“To Let Threads Be

Articulate Again”: Reading

Anni Albers’s Calligraphic
Weavings
STEPHANIE HAMMER
University of St. Andrews, Class of 2018

ABSTRACT

Though the weaver, printmaker, and writer Anni Albers (1899-1994) left
behind a body of incredibly thought-provoking work, the current
scholarship is filled with gaps and unanswered questions. For example, no
in-depth investigation of her so-called pictorial weavings has been carried
out. Created from the late 1940s until the end of the 1960s, Albers intended
these works to be viewed as art, worthy of contemplation. However, besides
stating that her pictorial weavings were meant to be viewed as art, Albers
left behind little specific information about them; for example, there are no
extant draft notations for these works, and as a result, little is known about
their structures. This paucity of information is likely responsible, in part, for
the vagueness with which commentators have described them. Indeed, a
frequent tendency in analyses of the pictorial weavings has been for the
authors to remark on their ‘mysterious’ or ‘enigmatic’ nature, and then move
on without further elaboration. Using the so-called ‘calligraphic weavings’, a
subset of the pictorial weavings which have the appearance of writing on
them, as a case study for examining the challenges of interpreting Anni
Albers’s pictorial weavings, this dissertation will seek to put forward a
preliminary framework for understanding them. For when the absence of
information Albers left behind about her pictorial weavings is viewed
together with the beliefs expressed in her writings about how works of art
are best understood, interpretation shifts to the process of viewing rather
than the attempt to discern an easily decipherable meaning.

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To Anni Albers, who repeatedly stated that a ‘feeling of amazed

confusion’ was emblematic of modern life, the engagement with materials,
as well as the process of creating objects from them, could act as a
counterweight to this bewilderment.1 Albers argued that work with
unformed material facilitated a process of discovery through which the
‘irrevocable laws’ governing material were elucidated, thus providing a sense
of logic and constancy in a world seemingly characterized by flux.2 The idea
of engaging with the tactile qualities of materials is an integral component of
the writings of Anni Albers, and tactility itself is also a crucial element of her
woven works. These display a continual sensitivity to the textures and
thicknesses of various kinds of threads, both traditional materials and
modern inventions, which are combined and contrasted to great effect. 3 For
example, in an undated textile sample at the Albers Foundation (see plate 1),
rows of dense, fluffy chenille alternate with thinner, fairly open rows of
brown weft threads.4 Between the chenille and densely packed brown
threads, the horsehair warp is left visible, resulting in open spaces that stand
out against the density of the chenille. The smooth, almost plastic-like
texture of the somewhat transparent horsehair also contrasts with the

1
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, in Selected Writings on Design, 12. In ‘Work With Material’, Selected
Writings, 6, Albers writes, ‘Life today is very bewildering.’ Though these essays were both written
on the eve of the Second World War, the argument for engagement with material expressed in them
can be seen as representative of Albers’s beliefs, as she continued to express similar views for the
remainder of her life. See, for example, ‘Tactile Sensibility’, originally published in On Weaving in
1965 and reprinted in Selected Writings on Design, and also ‘Material as Metaphor’, Selected
Writings, from 1982.
2
Albers, ‘Work With Material’, 7.
3
For example, the fibers comprising the textile samples at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in
Bethany, CT, include cotton, saran, horsehair, metallic threads, jute, chenille, cellophane, and silk.
4
Weaving can be described as the process of inserting horizontal weft threads at right angles over
and under vertical warp threads, which are immobile and held in tension. The basic structure of a
weave, then, is a grid. Draft notations, also laid out on a grid, denote the structural makeup of a
specific textile pattern, thus enabling weavers to recreate them.

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softness of the chenille, which is reminiscent of caterpillar fur. In short, the

properties of the threads used become magnified through placement beside
fibers characterized by opposite qualities. This careful attention to contrast
and texture is visible throughout Albers’s woven works.
However, though the manipulation of the varying textures and
thicknesses of thread types comprises a significant aspect of Anni Albers’s
textiles, it is precisely these tactile effects that tend to be lost in
photographic reproductions, due to the inability of photography as a
medium to capture a satisfactory sense of texture or three-dimensionality.
This is an important point to bear in mind for the duration of this essay,
centering as it does on Albers’s woven works.

I. Anni Albers’s Pictorial Weavings and the Question of

Interpretation
Anni Albers is particularly known for her involvement in the Bauhaus,
where she studied and taught weaving, and Black Mountain College, where
she and her husband, Josef, accepted teaching posts in 1933.5 After leaving
the college in 1949, the Alberses moved to Connecticut, where they
remained for the rest of their lives. It was at this later stage that Anni Albers
began to create what she called her pictorial weavings. A focal point of her
creative energies until the late 1960s, when she gave up weaving in favor of
printmaking, the pictorial weavings demonstrate the desire, as Albers wrote
in the 1959 exhibition catalogue devoted to these works:
to let threads be articulate again
and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own
orchestration,
not to be sat on, walked on,

5
See Tabatabai Asbaghi, ‘Anni Albers: 1899-1994’, in Anni Albers, and the Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation, ‘Artists: Chronology’, for a complete chronology of Albers’s life.

