of the great textile designers in America.

In 1951, Florence Knoll invited Albers to collaborate with the Knoll Textiles Department. This initial contact would lead to a 30 year relationship through which Albers would bring her stylistic innovation to Knoll, helping to direct and define the company’s ever-evolving identity. Introduced in 1976 and her best known pattern, Eclat, exemplifies Albers’s design philosophy — to ground designs in order, but not in an overly apparent manner.