Changing the bedspread in the Glass House
FAMED BAUHAUS ARTIST REDECORATES A LANDMARK HOME, POSTHUMOUSLY
At the Glass House in New Canaan, the bedspread is being changed for the first time since it opened to the public in 2007, but not for housekeeping reasons.
Instead, the change heralds a new series that will alter the interior with temporary site- specific textiles and kicks off by paying homage to the Bauhaus- trained weaver and writer ( and longtime Connecticut resident) Anni Albers. In effect, Albers, whose international stature has only grown since her death in 1994, is being invited into the Glass House to do some posthumous redecorating.
To start, the existing bedspread is to be replaced with a new bedspread replicating the “Eclat” pattern Albers made for Knoll Textiles of New York during a 30- year collaboration initiated by Florence Knoll Bassett, herself a seminal figure in modern office design. The pattern, available in six colors, is still in production.
Meanwhile, the German textile artist Katharina Jebsen is using archival methods to produce what is to be a second temporary addition to the sleeping area. These are window sun panels replicating draperies Albers designed for the private Manhattan residence known as the Rockefeller Guest House.
Completed in 1950, it was built by Philip Johnson on the same see- through, modernist principles he used for his Glass House. The year before, he had curated Anni Albers’ solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the first for a weaver and the first for a woman.
In an interview taped years later, Johnson calls Albers “the dream designer of fabrics,” and is likely talking about the Rockefeller draperies when he remembers, “a copper cloth she designed that was just so beautiful you didn’t know copper could do that.”
The textile series itself is being called “Pliable Plane,” after a landmark 1957 essay Albers wrote that begins by asserting the primal place textiles — as clothing and as shelter — occupy in human history. As mute and material as the Albers’ bedspreads and sun panels will be, they carry with them into The Glass House the artist’s own remarkable history.
In recent years several European museums have mounted big Albers’ exhibitions. One at the
Tate Modern in London introduced her as “an artist who changed weaving. A weaver who changed art.” Filling 11 rooms, its 350 pieces ranged from masterpiece “pictorial weavings” made as pure art to sample fabric swatches she made for manufacturers like Knoll. ( There are plans to have Katharina Jebsen produce a second new bedspread from just such a swatch.)
Cole Akers, curator and special projects manager at the Glass House, says he conceived the Pliable Plane project as a way to show how Albers’ work, and that of others to follow, functions in a living environment. Her essay foresaw a future in which textiles would be integral to architecture. “We didn’t want to just show her work in the painting gallery and call it a day,” he says.
Anni Albers’ name remains unavoidably linked with that of her husband, the artist and color theorist, Josef Albers. They arrived in Connecticut in 1950, when Josef joined the Yale School of Art as head of design. But they had met and married in the 1920s while studying and teaching at the Bauhaus school, the laboratory of modernism that flourished in Germany until the rise of Nazism.
The date is uncertain, but shortly before the Gestapo padlocked the school in June 1933 the Albers got a visit from an early proponent of modernism: the young Philip Johnson. It set off a six- degrees of separation chain of events.
In a video interview decades later, Albers recalls showing Johnson some of her work and him asking if they would be interested in moving to America. “It was just at the brink of things happening in Berlin,” she says. “And six weeks after that we received a letter from Black Mountain College.”
She says she and Josef read the letter, inviting them to teach, sitting on the edge of their bed. When they read the North Carolina college was experimental and arts oriented, she says, “We both said, ‘ That’s our place.’ ”
The letter came from Johnson, who had worked with Edward Warburg, the arts philanthropist, to arrange their move. Warburg, who lived his last years in Wilton, was a principle founder of the America Ballet and a MoMA founder. The Warburg family mansion where he grew up is now home to the Jewish Museum of New York. One of the highlights of the collection is “Six Prayers,” the six- panel tapestry Anni Albers made to commemorate the six million Jewish lives taken in the Holocaust.
Albers herself came from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. “Six Prayers” got a room of its own at the 2018 Tate Modern’s exhibition, where it was described as her most ambitious pictorial weaving. The author of a chapter on Albers’ knot drawings in the exhibition catalog was Brenda Danilowitz, the chief curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany. She is also working with the Glass House on the Albers project.
“I have no hesitation in saying what I think her masterpiece is and that is the piece at the Jewish Museum in New York called Six Prayers,” Danilowitz says.
Their intricate construction and use of multiple threads, including light- reflecting metals, make the visual impact of Albers’ weavings difficult to convey. Danilowitz settles on “It’s just spectacular" for the monumental “Six Prayers.” She says Albers worked on “Six Prayers” for a year. She made it and others in her home studio on North Forest Circle in New Haven. The labor involved is likely one reason she had stopped weaving and turned to print making by 1970, when she and Josef moved to Birchwood Drive in Orange.
Danilowitz attributes the huge growth in Albers’ stature to a variety of reasons: her Bauhaus roots, the greater interest in female artists, her boundary- breaking pictorial weavings, and finally her influential writing. Her seminal book “On Weaving” was recently reissued by Princeton University Press. She dedicated it to her “great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.”
“To her weaving was fundamental to existence,” Danilowitz says. “She felt weaving was the foundation of all creativity. You can talk about cave painting, but she felt weaving was the original art.”
At the Glass House, the first of the new bedspreads, the one based on the “Eclat” pattern, should be in place by a full reopening in September. Prints and textile samples made by Albers will be displayed more traditionally in the foyer of the painting gallery. The grounds themselves are expected to reopen June 1.
Elsewhere, the New Britain Museum of American Art was forced to close just before its exhibit, “In Thread and On Paper: Anni Albers in Connecticut,” was to open. Also done in collaboration with the Albers Foundation, the exhibit remains and may be extended past its original June 14 closing date.