Orchestra I

Anni Albers escaped to America after the Nazi government forced the closure of the experimental art school Bauhaus, where she taught weaving. With her husband, the well-known artist Josef Albers, she fled to the United States and subsequently taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the earlier part of her career, she worked in textiles, combining geometric abstraction with her love of pre-Columbian design. Around 1963, she began producing prints that she imbued with textile-like qualities. A lifelong lover of music, Anni Albers aptly viewed her experimentation with photo-offset lithographs as an act of orchestration. Here she used the photographic negative of her own drawing to create a print whose design appears as white lines on a mostly black surface.