Abstract Threads

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Two shows opening this week on Manhattan’s museum mile, one at the Met, the other at Cooper-Hewitt, are both magnificent. Though they draw from different periods, and one is a gathering of the work of many artists and craftsmen while the other is of just two, they are also surprisingly complementary.


The Cooper-Hewitt show, curated by the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Nicholas Fox Weber, gives top billing to the more famous of the Alberses: Josef (1888-1976). But its star is the much greater artist of the family: Anni (1899-1994). Josef, the color theorist and painter who also produced graphic design and furniture, is best known for his abstract series of paintings “Homage to the Square”; Anni is known for her textiles. “Designs for Living,” an exhibition of more than 120 tastefully installed objects made between 1920 and 1950, brings together Josef’s furniture, stained glass, and graphic design with Anni’s textiles and jewelry.


The Alberses met at the Bauhaus, where they both would rise to junior faculty positions. They married and, after the school’s closing in 1933, immigrated to America. They both taught at Black Mountain College, and Josef later taught at Harvard and Yale. He was the first living artist to be given a one-person show at the Metropolitan Museum. Anni, in 1949, became the first textile artist to have a solo show at MoMA.


Certainly, a comparison between the couple is not the intent of the show, but it is inescapable. And this exhibition makes clear Anni’s artistic superiority to Josef. Josef was best as a graphic designer: Vitrines of abstract album covers, holiday cards, and book covers, some bold, some delicate, are occasionally lovely. But his abstract stained glass and furniture, like his paintings, lack the playfulness essential to hard-edge abstraction. The geometric patterns in his stained-glass pieces dance without rhythm. Their colors sing off key. Bulbous knobs and drawer pulls are too large for his furniture’s austere, Modernist fronts. The knobs are not wrong, exactly, but like a bright red pimple on the end of a nose, they make you work too hard not to stare at them.


Anni Albers is arguably the greatest and most innovative textile designer of the 20th century. Like Josef, she was a devout Modernist. But unlike Josef, she did not treat Modernism as a “style” to emulate. She embraced it as a calling. At the Bauhaus, Anni studied with the abstract painter Paul Klee, who ran the weaving workshop. Many of Klee’s ideas about abstract pictorial structure came from his understanding of art from other cultures, especially ancient, including the enormous collection of pre-Columbian abstract textiles in Berlin’s Museum fur Volkerkunde.


Peruvian textiles and Klee’s teaching (Anni later referred to Klee, who talked about the “orchestration” of threads, as “her god at the time”) remained the largest influences on her abstract weavings. She was once asked by the head of Knoll textiles what had led her to invent the open weave. She responded that, on the contrary, the Andeans had invented the open weave 3,000 years ago. She had only “reintroduced” it.


It is interesting with this in mind to turn to the amazing “Colonial Andes” exhibition, curated by Elena Phipps and Johanna Hecht at the Met, and Cristina Esteras Martin at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. The subject of this show is the forced interracial marriage between Spanish and Peruvian cultural and artistic traditions. A culture clash show if there ever was one, it includes more than 175 works – paintings, tapestry, and silverwork, many of them masterpieces – that document the strange and at times awkward transition from Inca abstraction to viceregal representation.


Andean art evolved for thousands of years as an abstract tradition until the Spanish conquest of what is now Peru in 1532. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Incas had no written language in the conventional sense; their textiles (often woven garments, including wedding mantles and tunics) communicated their cultural beliefs through abstract, geometric forms – both symbolic and pictographic – held flat within the woven grid. Within a single generation, all of this was to change.


The Spanish forced their European Christian beliefs and iconography, as well as their representational pictorial conventions, onto Andean culture and art. Though the results sometimes can seem awkward, many of the paintings on view, surreal mixtures of seemingly Byzantine hierarchical structures, medieval manuscripts, and folk art, are spectacular. Yet it was the textiles and silverwork – artworks that, as they evolve more and more toward European strictures and iconography, still hold firmly to their abstract past – that made me swoon.


What excited Paul Klee and Anni Albers about Andean textiles was their primitive, nonillustrative power: a “timelessness” and “expressive directness” that transcended period and culture to convey a deeper, more visceral and universal mythology. The grid, which is the basis of all pictorial structure, is constantly felt in the Peruvian textiles (many utilize a checkerboard pattern). Textiles generally have no top or bottom, but can be rotated at will, making vertical and horizontal interchangeable and interdependent.


Klee understood that Andean textiles were constructed like Modernist abstract paintings; and that the rectangle of the canvas also could be “woven,” using vertical and horizontal lines and overlapping transparent color, producing a geometry that is held within, even as it activates, the grid. The “woven” space – which merges figure and ground, and in which shape is felt not as “thing” but as interweaving energies – could be a metaphor for creation within structure.


Anni Albers, like her Peruvian predecessors, expressed herself fully with pure line, shape, rhythm, and color. In fact, some works at the Met could be mistaken for Albers’s, and vice versa. Her light and airy weavings, based in nature but always abstract, can resemble rain on a windowpane. They glow from within with a muted, earthen light. Their wide range of grays ripples through their surfaces as if carried by the wind. She often mixed jute with cellophane to produce works that glisten and flicker within a beautifully pedestrian softness; some of her hanging screens, made of wooden slats and waxed-cotton thread, feel tribal.


Anni’s syncopated geometric patterns shift with the impact and rhythm of a Mondrian. Her colors can be bold – bright yellow, green, blue, or red – yet, emerging as they do from within the weaving, they never call attention to themselves. The field is felt through vibrations, as if color were breathing. And her choice of color is pitch-perfect. Albers’s weavings, as clear and timeless as the Andean works on view at the Met, express the Modernist “now” – a now that extends all the way back to a primitive “then.”


The New York Sun

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