Josef Albers was born in Germany in the year 1888. In college he studied to be a teachers and he taught in the public schools in the city of Bottrop, Germany. When he was teaching he spent time after school and on weekends studying art and became so interested in art that he left his teaching job and his home town and went to art school. The art school he went to was called the Bauhaus and it was in a large city named Weimar, Germany. He studied for three years and became a teacher at the Bauhaus where he taught students how to paint, how to draw, how to make furniture, how to design wall paper and how to make pictures with colored glass. While he was at the Bauhaus Josef made many pictures by joining together pieces of colored glass. In 1925 he met and married Anni. In 1933 the Nazi government in Germany closed the Bauhaus and Josef and Anni moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina where he became a teacher at Black Mountain College teaching students about color and design. In 1950 he left Black Mountain to teach at Yale University where he began to work on paintings that used squares to explore color and optical illusion. He retired in 1958 and spent all his time on painting and print making until he died in 1976. He is known around the world as an important artist and teacher who inspired many people to become artists. The Asheville Art Museum is very fortunate to own more than eighty of Josef Albers’ prints.

Anni Fleischmann Albers was born in Berlin, Germany in the year 19899. She began her art career as a weaver and became a student at the Bauhaus when she was 23 years old. She studied weaving, stayed at the school to teach and married Josef Albers in 1925. She immigrated to the United States in 1933 with Josef when the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus. Anni introduced new ideas about weaving, art and design to students at Black Mountain College. She explored weaving with new methods and materials throughout her career and wrote several books about weaving. In the 1960s her interest turned to print making. Like her weavings, her prints are balanced studies of color and geometric form. Her prints were displayed in museums and galleries across the country and they brought her great fame. She died in 1994. The Asheville Art Museum owns ten of Anni Albers’ prints.