The World of Interiors

BAUHAUS

BELOW THE

BORDER

One-time linchpins of Weimar’s seminal school

Josef and Anni Albers fled Nazi Germany to

teach in the USA. On holidays to Latin America

the couple were excited to discover that their

cherished Modernist principles of form col-

our and universality had already been fully

realised in pre-Columbian art. As a show opens

in Milan Charles Darwent heads south to in-

vestigate their ‘promised land’ of abstraction r

Opposite bottom right: the duo’s Latin American travels

were not restricted to Mexico as Josef’s photo-collage

of Chan-Chan Peru 1953  shows. This page left: Anni’s

cotton/linen Red Meander of 1954 indicates her debt to

‘my great teachers the weavers of ancient Peru’. Below

left: Josef’s photograph of Anni her father Siegfried Fleisch-

mann and an unknown boy in Teotihuacan Mexico 1937

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