When Anni Albers was 91, she received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art here in 1990. A ceremony was held nearby at The Royal Albert Hall, so solemn that a friend of hers joked that the venue deserved to be renamed “The ‘Royal Albers Hall.”
Ms. Albers attended the festivities in a wheelchair and accompanied by a nurse, but the textile artist stayed through the three-hour ceremony and collected her award for a lifetime of achievement.
As she was being wheeled out of the hall after the ceremony, Nicholas Fox Weber — the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Conn., and who recounted the episode — asked her how she felt.
“Those were the most boring three hours I ever spent,” came Ms. Albers’s deadpan reply.
“Anni shot straight about everything,” Mr. Weber said in an interview. “She was focused, independent — a brilliant artist and totally funny.”
Twenty-four years after Ms. Albers’s death, Tate Modern is putting on a major retrospective of her work. More than 350 objects will be on display, ranging from mass-produced textiles and jewelry crafted from everyday objects, to sketches, studies and wall hangings.
It’s an opportunity for Tate to recognize a female artist whose name is still missing from many art history textbooks, who remains forever associated with her husband Josef (one of the founders of the revolutionary Bauhaus school), and whose discipline, textile, is still being sidelined by the world’s major museums.