Anni Albers

Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937.
Photo: Helen M. Post, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina

Innovative textile artist Anni Albers is currently being celebrated at London’s Tate Modern. As a female student at the radical Bauhaus art school in Germany, Albers was discouraged from taking up certain classes. She enrolled in the weaving workshop and made textiles her key form of expression. The exhibition explores the artist’s creative process and her engagement with art, architecture and design and displays the range of her work, from small-scale ‘pictorial weavings’ to large wall-hangings and the textiles she designed for mass production. We spoke to curator Ann Coxon to discover more about this pioneering artist – and why her work remains so relevant to today.

This is Anni Albers’ first major UK exhibition. Why do you think it’s taken so long?

It’s because of the media. Because Anni Albers was first and foremost working with weaving. Because the art that she made was made with thread. She stopped weaving when she was older, because it was quite physically demanding, and started printmaking. Quite late in her life, she made some comments about how when you’re working on paper it’s considered art but when you thread it’s considered craft.

That legacy of dividing into art and craft has continued, even though the ethos of the Bauhaus – where Anni Albers studied – was to bring design, craft and art together. Even though that happened 100 years ago, I think we’re still just catching up! It’s really important that Tate Modern is showing that textile can be used as a fine art medium and putting it centre stage.

Black White Yellow 1926 / 1965, original 1926 (lost), re-woven by Gunta Stölzl in 1965, cotton and silk, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Everfast Fabrics Inc. and Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969 / Art resource / Scala, Florence © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Could you tell us a bit about the weaving workshop in the Bauhaus?

At the Bauhaus, students took a preliminary course, then chose a workshop. We don’t know exactly how it came about but we do know that the weaving workshop became known as the women’s workshop. That women both gravitated towards it and were encouraged to take it up and discouraged from certain other disciplines. For various reasons, weaving wasn’t her first choice, but she took it up and really fell in love with it when she found her creative outlet there. And so this incredible thing happened at the weaving workshop, when these women were exploring weaving as a form of modernist art making.

The Bauhaus disbanded in the mid-1930s with the rise of National Socialism and Anni, and her husband Josef, were lucky enough to be offered to be offered teaching posts at Black Mountain College in the United States. But some of her peers were not so lucky. Otti Berger, a contemporary of Albers at the Bauhaus, unfortunately died in Auschwitz. Anni was of Jewish heritage as well. In the 1960s, she got back in touch with Gunta Stölzl, who was head of the weaving workshop, or Gunta Stölzl reached out to her, and together they recreated some of the beautiful wall-hangings from the Bauhaus era that had been lost during the war.

Going around the show, you really get a sense of how naturally experimental Anni Albers was.

I think the interesting thing about weaving is that you’ve got this quite rigid format, with the vertical warp threads that are set up on the loom, then the weft threads get woven across and through and so you’ve got this grid framework really at the heart of the endeavour. What Anni Albers’ was interested in exploring is: what can I do with that? What are the variations? What happens if you twist the warp threads? What happens if you use this technique? Or this one? She was really thinking about how to push all the possibilities.

I’d previously seen her work as photographic reproductions and it’s amazing how different they look when you see them in person.

That’s something that really comes through in textile media. We tend to privilege the visual and the optic. What comes through with textile art is that there’s this tactile and haptic register: not just what’s seen but also felt. I think Anni Albers’ work really makes you think about the tactile. She was very vocal in saying – even at the time that she was writing in the 1960s – that we were starting to lose touch with what it means to make things with our hands and she gave the example of when you go out to buy your sliced bread, it’s very different to kneading the dough to make the loaf of bread.

Study for Unexecuted Wallhanging 1926 The Josef and Anniversary Albers Foundation © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

There’s something of a recent revival in weaving. Do you think it’s that desire to get back in touch with our hands?

Everything is very visual and the touchscreen fills our day. More and more, we’re all glued to our phones. Everything is communicated very visually and perhaps it’s that longing to get back to something a bit more tactile, literally a bit more homespun. Certainly, lots of a younger generation of artists seem to be making reference to Anni Albers’ work or beginning to use textiles again as part of a multimedia practice, such as Sarah Sze – whose work has recently come into the Tate’s collection.

