Eleanor Pritchard, textile designer
'I was very aware of her work when I studied at Chelsea and found the confidence and graphic clarity of design in her weave inspiring. These are very much qualities that I try to achieve in my own work. I also find her very inspiring as a feminist role model. Albers, along with other important female textile designers such as Gunta Stölzl, and here in the UK, Enid Marx, Marianne Straub and Marion Dorn, are all inspirational weave designers who blazed a trail for women in the design world.'
Christopher Farr, rug designer
'I started looking at the Bauhaus at art school and the work of Josef Albers. Later, in 1996, I went to San Francisco to do a show of some rugs I’d made and Jack Lenor Larsen said I should work with Gunta Stölzl, who ran the Bauhaus’s weaving department. I started investigating Albers’s work very seriously after that, and got the license from the Albers Foundation to bring some of her designs for rugs and fabrics back into production. I think because my own education had been very influenced by a trip I’d made to Peru, where I studied pre-Columbian textiles, we shared that in common – you can see her interest in the pre-Columbian textiles she saw in Mexico in her colour sensibility, and in both her and Josef’s understanding of form. That’s only really being properly understood now, just how influential these were on both the Albers. It was like a thread connecting everything for them; it represented something universal.'