14 craft power couples of the 20th century

27 May 2021

When great creative minds unite

27 May 2021

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Josef and Anni Albers, ca. 1935, photographer unknown. Courtesy: the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

You know what they say about a couple that crafts together – well, we’re taking liberties with an age-old phrase to celebrate the age-old joy of love. Here, we celebrate some of the fascinating 20th-century pairings in craft that are simply #couplegoals.

Anni and Josef Albers

Modernism’s original power couple, Anni and Josef Albers met in Wiemer, Germany, in 1922 at the Bauhaus – then a fledgling teaching institution that would transform 20th-century art and design. They were an unlikely pairing: she was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin; he was 11 years her senior, from the industrial Ruhr valley and a devout Catholic family. Creative powerhouses in their own right, Anni Albers was a textile designer, weaver, writer and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, while Josef was an influential teacher, painter and colour theorist. Curiously, the couple never collaborated on art – with the exception of their annual Christmas cards and Easter eggs.

Charles and Monika Correa in 1978. Courtesy: Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

Monika and Charles Correa

Trained as a microbiologist, Monika Correa never formally studied art or weaving. Her foray into textiles began after her husband Charles Correa – often referred to as ‘India’s greatest architect’ – was invited to the US to teach at MIT, his alma mater, in the late 1960s. There, she learned the basics from Marianne Strengell, head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s textile programme. Many of her early works were dhurries (floor carpets), which combined stripes and block colours with traditional techniques reimagined for a new age. ‘I was his greatest admirer and his greatest critic. It was the same with him. He pushed me on,’ Monika said of her late husband in an interview with Indian business publication Mint.

Gertrud and Otto Natzler

Ceramicists Gertrud and Otto Natzler met in Vienna in 1934 and within two years of meeting had established a studio together. In 1938, the same year in which they were married, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. The newlyweds left for California, where they continued their collaborative practice: Gertrud would throw delicate forms that Otto would then glaze. By Gertrud’s death in 1971, they had created some 25,000 works and Otto had developed 2,500 glazes. After her passing, Otto remarried but initially couldn’t bring himself to glaze the the 200 pots that Gertrud had thrown and left behind for him – until his new wife convinced him otherwise.

María and Julián Martinez pit firing blackware pottery at P’ohwhóge Owingeh (San Ildefonso Pueblo), New Mexico (c.1920)

Maria and Julian Martinez

Potters Maria and Julian Martinez are widely renowned for reviving the traditional black-on-black pottery of San Ildefonso pueblo, an Indigenous community 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Working together between 1917 and 1943, the couple harvested clay and fired the pots together –with Maria shaping them and Julian painting onto them – and gave demonstrations of their techniques, inspired in part by archeological research and discoveries of ancient examples of this craft. Maria took influence from her aunt and grandmother, who had made pottery for storage, cooking and ceremonial use, as well as passing the skills on to their son. The couple’s works are held in dozens of museum collections, including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum. Their early pieces were unsigned, after which only Maria’s name appeared on them. From 1925 onwards, all their works were signed with both names, until Julian’s death in 1943.

Annica Sandström and David Kaplan

Pioneers of the studio glass movement in Scotland, husband-and-wife David Kaplan and Annica Sandström established Lindean Mill Glass in 1978 in the Scottish Borders. The pair met in Sandström’s native Sweden, and together they continue to produce elegant, contemporary glass tableware in the former mill that also serves as the couple’s family home and a gallery space. Their work is represented the collections of many noteworthy institutions, including National Museums Scotland, the Crafts Council Collection, the V&A and Röhsska Museet.

Textile print by Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher
Self-taught block printers and dyers Phyllis Barron (left) and Dorothy Larcher

Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher

What’s more #couplegoals than wearing clothes you made together? The modernist textile designers Barron and Larcher wore dresses printed with their own designs, and became famous for their use of natural dyes and vibrant fabrics block-printed by hand. The pair lived and worked together for over 30 years. In the 1930s, the couple moved from London's Hampstead to Painswick in Gloucestershire, where they grew a garden full of plants useful in their work – either as inspiration or as dye ingredients.

Althea McNish and John Weiss. Photo: Derek Tamea
Althea McNish textiles for Liberty

Althea McNish and John Weiss

Through her printed textiles for the likes of Liberty and Heal’s, Althea McNish brought colour to grey post-war London. ‘She led the way, overthrowing the sterile rules of taste that had previously shaped British and international design,’ said V&A curator Christine Checinska in an obituary in the Guardian last year. The textile designer started out studying at the Architectural Association, before moving to the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art. Her husband, jewellery designer and silversmith John Weiss, who died two years before that, was a champion of her work and a talented maker in his own right, creating elegant designs that complemented her vibrant prints. He also started out studying architecture, and headed the Furnishing and Interior Design department at the London College of Furniture, before focusing fully on silversmithing in his retirement – making contemporary jewellery, as well as cutlery and religious artefacts, such as an ornate modern Torah crown cover for the Bristol and West Progressive Jewish congregation. As a couple, they lectured widely around the world and were also well known for being generous hosts.

