At the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Anne Albers often guides her students back to what she calls "zero point." Imagine she said that you came to America through the Bering Strait in the 10th century. You have no tools, techniques or clothes available. You are hungry, the weather is hot and windy. There are many fish in the water. Branches, shells, seaweed and skeletons washed ashore. What will you use to weave the net? How will you survive?
This is a thought experiment aimed at giving importance to the basic elements of design. In Albers's view, artists and survivalists are not completely independent entities. Both must collect, stretch, weave, and process the material into a beautiful and practical form. In Albers' course, the first to create an unexpected juxtaposition of synthetic and organic, and then weave them purposefully.
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In 1933, she and her husband Joseph fled the Nazi party in power in Europe and came to this pioneering university. The influential Bauhaus school is closed indefinitely, and its members have integrated painting, sculpture, and design over the past ten years, scattered all over the world. "In a world as chaotic as the European world after the First World War, any exploratory work of art must be experimental in a very comprehensive sense," she wrote. "What already existed was proven wrong; everything that caused it seemed to be wrong." She insisted that the total chaos was "not human."
Her practice, including wall hangings, architectural innovations, jewellery and tapestries, has been influenced by the desire to actively participate in contemporary life through objects. Her architectural commissions included wallpaper for the union school established by Walter Gropius. In addition to pure cotton, she also used cellophane (a new material at the time) to make soundproof and filter walls. She believes that its deep solid color will not distract students.
Albers is today considered a pioneering figure in the history of modernism, despite the long shadows of her husband and her close friends Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky. It is safe to say that the gender marginalization of her media has ended. Her traveling retrospective held at the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Museum in Düsseldorf in 2018 was warmly welcomed. In the field of equal participation, two artists were investigated in depth. Given that the Joseph and Albers Foundation will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year, the time is ripe for renewed attention to her art.
Below, take a look at some of Anne Albers’ greatest achievements.
Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was born in a wealthy family and opposed the expectations of high-class women from an early age. She joined the Bauhaus School of Design in 1922, but she could not learn painting, and painting was mainly aimed at male artists. Instead, she explored craftsmanship. However, even in this discipline, gender division continues. (Sometimes these boundaries are even literal-the first time she saw Joseph, he was first a painter and entered through the window into the stained glass workshop where he worked.) Women are limited to weaving, which she thinks is a kind of " Quite sissy" craftsmanship. However, the particularity of textiles-the practicality of its materials, the disadvantaged position of the medium-quickly provided her with a breakthrough.
The Bauhaus in the 1920s was an era of exploration, and more importantly, Gropius left the school he founded in 1928. After him, the idea of industry as art became popular among students. Under the guidance of experimental weaver Gunta Stölzl, Albers tested the technical limits of textiles, avoiding abstract graphic representations. Her earliest works depict vertical colored panels woven from traditional yarn and more unusual materials (horsehair, cellophane, and silver thread). Works like Unexecuted Wallhanging (1926) superimpose solid-color vertical panels on a grid, reflecting the logic of Klee and Kandinsky, both of whom are school teachers.
In 1933, after the Nazi Party closed the Bauhaus, the Albers fled America’s Europe together with many others in the art world, including Gropius, Marcel Brewer, Mies van der Rohe and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The couple was invited to help develop the art and design curriculum at Black Mountain College. There, Annie transformed the aesthetic philosophy she developed as a student and lecturer in Berlin into a workshop that emphasized theory and materiality.
Albers began to engage in automatic knitting, which involved the use of machines that were faster than human hands. She sometimes lamented having to rely on this technology, believing that it limits the spontaneity and immediacy of using raw materials. "Creation means responding to materials, not realizing dreams like laymen imagined," she wrote in her landmark book "Weaving". "The first vision to accomplish something reflects the mood of the work better than the final form. As the work progresses, the form will appear." She illustrates this with Andean textiles, which she praised as technology and design The purest fusion.
Albers taught at the Montenegro College until 1948, when her own work achieved major developments in form. Knot (1926) is a denim painting that attracted people's early interest in twisted lines, which culminated in later masterpieces, such as Open Letter (1958). In that piece, she used leno knitting, which is a technique of weaving two threads tightly around the weft, leaving an empty decorative space between the two. Albers’ modernist aesthetics had a clear impact on the students of the academy, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa, whose use of interwoven textiles influenced them , She puts more emphasis on the production process rather than the final product.
Between 1935 and 1967, the Albers visited Mexico about 13 times and encountered traditional weaving styles that had a significant impact on the two artists' use of design and color. Anni collected a series of hand-scaled pre-Columbian textile fragments, which were later acquired by museums such as Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. In Oaxaca, the weaver taught her how to use a sling loom, which is a simple device consisting of wooden sticks, ropes, and a belt tied to the waist of the weaver. She became fascinated by it and brought a loom for her students at Black Mountain College. She told the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, "Peru's strap loom has embedded everything that today's high-power machine loom has."
Many of the textiles that Albers created after her initial visit were to commemorate the Mexican artists she admired, whose techniques rhymed with the modernist abstraction from Europe—and earlier than—the modernist abstraction. Her textile Monte Albán (1936) refers to the spiritual archaeological site and its Zapotec architecture she has visited, while the wall-mounted weaving of ancient characters (1936) is an example of pre-Columbian weavers who coded their belief system in a series of knots. The technology in China is appreciated. In Albers's work, complex thread structures float on the fibers she weaves. This is one of the first works that she calls "pattern weaving"-a textile that transcends the hierarchical distinction between crafts and fine arts.
'Complete single element'
In 1949, Albers held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. At that time, few arts using craftsmanship were displayed like this. In this show, she created a set of free hanging room dividers, woven from different materials such as cellophane, cotton, yarn and jute. They are an unexpected combination of soft and rough materials, attracting the audience's hands to slide on their surfaces. She developed the room divider in response to the development of modernist architecture in that era. This design made the open floor plan and the attic apartment framed by tall glass windows privileged. Light and air pass through her partition cleverly.
Albers believes that architecture is the creative field closest to weaving. He once said: “It is constructed from individual elements, and a whole is constructed from individual elements.” The Albers got a teaching position at Yale University, although she She has never held a formal position in the Department of Architecture, but she often lectures to students. At that time, she proposed the concept of "flexible plane", which described the duality of textiles: stable sources and materials that can be manipulated according to the environment. She insisted that the grids of large cities and the content of looms have a lot in common.
Albers was a secular person (she claimed to be only a Jew in the "Hitler sense"), but received a series of religious commissions in the late 1950s and 1960s, including designing an ark covering for a Jewish temple in Dallas. Texas. Six Prayer (1966–67) is one of her masterpieces and her biggest "pattern weaving", commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Reminiscent of a funeral shawl, Elegy is composed of six vertical panels woven from beige, white, black and silver threads, adding a subtle and otherworldly light to the work. In keeping with her religious ambivalence, her work avoids public references to Torah or Jewish portraits, but instead focuses on form and function. Each color dominates its own panel, while the black and white yarns wind up irregularly, paying tribute to the spirit of individuality that is enduring in unity. Albers later said of this work: "I use the line itself as a sculptor or painter using his medium to produce a biblical effect, which reminds people of the sacred text."
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