Modern Women The Art of Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, and Benita Koch-Otte

11 September - 18 December 2025
  • "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.

  • Sonia Delaunay, Composition, 1970

    Sonia Delaunay

    Composition, 1970
    Color etching and aquatint on Arches paper
    26 x 20 in (66 x 50.8 cm)
    Edition of 125, plus proofs
  • Anni Albers, Camino Real, 1967-1969

    Anni Albers

    Camino Real, 1967-1969
    Screenprint on Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper
    23 1/2 x 22 in (59.7 x 55.9 cm)
    Edition of 90, plus 12 AP
  • Anni Albers, Triangulated Intaglio I, 1976

    Anni Albers

    Triangulated Intaglio I, 1976
    Single-color copper plate etching on mould-made white Arches Cover
    24 x 20 in (61 x 50.8 cm)
    Edition of 20, plus 9 AP
  • Anni Albers, Triangulated Intaglio II, 1976

    Anni Albers

    Triangulated Intaglio II, 1976
    Single-color copper plate etching and aquatint on mould-made white Arches Cover
    24 x 20 in (61 x 50.8 cm)
    Edition of 20, plus 9 AP
  • Anni Albers, Triangulated Intaglio IV, 1976

    Anni Albers

    Triangulated Intaglio IV, 1976
    Single-color copper plate etching in red on mould-made white Arches Cover
    24 x 20 in (61 x 50.8 cm)
    Edition of 20, plus 9 AP
  • Benita Koch-Otte, Water Lily, ca. 1930

    Benita Koch-Otte

    Water Lily, ca. 1930
    Gelatin silver print
    8 1/4 x 6 in (21 x 15.2 cm)