The exhibition also emphasises Anni Albers’ wide range of cultural influences. 

When Josef and Anni came to North Carolina in the 1930s, they travelled by road down to Mexico, and they both fell in love with Mexico and Mexican culture, history and making and they made several trips to different Latin American countries, such as Peru. Anni Albers  referred to the Peruvians as her “great teachers”. She was very interested in pre-Columbian textiles, unpicking them to see how they were constructed and fascinated by the way that weaving was really the most ancient form of communication, of technology, of civilisation. To take that, to inspire her to make weaving a modern project. She’s really taking that ancient art form and making it modern.

Anni Albers, Six Prayers, 1966–1967. Cotton/linen, bast/silver, Lurex. 1861 x 2972 mm. The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of the Albert A. List Family, JM © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

What would you say is Anni Albers’ masterpiece? 

The very beautiful work, Six Prayers. It was commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York as a memorial to the holocaust. It’s beautifully constructed. There’s a kind of light that shines out of it – it really is a masterpiece.

Anni Albers is at Tate Modern until 27 January 2019. Read about a stay at the Bauhaus here.

Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde

Photographer unknown, Rodchenko and Stepanova descending from the airplane. (for the film The General Line by Sergei Eisenstein), 1926. Courtesy Rodchenko and Stepanova Archives, Moscow

words: Victoria Rodrigues O’Donnell

With institutions like the Tate and National Gallery becoming more vocal about collecting and exhibiting works by women alongside projects like Katy Hessel’s The Great Women Artists Instagram account (featured in our current issue), the new exhibition at the Barbican, London, challenges our understanding of art history and women in Modernism. Showcasing the works of over 40 artist couples, ‘Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde’ seeks to reassess modern art and the influence of intimate collaborations on its development from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Little did I know that I would end up spending the next three hours walking through the space in enthrallment.

The modern couples in question vary from sexual orientation to location as well as artistic style and each room is dedicated to either a pair or group whose relationships inspired their creative output. It’s an understatement to call this an ambitious project, but I felt it succeeded most in shedding light on the works of women that have largely been overshadowed by their male partners and contemporaries. They even quote a reporter writing for the New York Evening Sun in 1917: "Some people think that women are the cause of Modernism, whatever that is."

Friedrich (Fritz) G Walker, Emilie Flöge in Chinese Imperial costume from the Qing Dynasty in the Gardens of the Villa Paulick in Seewalchen at Attersee 13 or 14 September 1913, 1913. IMAGNO Brandstätter Images, Vienna

Firmly established in the canon and soon to be celebrated in an exhibition at the Royal Academy, Gustav Klimt is joined here by his lifelong partner Emilie Flöge. While most of us are familiar with the legacies of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, Flöge’s contributions to fashion design and success as an entrepreneur remain virtually unrecognised. In 1904, Flöge opened the couture house Schwestern Flöge with her two sisters where they would sell the latest in women’s fashions and accessories. Photographs of Schwestern Flöge on display show its changing rooms decked out with designs from the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) – a style that would go on to influence Art Deco and Bauhaus. Flöge’s daring designs for modern women are perhaps best encapsulated by her free-flowing kaftan-esque smocks which rejected the rigidity of a corseted silhouette.

Sonia Delaunay, Stroll, 1923. Collection of V. Tsarenkov

Other women who worked with fashion and textiles as part of their oeuvre were Sonia Delaunay and Varvara Stepanova. The latter was a key figure in Constructivism, the Russian avant-garde movement better associated with her partner, Alexander Rodchenko, while the former is known for her colourful concentric paintings and patterns. Like Klimt and Flöge, these couples were advocates of art and design being integrated in all aspects of life. Although he dabbled with Neo-Impressionism, Robert Delaunay’s committed revolt against conventional painting methods and interest in colour theory would ultimately impact on his wife Sonia’s approach to designs for other mediums such as textiles, theatre and interiors.

In the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stepanova and Rodchenko were similarly dedicated to design that would be both decorative and functional. In the words of their collaborator and friend Vladimir Mayakovsky, “the streets shall be our brushes, the squares our palettes”. Not content with the limited reach of creating book covers, posters or photomontages, Stepanova moved her focus onto designing clothes for the everyday proletariat, concentrating on flexibility and dynamism – think bold colours, geometric shapes and chevron. 

