Published: 14 December 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Six Prayers is classic Albers, using cotton, linen, bast and silver thread to create a visual language that hovers somewhere between abstraction and the suggestion of script, or which in Albers’ words, “produce[s] a scriptural effect which would bring to mind sacred texts”.
Born at the turn of the century in Berlin, Annelise Fleischmann came from an affluent family of furniture manufacturers. A baptised Protestant, Albers saw herself as Jewish ‘only in the Hitler sense’, and it is unlikely she ever stepped foot inside a synagogue as a child.
In later life, however, she would produce several works of a Jewish nature. Although none are exhibited at the Tate show, the curators have procured studies for the parochet, or ark covering, at Temple Emanu-el in Dallas, all shimmering blue, gold, blue and silver foil and metallic thread, and Star of David-decorated panels for Har Tzeon Synagogue in Maryland.
For someone who went on to revolutionise the discipline, Albers’ beginnings in weaving were hardly auspicious. She considered the work to be “sissy”, and only took it up as one of the few options available to a female Bauhaus student. Very quickly, however, Albers found herself captivated by the threads which, as she later recalled, “caught me, really against my will”.
It was here at the radical design school that the young Berliner also met her future husband, Josef Albers, a teacher and later leading colour theorist and abstract expressionist. Indeed, at times the exhibition can feel as much a tribute to the Bauhaus as it is to Albers herself.
On display are not just the artist’s own notebooks, but also work by her peers and students (Albers started teaching Design Theory in 1929): designs jotted down in notebooks for Bauhaus master Paul Klee’s classes, for example, as well as original fabric samples, used to explore weave structures and colour.
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Albers’ own 1930 diploma piece is shown in reproduction, a pioneering sound-proof material commissioned to cover the walls of a trade school auditorium. Its black and white threads are interwoven with transparent cellophane, and the chenille at the back produced a velvet-like surface to muffle sound. For architect Phillip Johnson, a Nazi sympathiser who ironically assisted the Albers with their move to the US, this work was Anni’s “passport to America”.
In 1933 the Nazis shut the Bauhaus down, and the Albers fled Germany. Anni would go on to set up the weaving department at Black Mountain College, a new art school in North Carolina, whose experimental teaching and lively intellectual community, made up of dancers, artists, architects, and mathematicians, seemed the closest thing to the Bauhaus that America could provide.
It was at Black Mountain that Albers began to conceive of her work as ‘pictorial weavings’, artworks to be framed and hanged on the wall like paintings. 16 years after arriving in the US as a refugee, Albers would present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first weaver to do so.
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The Tate retrospective is impressive, bringing together everything from Albers’ chenille and copper drapery for the Rockefellers to her bedspreads for Harvard graduates. The jewellery Albers co-designed with Alexander Reed, a Black Mountain alumnus, is also here: a necklace which looks like silver from afar, but on closer inspection is made up of bobby pins hanging from a chain. Another startling piece is composed of papers clips and a large aluminium sink strainer.
But of all these marvels, it is Albers’ pictorial weavings that weave magic. Pasture (1958) is an aerial composition of crops and fields, modern agriculture as reimagined in uniform squares and rectangles of shades of emerald and, and the odd sprinkling of orange and brown.
Next to it, South of the Border (1958), with its bold pinks, bright oranges, vibrant yellows and touch of turquoise, evokes the spirit of lands beyond New Mexico and Texas, the Mesoamerican influences so close to Albers’ heart.
Albers’ desire was to speak the language of threads, a fluency she believed had been lost since Renaissance and Gothic textiles began simply copying images from paintings.
A simple name like Black-White-Gold I (1950) belies the intricate weaving of these coloured threads into a pattern calling out to be deciphered. Red Meander (1954) weaves linen and cotton, orange and white, into a labyrinth where your gaze lingers and gets lost. These exquisite pieces command attention, much like a Pollock or Rothko.
Albers’ desire was to speak the language of threads, a fluency she believed had been lost since Renaissance and Gothic textiles began simply copying images from paintings.
For her weaving was a language, a grammar and vocabulary of abstract expression. Albers’ script experiments from the 1980s, for example, are untitled experiments in pen that resemble cuneiform. Her drafts recall the work of another Black Mountain student, CY Tombly and his graffiti experimentation, and are echoed in earlier pieces like the shimmering Epitaph, (1968) a stunning assembly of cotton, jute and Lurex, or in the earthy textures of Code (1962), with its cotton and hemp threads, native to American soil.
In Albers’ view the weavers of ancient Peru were the supreme masters of this form. One room in the exhibition thoughtfully assembles beautiful pieces of Peruvian fabric, some dating back nearly a thousand years: tapestry fragments from Chimú, lace and cotton textiles from Chancay, many belonging to Albers herself. There are also pieces from Africa and Asia, reflecting the artist’s diverse range of influences: Kuba cloth from the Congo, a Coptic tapestry medallion from Egypt, and a Japanese Sword Belt of bark cloth.
In its description of her Holocaust memorial, the Jewish Museum writes that Albers “create[d] a place of rest, something in between the world of things and the transcendental unknown”. This description could apply to so many of Albers’ works, art which is both magnetic and elusive, and which succeeds in creating a new form of visual semantics, abstract yet tangible.
