Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art.
This monumental, 11-room retrospective is the first major exhibition of Anni Albers’ work in the UK. It is a revelation and a fabulously calm, peaceful and enjoyable experience. The curators have somehow made all the rooms appear white and bright and open-plan. A couple of rooms are divided into sections partitioned off by translucent fabric stretched across Ikea-style pine frames.
The effect is to slow and calm you right down to a frame of mind which allows you to really soak up the beautiful and varied patterns of Anni’s fabrics and hangings, watercolours, prints and gouaches.
Installation view of Anni Albers at Tate Modern
The exhibition includes more than 350 objects from exquisite small-scale ‘pictorial weavings’ (her term for weavings which were not meant to decorate or hang, weren’t intended to have an architectural purpose, but to have the same importance and impact as traditional paintings), to the large wall-hangings and textiles Anni designed for mass production, as well as a generous selection of her later prints and drawings.
It opens with a big visual statement – with a room dominated by an actual loom of the type she would have used while a student at the Bauhaus. To match or balance this, right at the end of the show, the final room includes samples of cloth and fabric which we are encouraged to touch and feel, as well as a film showing a weaving loom in use, highlighting the complex interaction of hand and eye which was required to use one of these machines.
A 12 Shaft Counter March loom of the type Albers would have used at the Bauhaus
Biography
Anni Albers (1899 to 1994) was born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin, Germany, to a bourgeois family of furniture manufacturers. In 1922 she joined the Bauhaus, the influential art and design school established by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, and enrolled in the school’s weaving workshop. It was at the Bauhaus that she met the artist Josef Albers, who she married in 1925. (I am going to refer to her as Anni to distinguish her from her husband.)
Wall Hanging (1926) by Anni Albers. Mercerized cotton, silk © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
The early rooms display her student work alongside work by her tutors at the Bauhaus, including Paul Klee, and colleagues such as Gunta Stölzl and Lena Meyer-Bergner.
I couldn’t help revering the only Klee here, Measured Fields, a watercolour from 1929. Albers is quoted as saying that she didn’t learn that much from Klee’s teaching, but masses from the actual practice of his watercolours which experimented with laying blocks of (generally quite washed-out) colour next to each other.
Measured Fields by Paul Klee (1929)
Klee and Kandinsky were just the two most famous painters experimenting with colour and abstract design at the Bauhaus. Although he doesn’t get much mention here, Anni’s husband, Josef, was also thinking about colours and how they interact. The Bauhaus was an incredibly stimulating environment.
Anni completed her diploma in weaving in 1930 and succeeded Gunta Stölzl as the head of the weaving workshop the following year. However, in 1933 the Bauhaus closed under increasing pressure from the Nazi party, and the Alberses fled to America when they were invited by the American architect Philip Johnson to teach at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina.
Here Anni and Josef they initiated and led the art programme until 1949. That year, Anni Albers held her first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first solo exhibition to be dedicated to a textile artist at the institution.
In 1950 she moved for the final time in her life to New Haven, Connecticut, when Josef Albers was appointed to teach in the Department of Design at Yale University.
Pasture (1958) by Anni Albers. Cotton © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
Printmaking
Anni Albers continued to hand-weave until the late 1960s when she began to focus on printmaking. On display here is a fabulous sequence of white prints on white paper. The effect is of embossed zigzag patterns on a plain white background which itself contrasts with the slightly stippled surface of the surround outside the main square. It sounds simple but they are tremendously evocative, in one way they were the most attractive thing in the show.
Mountainous I by Anni Albers (1978)
Six Prayers
In the mid-1960s Anni was invited to design an ark covering for a Jewish temple in Dallas, Texas. The result was Six Prayers which are given a room to themselves. Into the cotton and linen of the tapestries is woven silver thread, giving them a scintillating effect in the carefully gauged darkness of the room.
The pattern, when you look up close, invokes but doesn’t quite use, the Hebrew script, an effect which can be interpreted as a fragmenting of language and meaning or, more hopefully, a sense of the numinous, of silver threads of meaning, struggling to pierce through the weight of the everyday.
Six Prayers by Anni Albers (1966 to 1967)
The event of a thread
Room eight – titled ‘The event of a thread’ – explores how, in the mid-1940s, Anni began to explore knots. She was probably influenced by the German mathematician and knot theorist Max Wilhelm Dehn, who joined Black Mountain College in 1945 and became a friend of the Alberses.
