When Josef and Anni Albers fled Germany for the United States, in 1933, the New World offered them more than refuge from the rise of Nazism. It also gave them access to one of their chief fascinations: Latin America. “They had gone to museums in Germany and seen the pre-Columbian art, what the Mayan and Incan cultures had done, and loved it,” says Albers Foundation director Nicholas Fox Weber. “That’s what America meant to them as much as anything else.”
Not long after the Third Reich shut down the Bauhaus, the avant-garde art school where Josef and Anni had both studied and taught, Josef was fortuitously invited to lead the art department at the newly founded Black Mountain College, the North Carolina art school that would soon become a hotbed of modernist experimentation. “When they arrived,” says Fox Weber, “they knew more about Central and South America than the United States.”