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"For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art."— Sonia Delaunay
Modernity, for Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, and Benita Koch-Otte, was never a single breakthrough but a rhythm of repeats—motifs multiplied across fabric, print, and photograph. Each artist translated the Bauhaus promise of art-and-life unity into a personal language of pattern: Delaunay’s chromatic “simultanéités,” Albers’s woven grids reimagined in screen-print, and Koch-Otte’s lens-sharp studies of textile structure. Their works show modern vision unfolding through serial processes that democratize the avant-garde.
In bringing together Delaunay’s etchings, Albers’s intaglios and screenprints, and a rare photograph by Koch-Otte, Modern Women spotlights reproducibility as both method and manifesto. Printmaking and photography allowed these artists—working in media often dismissed as “craft”—to broadcast abstraction beyond the studio, subverting the masculine cult of the unique masterpiece and opening modernism to everyday encounter.
Viewed side by side, their images reveal a shared grammar of color bands, woven line, and optical vibration, formal echoes that testify to overlapping Bauhaus networks and to a collective ambition to re-pattern daily life. This viewing room invites you to see modernity through their multiplied impressions: bold, iterative, and unmistakably authored by women who reshaped the visual fabric of the twentieth century.
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Anni Albers
Camino Real, 1967-1969Screenprint on Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper
23 1/2 x 22 in (59.7 x 55.9 cm)
Edition of 90, plus 12 AP -
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Benita Koch-Otte
Water Lily, ca. 1930Gelatin silver print
8 1/4 x 6 in (21 x 15.2 cm)
Modern Women The Art of Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, and Benita Koch-Otte
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