Although not a painter, in 1947 Anni Albers began to sketch and paint entangled, linear structures. Later, in the 1950s, she produced a number of scroll-like works with celtic-style knots, and then the Line Involvements print series in the 1960s.
To be honest, I think I respond to painting and drawing more immediately than I do to fabric, and so I found some of these knot paintings absolutely mesmeric. They are as if someone has taken the beautifully taut and compact interlocking lines of classic Celtic patterns and… unlocked them, loosened them, shaken them up, set them free. My photo of them is awful but the real things are entrancing.
Drawings for a rug by Anni Albers (1959)
On Weaving
Next to this section was the space which most epitomised the tasteful design and layout of the exhibition – a room created of see-through partitions, devoted to Anni’s writings. She published two influential books: in 1959, a short anthology of essays titled On Designing, and in 1965 the seminal book On Weaving.
The extensive display cases in this space convey the tremendous breadth and range of this latter work, which took as its subject the entire 4,000 year long history of the practice, from right round the world.
While still a student in Berlin, Anni had become a regular visitor to the Museum of Ethnology and become fascinated by its collection of Peruvian textile art. Apparently, the ancient Peruvians never developed a written language, in the way we think of it. Instead their art, and most of all their textiles, served a sort of communicative purpose.
Anni’s ‘pictorial weaving’, Ancient Writing, from 1936, was the first in an occasional series of works whose titles explicitly refer to language and texts, such as Haiku (1961), Code (1962) and Epitaph (1968).
Ancient Writing by Anni Albers (1936) Cotton and rayon © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
The Peruvian tradition was only one among hundreds of ancient techniques and traditions which Anni taught could be used to revitalise contemporary practice. The cases display the source material Anni gathered for the book, from images of works by contemporary artists such as Jean Arp, to fragments of woven pieces from Africa and Asia, Europe and the Americas.
These are accompanied by technical diagrams of various knotting techniques, as well as ‘draft notation’ diagrams which show the weaver how to create the different weave structures and patterns.
Although I didn’t follow the details, I did get a sense of how universal this art has been, practiced by all human cultures across a huge span of time. How there is something almost primeval about weaving and binding fabrics for human use.
Installation view of room 9, On Weaving, of Anni Albers at Tate Modern
In the 1970s Anni finally gave up the physically arduous task of weaving and switched her interest to printing techniques such as lithography, screen-printing, photo-offset, embossing and etching.
Printing allowed Anni to pursue her interest in colour, texture, pattern, surface qualities and other aspects of ‘textile language’, translating these concerns onto paper. She used simple grids and rows of triangles to create a wide variety of effects that reveal the influence of the pre-Columbian textiles and artefacts she collected and studied.
I’ve shown one of the white patterns which she came to title Mountainous earlier, but there are plenty more examples of her wonderful eye for geometric design and colour, an endless play of design and pattern.
TR II (1970) by Anni Albers. Lithograph © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
This is an eye-opening exhibition in every sense. A lifetime’s output of beautiful objects, fabrics, rugs, hangings, paintings and prints by a consistently inspired and inspiring artist.
The guide tells me it was designed by PLAID Designs, so major respect to them for having laid all these treasures out in light and airy spaces. In her 1957 article, The Pliable Plane, Anni had imagined a museum where
textile panels instead of rigid ones … provide for the many subdivisions and backgrounds it needs. Such fabric walls could have varying degrees of transparency or be opaque, even light-reflecting…
Well, the curators and designers of this exhibition have come as close to realising Anni’s vision as is possible. There is much more I haven’t mentioned, about her involvement with specific architectural projects, about her innovatory use of hangings as room dividers or sound-proofing music auditoria, and an enormous amount about her wide-ranging experiments with fabrics ancient and modern, and with techniques from ancient Peru to modern America.
But it’s the light and space of the show, in which countless examples of beautiful fabrics and prints hang suspended in their beauty and weightlessness, which make you leave the exhibition walking on air.
The promotional video
And this is one of Simon Barker’s videos showing how a handloom is used.
Related links
- Anni Albers continues at Tate Modern until 27 January 2019
- Anni Albers: Weaving Magic
- Six Prayers article on the Jewish Musum website
- The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
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