LIFE’S RICH TAPESTRY As a new retrospective opens at Tate Modern, we examine how Anni Albers’ woven artistry continues to inspire so many of today’s designers
A new exhibition at Tate Modern celebrates Anni Albers’ woven masterpieces, which elevate textile design to the status of fine art
When asked to name the greatest artist of the 20th century, Anni Albers made an unexpected choice. She might, perhaps, have been expected to cite Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky – both leading Bauhaus figures she knew and revered – but it was Coco Chanel to whom she gave the honour, praising the designer’s liberating influence on women’s fashion. It’s an appropriately open-minded response from a creator whose work broke down the traditional boundaries between art and craft, seamlessly crossing disciplines and leaving a legacy that extends far beyond the world of textiles.
Not recorded in any official biographies, the Chanel anecdote comes directly from the personal notebooks of Nicholas Fox Weber, a close acquaintance of Albers prior to her death in 1994 and now the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Weber has collaborated with Tate Modern on its forthcoming retrospective of Albers’ oeuvre – an exhibition he has been hoping to stage for the best part of two decades. ‘Towards the end of Anni’s life, when she was in Connecticut and I was living in a remote Irish cottage where I only put in a phone so that I could stay in contact with her, we used to talk about the future of her work,’ he reminisces. ‘She felt that she wouldn’t live to see it fully recognised, but she was never bitter.’
Weber remembers his friend as a born rebel whose determination to forge her own creative path was clear from the start of her career. Brought up in a comfortable family home, the young Annelise Fleischmann nursed bohemian ambitions of becoming an artist and, in 1921, left Berlin to attend Weimar’s radical Bauhaus school, with its holistic approach to design education. (‘What do you mean, a new style of art?’ her father apparently protested when told about the institution’s unorthodox teaching methods. ‘There are only two styles: Renaissance and Baroque!’) While forward-thinking in its pedagogical outlook, however, Walter Gropius’ establishment was still not entirely progressive in its attitude towards women, and it
was through obligation rather than preference that Anni found herself entering the weaving workshop, instead of studying glass like her beloved Josef Albers, whom she would marry in 1925. ‘I went into weaving unenthusiastically, as merely the least objectionable choice,’ she later recalled. But the threads she initially spurned were soon to capture her imagination.
‘However art history may have overshadowed it, her project was always as ambitious as that of her peers,’ says Briony Fer, a professor of art history at University College London and the co-curator of Tate Modern’s exhibition. In the rigorous discipline of weaving, with its strict grid (‘the modernist form par excellence’, according to Fer), Albers found an extraordinary freedom and fluidity that could only be achieved through technical mastery coupled with an artist’s sensitivity. ‘Great freedom can be a hindrance because of the bewildering choices it leaves to us, while limitations, when approached open-mindedly, can spur the imagination to make the best use of them and possibly even to overcome them,’ wrote Albers. Her creative instinct is manifest from her earliest projects: the wallcovering for which she earned her Bauhaus diploma in 1930 was not only visually splendid but also pushed design boundaries, using chenille to muffle sound and transparent cellophane to create iridescence.
Those early experiments with light and texture prefigure the ingenuity of her first pictorial weavings, which she produced while teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the arts-led institution where she and Josef took posts in 1933 (following the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis). The metallic threads used to trace out the shape of a cross in La Luz I, for example, emanate an almost sacred radiance, while Ancient Writing exploits the floating-weft technique (a method of superimposing additional threads onto the weave) to make abstract forms reminiscent of linguistic characters appear to hover over the fabric. The couple’s travels to Mexico were influential in the development of these works: Albers was fascinated by the traditional Latin American weavings she came across and would often unpick the pieces she collected in order to study the methods of their creators. Equally, her jewellery designs from this era, made from everyday objects such as corks and paperclips, recall the marvels she discovered during her visits to the archaeological site at Monte Albán. Albers subsequently paid tribute to the talents of these anonymous makers in her seminal text On Weaving (1965), in which she sought to expand the study of art history beyond the narrow limits of the Western world.
Indeed, the need for breadth of vision, whether across geographies or disciplines, was Albers’ clarion call throughout her life. In an essay written as early as 1937, she urged readers to adopt a more neutral attitude towards the medium in which she worked, arguing that ‘weaving is an example of a craft which is many-sided […] Like any craft it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art.’ It must have frustrated her, then, to find that when she eventually gave up weaving in favour of print-making in the 1960s, by which time she and her husband were living in Connecticut and the physical demands of working at a loom were becoming too great, her output met with increased acclaim. ‘I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art,’ she said in a 1985 interview. In fact, the qualities that mark out Albers as a true artist – the textural effects she achieved through a clever use of materials; her playful choice of asymmetrical patterns to surprise the viewer; the love of colour and geometry she inherited from her Bauhaus teachers – are consistent across her entire oeuvre.
No wonder Albers’ influence, far from being limited to the craft sector, has been felt in spheres ranging from architecture (Tate Modern’s exhibition will highlight her lesser-known textile commissions for hotels, museums and synagogues) to interiors and fashion. Hugo Boss and Paul Smith are among the designers unveiling Albers-inspired collections this year, while Roksanda Ilincic describes the artist as an important influence who always has a presence on her moodboards. ‘I love the femininity and the strong graphic sense in her work, as well as the unexpected colour combinations,’ she says. ‘The tactile aspect appeals to me, too – like Anni, I often have a slight rawness in my designs. Although her pieces were very tightly planned, they always have a certain warmth – she really bridged the gap between painting and something more textural.’
Bridging the gap is what Albers did best: in her work, form meets function, simplicity breeds multiplicity, and a maker’s mindset is allied with a lasting devotion to the pursuit of what she called ‘visual refreshment’ – the constant human need for art in all its forms. ‘What’s important is that she be recognised not as a textile artist, not as a woman artist, not for anything to do with her background but simply because of the sheer wonder of her work,’ says Fox Weber. That, surely, is reason enough.
The Anni Albers exhibition is at Tate Modern (www.tate.org.uk) from 11 October to 27 January 2019. For more information about the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, visit www. albersfoundation.org.
‘When the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when on paper, it’s considered art’