In December 1929, when Anni Albers was 30 years old, she and three friends from the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus, the experimental German art school, boarded a tiny, four-seater plane they had hired to fly them over Paul Klee’s house so that gifts for his 50th birthday could float down to him from the sky. They revered Klee, a master of modern art and a teacher at the school, and a more typical delivery method seemed inadequate. The young Bauhauslers wrapped his presents in a large package shaped like an angel, whose strands of hair Anni made out of brass shavings. As they whizzed through the Dessau sky, it was Anni who pointed out Klee’s house to the pilot.

This is but one of many thrilling anecdotes in Anni Albers: A Life, a new biography by writer and art historian Nicholas Fox Weber, published today by Yale University Press. It is the first comprehensive biography of this fascinating artist, an indelible figure of not just textile art but modernism itself.

The book traces Anni’s remarkable life story from her birth in 1899 to a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, to her years at the Bauhaus in Germany and then Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to her life with her husband, famed abstract painter Josef Albers, in Connecticut, where the couple moved in 1950. It covers Anni’s extensive contributions to weaving, including details on masterpieces like Six Prayers (1965–66), her wall hanging made in remembrance of the six million who perished in the Holocaust.

The book is more than 50 years in the making. Weber, who is the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, worked closely with the Alberses during their lifetimes (Josef died in 1975, and Anni in 1994), and he began collaborating with Anni on a book about her soon after their first meeting in 1971. They had a rich friendship. “She is still such an important part of my life, and I’m thinking about her all the time,” Weber says now.

Those interested in 20th-century art history will delight in the stories of other bold-faced names like Klee, John Cage (who, as Weber writes, “quickly developed a strong rapport with Anni”), Merce Cunningham, Ruth Asawa, and Jacob Lawrence. And like any good biography, it does not ignore the contradictory aspects of its subject, including Anni’s complicated relationship with Josef, whom she regarded as a genius but whom she also knew to be unfaithful.

Anni was an adventurous, resilient spirit, and throughout her life she overcame adversity, including physical limitations due to Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a genetic disorder, and the typical headwinds that faced many a woman artist in those years. She traveled extensively, including making 14 trips to Mexico. She exhibited her work in the most prestigious of venues, like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And she was endlessly inventive, constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible with textiles and, later, printmaking. Her philosophy was that often in life it was beneficial to “start from zero,” as Weber writes.

Ahead of the book’s publication, Vogue spoke with Weber about his first meeting with Anni and Josef, the controversies of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, Anni’s call to weaving, and her enduring wit. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Vogue: What was your first impression of the Alberses?

Nicholas Fox Weber: The mother of a friend of mine took me to meet them at their home in Connecticut in 1971, when I was in graduate school. I had not been able to get my car started that morning and had to get underneath it and use a rock to hammer the fuel pump. I was dressed in a way that I thought would be appropriate for meeting people from the Bauhaus, in a neat pair of tan corduroy pants that now had grease on them.

When I arrived at the house, Josef didn’t even say hello. He looked at me and simply said, “What do you do, boy?” I probably looked like a mechanic. I said, “I’m studying art history at Yale, sir.” And then he said, “Do you like it, boy?” This was clearly a very, very strong person and not someone in front of whom you could possibly dissemble. And Anni at this point had not said a word. Looking up at them, they looked like a two-person religious act. They both emanated great force. And so immediately Josef made a very strong impression as someone who would speak his mind very clearly, but Anni was such a presence without opening her mouth. She gave me just enough of a smile to make me feel that I was fielding her husband’s difficult questions in a way that was somehow suitable. I can’t explain why but I felt her support before I had even heard a word from her.

You write in the book that she served Kentucky Fried Chicken on a plain platter for lunch that day—I love that detail. Throughout the book you describe their almost ascetic existence. They ate simple foods, they dressed simply, the house was barely decorated. Was this a shock to you as you first entered their home?