Bowl, by Bernard Leach, 1960-65. Crafts Council Collection: P6

Bernard and Janet Leach

Texas-born ceramicist Janet Darnell trained with the legendary Japanese potter Shoji Hamada at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, before heading to Japan to study ceramics – making her the first foreign woman to do so. In 1956, she married Bernard Leach (who is often dubbed ‘the father of British studio pottery’) and became an integral part of the thriving Cornish artists’ colony of St Ives, where his Leach Pottery was located. Both potters were strongly influenced by Japanese aesthetics and techniques. The Leach Pottery remains open today, accompanied by a museum displaying many pieces by the couple, their apprentices and their colleagues.

Claude with his ‘flock’ of sheep sculptures
French artist duo François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne

François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne

Husband-and-wife duo François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, or Les Lalanne as they were known, often incorporated animal and mythological imagery in their furniture pieces. ‘I thought that it would be funny to invade that big living room with a flock of sheep,’ François-Xavier once explained. ‘It is, after all, easier to have a sculpture in an apartment than to have a real sheep. And, it’s even better if you can sit on it.’ The French couple met in 1956 at François-Xavier’s first gallery show and, in the decades that followed, produced work together and separately, counting Yves Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy among their patrons.

Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský

Jaroslava Brychtová, a sculptor, and Stanislav Libenský, a painter-turned-glass artist, first met in 1954 and worked together until Libenský’s death in 2002. Their collaboration began with a glass and concrete wall for the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. Throughout their life together, the couple ‘created an ambitious body of work that could be likened more to painting, sculpture and architecture than to something that rests on a tabletop,’ wrote The New York Times in its obituary for Brychtová last year. Their works are included in many major modern art collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the V&A.

Photograph of Bob Stocksdale included as part of the materials for the exhibition Wood Turnings by Bob Stocksdale, held at the Little Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City, New York in 1969. Courtesy: American Craft Council
Kay Sekimachi at her loom by Stone and Steccati, undated. Courtesy: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale

The late American woodturner Bob Stocksdale was raised on a farm in Huntington, Indiana, where he learned to make baseball bats, table legs and croquet sets using a lathe powered by an old washing machine engine – owing to the fact his family had no electricity. He produced more than 200 turned bowls every year and had a penchant for exotics woods. In 1972, he married the equally talented fibre artist and weaver Kay Sekimachi, who is best known for her three-dimensional monofilament hangings, as well as her intricate baskets and bowls. Now in her nineties, Sekimachi continues to create, and has recently been crafting with objects found while beachcombing.

Printed floral silk from the Ascher archive. Courtesy: The Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague
Zika and Lida Ascher, founders of textile company Ascher London Ltd

Zika and Lida Ascher

Czech emigres Zika and Lida Ascher arrived in the UK at the onset of the Second World War. Zika, born into a family of textile manufacturers and often referred to as ‘the mad silkman’, founded textile company Ascher London Ltd in 1942 with Lida, who had an eye for pattern design. The pair gained renown for their pioneering textile innovations, artist collaborations (Henry Moore among them) and experiments with fabrics including rayon, parachute nylon, silk, wool, mohair and cheesecloth. Their contributions to the British textile industry was recognised in a 1987 retrospective of their work at the V&A.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald
The Mackintosh House studio-drawing room. Courtesy: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald

Given that some of the remains of St Valentine reside in Glasgow, it’s a fitting locale for a love stories. Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and painter and glass artist Margaret MacDonald met as students at the old Glasgow School of Art in 1883, marrying seven years later at the Episcopal Church in Dumbarton. Together they formed one half of The Four (Spook School), alongside Margaret’s sister Frances Macdonald and her husband Herbert McNair, and are credited with their significant contribution to international Art Nouveau. The French painter Blanche Ernest Kalas, writing in 1905 of a visit to the Mackintoshes’ home at 120 Mains Street, recalled ‘two visionary souls, in loving mateship… wafted still further aloft to the heavenly realms of creation’.

Pot by Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie. Photo: courtesy of Maak Contemporary Ceramics
Small bowl by Norah Braden. Photo: courtesy of Maak Contemporary Ceramics

Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and Norah Braden

Despite her aristocratic background, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie described herself as ‘a simple potter’, saying: ‘I like a pot to be a pot, a vessel with a hole in it, made for a purpose.’ Visiting the famous Omega Workshops in the 1920s sparked her life-long passion for pottery, which she shared with her partner Norah Braden. After training with Bernard Leach in St Ives, the pioneering pair potted together on the family estate, where they experimented with glazes made from plants growing nearby to create earth-toned stoneware pots that – as Pleydell-Bouverie famously put it – evoke ‘things like pebbles and shells and birds’ eggs’.

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The 20th century textile artists you should know