Queer love, particularly between women, is at the centre of a section entitled ‘Chloe Liked Olivia’. Referring to a line from Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, this ‘exhibition within the exhibition’ is devoted to the female artists and writers drawn to Paris’ Left Bank in the 1920s. The display features personal letters, photographs and publications capturing the intellectual and erotic exchanges between the women who moved within these circles. For over 60 years, Natalie Clifford-Barney, nicknamed ‘the Amazon’, ran a weekly literary salon frequented by the likes of Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes as well as Colette, Jean Cocteau and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Paintings by Romaine Brooks, her long-term partner, line the walls of the circular space and epitomise her distinct use of a monochrome palette. 

Claude Cahun, Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror, checked jacket), 1928. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections

The significance of Woolf’s Orlando and its dedication to her lover Vita Sackville-West are also explored in the display. Inspired by this affair, Woolf wrote in her diary that the novel is “a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando. Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” Moving fluidly throughout time and gender, Orlando continues to be just as transgressive as it was when first published 90 years ago.

Elements of the display reappear elsewhere in the exhibition, like the room dedicated to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Spanning across 40 years, Cahun and Moore’s relationship was already established when Cahun’s mother married Moore’s father in 1917. The two would go on to challenge gender stereotypes via experimental photography and collage throughout the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. The importance of mirrors, queer desire and subverting traditional notions around female vanity feature heavily in the couple’s work and are echoed in Cahun’s surrealist autobiography: “I am one, you are the other. Or the opposite. Our desires meet one another.”

From the tempestuous and obsessive to the intimate and tender, I was still contemplating all the ways in which art and love weave into one another during my tube ride home. ‘Modern Couples’ is a superb celebration of what can arise when these two coalesce; forging new paths into the unknown and shaping modern art as we know it.

Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde is at the Barbican until 27 January 2019.

Fashioned From Nature

Silk train (detail), woven with a pattern of roses, c.1890s © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In our spring issue, we celebrate ethical fashion with our feature, Yours Sustainably. The V&A’s Fashioned From Nature exhibition delves into similar themes with its exploration of the complex relationship between fashion and the natural world since 1600. 

As the exhibition shows, the beauty of the natural world has always been an inspiration for fashion, influencing colour, fabrics and patterns. Unfortunately, sometimes the fashion industry has chosen to exploit the very thing that has provided that inspiration. 

Earrings made from heads of Red Legged Honeycreeper birds, circa 1875 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

These 1875 pair of earrings are formed from the heads of two real Honeycreeper birds – a hugely popular item that sold in enormous volume at the time. The devastating consequences of the plumage trade for world bird populations actually led to the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1891. Cartoons appeared in Punch satirising those women that supported the feather trade. The feather debate continues today.

Greenpeace Detox Catwalk in Bandung © Greenpeace/ Hati Kecil Visuals

Other protesters draw attention to the waste and sheer volume of raw material required by the fashion industry. Greenpeace launched the Detox campaign in 2011 to encourage legislators, manufacturers and brands to eliminate chemical pollution caused by the textile and clothing industries. The toxic substances used affect drinking water, with a devastating impact on wildlife and the human population.

'Grape’ dress (detail) made with Vegea, a leather alternative made from grape waste © Vegea

Fashioned From Nature also highlights the brands seeking out alternatives, for example Vegea, who use grape waste from the wine industry to form a leather-substitute (Italy produces around seven million tonnes of this waste each year).

Outfit made from leather off-cuts and surplus yarn, Katie Jones, 2017. Photograph by Rachel Mann

And, like our Yours Sustainably feature, it shows what customising can do to give clothes new life, as Katie Jones did for fashion writer Susie Lau (AKA @susiebubble) to wear during Fashion Revolution Week 2015. We also feature Katie Jones on page 65 of our latest issue – with details about her workshops for knitting and reinventing your clothes. 

Visit the V&A before 27 January 2019 for more inspiration, or pick up a copy of our spring issue.