Anni was an adventurous, resilient spirit, and throughout her life she overcame adversity, including physical limitations due to Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a genetic disorder, and the typical headwinds that faced many a woman artist in those years. She traveled extensively, including making 14 trips to Mexico. She exhibited her work in the most prestigious of venues, like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And she was endlessly inventive, constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible with textiles and, later, printmaking. Her philosophy was that often in life it was beneficial to “start from zero,” as Weber writes.
Ahead of the book’s publication, Vogue spoke with Weber about his first meeting with Anni and Josef, the controversies of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, Anni’s call to weaving, and her enduring wit. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vogue: What was your first impression of the Alberses?
Nicholas Fox Weber: The mother of a friend of mine took me to meet them at their home in Connecticut in 1971, when I was in graduate school. I had not been able to get my car started that morning and had to get underneath it and use a rock to hammer the fuel pump. I was dressed in a way that I thought would be appropriate for meeting people from the Bauhaus, in a neat pair of tan corduroy pants that now had grease on them.
When I arrived at the house, Josef didn’t even say hello. He looked at me and simply said, “What do you do, boy?” I probably looked like a mechanic. I said, “I’m studying art history at Yale, sir.” And then he said, “Do you like it, boy?” This was clearly a very, very strong person and not someone in front of whom you could possibly dissemble. And Anni at this point had not said a word. Looking up at them, they looked like a two-person religious act. They both emanated great force. And so immediately Josef made a very strong impression as someone who would speak his mind very clearly, but Anni was such a presence without opening her mouth. She gave me just enough of a smile to make me feel that I was fielding her husband’s difficult questions in a way that was somehow suitable. I can’t explain why but I felt her support before I had even heard a word from her.
You write in the book that she served Kentucky Fried Chicken on a plain platter for lunch that day—I love that detail. Throughout the book you describe their almost ascetic existence. They ate simple foods, they dressed simply, the house was barely decorated. Was this a shock to you as you first entered their home?
It was totally surprising, but felt totally right. I once took a man named Stewart Johnson to the house. He was curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art. We were talking about something else, and when we turned into the driveway and he saw the house, he just went, “Jesus Christ.” It was not what anyone expected. And to that degree, it was a surprise in the sense that I think I anticipated something that would look like a building by Walter Gropius [the Bauhaus founder]. But what struck me above all was the rightness of it. You couldn’t imagine it any other way.
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