It was totally surprising, but felt totally right. I once took a man named Stewart Johnson to the house. He was curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art. We were talking about something else, and when we turned into the driveway and he saw the house, he just went, “Jesus Christ.” It was not what anyone expected. And to that degree, it was a surprise in the sense that I think I anticipated something that would look like a building by Walter Gropius [the Bauhaus founder]. But what struck me above all was the rightness of it. You couldn’t imagine it any other way.

It suited them.

Completely. Anni and Josef Albers were creating. I’ve come to realize that more than anything, their aliveness to the present was what was so affecting. And they had each other in that priority. So yes, people heard them bicker, and yes, they could be competitive with one another, but by and large it was an incredible marriage because there was no question that they had the same values.

Anni was at the Bauhaus and then Black Mountain College, two very influential art schools, but institutions that weren’t without their problems. How did she talk about her experiences there?

You could picture the Bauhaus as a place where everyone was supportive of one another, and I cannot tell you how many times Anni either refused to talk about the Bauhaus or said not to romanticize it. I did not even know until researching this book about the horrible situation that Gunta Stölzl was put in [Editor’s note: Stölzl was the head of the weaving workshop who was forced to resign under pressure from the Nazis], where Anni in essence defended her. But for Anni, it was a place where people were competitive, not mutually supportive. Black Mountain was a different set of problems. In both cases, these institutions were in desperate financial straits. At the Bauhaus, Josef didn’t get paid for the last year that he taught. When they went to Black Mountain, Josef only received $1,500 as an annual salary, and Anni got $100. Everything was a struggle, and like at many universities and institutions, in spite of shared goals, there was a lot of backbiting.

Weaving was not necessarily Anni’s first choice at the Bauhaus, but it seems like it really suited her, especially for its emphasis on technique and material. Did she talk about this?

She learned from thread, and people act as if she was forced into weaving against her will. It isn’t exactly that. It’s a more complicated story. She was physically incapable of being in the other workshops, and although she hadn’t set out to do weaving, what’s much more important is the degree to which weaving became a positive voice for her.

It seems like despite her physical difficulties, she was an extremely intrepid person.

Like no one I’ve ever met. I always think of her going to Machu Picchu. She had difficulty walking, and how she got to Machu Picchu, I don’t actually know. In Tenerife, she rode a mule. And of course there was the hiring of the plane to let down Paul Klee’s birthday present. But she was intrepid in the things she would say, the things that she would try. She had a freshness of attitude, which I miss terribly.

She had such reverence for the ancient weavers of Peru. She knew it was a practice that was bigger than her, that went way, way back. But in terms of modern textiles, she was a pioneer. Did she see herself that way?

She wasn’t that interested in her influence on contemporary textile making. A lot of people make much of it today, but she wasn’t all that interested in textiles that were made by the people I would call her disciples.

Are there surprising bits about her personality that you hope to shine a light on in this book?

Her humor and her originality. She always came up with the unexpected. I describe that trip when she went to the Royal College of Art [in 1990, to receive an honorary doctorate]. We took her to the British Museum and a lift was broken, so my father and me and two guards needed to carry her up the stairs in her wheelchair. Anni wasn’t bothered and said, “There is nothing I enjoy more than being carried by four men.” I mean, that’s an example of resilience and humor.

You also don’t shy away from the less flattering parts of her personality. She could be terse, and she had harsh judgments of other women. Were those details hard to include, considering you had such a close friendship?

I don’t think that it was hard because it would’ve been harder to screen myself. I mean, there are details that no one should know and that I don’t write about because they’re just too personal. But it was not hard to tell it the way that it was because I was writing about someone who told it the way that it was.

With anything that I write about Anni and Josef, the thing I want people to take away is: They were the real thing. Art making was so essential to them. And it was not “the art world.” It was not “money, money, money.” It was art itself that they lived for. There was a direct connection with the objects. And when they held a pre-Columbian object in their hands, you felt it. Creativity was what mattered to them. It was art as a reflection of human life. I think a lot of people are afraid to have their own opinions. And I hope that what people take away from this book is more of the courage to be truthful to one’s own reactions and to know the great pleasures that come from looking at great art.