Anni Albers / Wall Hanging 1926, Mercerized cotton, silk, 2032 x 1207 mm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Everfast Fabrics Inc. and Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969 , © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London
In the critical rehabilitation of weaving as a serious artform, much is made of the analogy between the figurative ‘weave’ of painting – the modernist grid being a heavy-handed example – and the literal weave of fabric on a loom. It is a comparison from which the art of weaving invariably comes out on the bottom. It is a comparison also which would have us see the weave as a starting point for something supposedly greater, and not the result of an accretion of experimentation, symbolism and knowledge, and an end in itself.
Shortly after moving to Black Mountain College in 1934, having trained at the Bauhaus, Anni Albers began taking frequent trips to South and Central America. She collected textiles, and her eye discriminated as much based on aesthetic interest and her own feel for quality as a producer of textiles as on the historical importance of the sample. For Albers, Peruvian weaving was the ‘highest point weaving could aspire to’ (1.). Her respect for the accumulated wealth of weaving knowledge from different cultures was evident in her own unhurried and sophisticated oeuvre. In the artist’s own words – ‘let threads be articulate again…to no other end than their own orchestration’ (2).
(1.) Briony Fer on Anni Albers in Tate exhibition catalogue
(2.) Anni Albers, ‘Pictorial Weaves’ in Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings, exh cat, Cambridge, MA 1959
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