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only to be looked at.6

In short, these works were meant for aesthetic appreciation and Formalist
contemplation, in the manner of paintings, and it is this intention that the
term ‘pictorial weaving’ refers to, rather than any figural content. To
underscore this aim, Albers frequently signed her pictorial weavings and
displayed them in frames.7
Through these actions, Albers sought to signify that her pictorial
weavings should be regarded as works of art, meant to stimulate reflection
and sustained engagement. These efforts can be seen as a tactic to
circumvent the Beaux-Arts hierarchy, and an awareness of this is important
for viewing these works. The result of a ‘centuries-long process’ through
which the terms ‘art’ and ‘craft’ came to be seen as antithetical to each other,
the aforementioned hierarchy is based upon the assumption that the arts,
defined as painting, sculpture, and sometimes architecture, are associated
exclusively with intellectual labor, that is, with the mind, whereas the so-
called crafts, including weaving, are assumed to be the product of labor that
is entirely manual, not requiring thought.8 The dissociation of ‘the
intellectual portion of artistic labor from its manual counterpart,’ as Rafael
Cardoso has put it, helped lead to the elevation of the arts above the crafts,
and became more entrenched through industrialization.9 Though the Arts
and Crafts Movement, the Bauhaus, and Modernist movement more
generally, sought to challenge the separation of art and craft in the

6
Italics original. Albers, Pictorial Weavings, opening page. See Appendix A for the complete
statement Albers made about her pictorial weavings in this catalogue.
7
Gardner-Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles, 122.
8
Cardoso, ‘Craft Versus Design’, 323. See rest of article for a detailed account of the process that
led to the separation of ‘art’ from ‘craft’ in Europe.
9
Ibid. The status of weaving was further denigrated due to its association with the ‘feminine’.
Wortmann-Weltge’s Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop was the first
work on the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop to address this, as well as being the first in-depth analysis
of the workshop itself.

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has nonetheless persisted.10 As T’ai

Smith observed in 2014, the unspoken assumption that the crafts are
‘manual and technical, but never intellectual’ still haunts much art historical
writing.11
One ramification of the exclusion of certain objects, in this case
weavings, from standard accounts of Art History, is that the canon ‘becomes
an increasingly impoverished and impoverishing filter for the totality of
cultural possibilities generation after generation’.12 There is a general
omission of weaving from introductory art historical texts, and the
subsequent lack of knowledge about the medium itself is detrimental to
thoughtful considerations of such objects.13 While some of the authors of
such texts draw attention to the historiographical reasons that have led to
the exclusion of the crafts from standard accounts of Art History, they do
not discuss craft objects in detail, and thus perpetuate it. For example, the
authors of Art in Renaissance Italy state in the book’s introduction that
‘painting, sculpture, and architecture dominate histories of art, to some
degree because of early histories,’ such as Giorgio Vasari’s influential book,
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first

10
Ibid, 323-324.
11
Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory, xxi. See the book’s introduction for a summary of recent
literature about the status of the craft object.
12
Pollock, ‘About Canons and Culture Wars’, 4. While Pollock is referring specifically to the
exclusion of artists from the canon on the basis of race and gender, her point applies equally to the
exclusion of so-called craft objects.
13
For example, in Snyder’s 578-page Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic
Arts from 1350 to 1575, a discussion of weavings and textiles is limited to pp. 23-26, 240-1, 407-9,
463, and 466-7. Paoletti and Radke, in Art in Renaissance Italy, mention tapestries on p. 34. There
is no mention in Hyde Minor, Baroque and Rococo: Art & Culture, Sutherland Harris,
Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture, or Eisenman and Crow, Nineteenth Century Art: A
Critical History. Edwards and Wood, in Art of the Avant-Gardes, devote pp. 374-5 to an analysis of
Constructivist textiles. These books have been chosen because, as recently published
undergraduate-level introductory texts, they can be seen as summations of the general knowledge
thought required to enable a sufficient understanding of Art History.

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published in 1550.14 Though the authors subsequently remind the reader

that ‘the visual culture of the Renaissance was enriched by a range of other
arts as well’, and that these ‘must also be considered integral’ to the ‘visual
language’ of the time, the book then proceeds to largely ignore these ‘other
arts’, including tapestries, in favor of wall painting, sculpture, and
architecture.15 The logic the authors seem to be following is that simply
drawing attention to this problem in a short paragraph of the book’s
introduction is enough to counteract it.16 However, the lack of attention paid
to weavings in introductory art historical texts means that the viewer is
likely to be less familiar with weaving, both its incredibly complex process
and examples of actual works, than painting, sculpture, and architecture.
This omission of so-called craft objects also unfortunately results in a lack of
relevant frameworks for understanding or interpreting work in such media.
Anni Albers’s awareness of the different statuses accorded to ‘art’ and
‘craft’ objects is evident in an interview with Richard Polsky, in which she
said of her weavings and prints: ‘I find that, when the work is made with
threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art’.17 For
Albers, this prejudice, combined with the ability to produce a far greater
quantity of prints than weavings, had the result that, in printmaking,
‘recognition comes more easily and happily, the longed-for pat on the
shoulder’.18 In light of this, the repeated insistence in Albers’s writings that
works of art are defined by ‘thoughtfulness and care and sensitivity in regard

14
Paoletti and Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, 34.
15
Ibid.
16
The passage itself, from the one paragraph section ‘Other Workshops’, is the conclusion of a
thirteen page section discussing the methods and materials of Italian Renaissance art. The main
divisions are as follows: ‘Wall Painting’, ‘Sculpture’, ‘Architecture’, and ‘Other Workshops’. Ibid,
pp. 22-34.
17
Albers, ‘American Craftspeople Project: The Reminiscences of Anni Albers’, 21.
18
Ibid.

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to form’ rather than any specific medium is surely not coincidental; by

emphasizing these over the type of medium used, she sought to elevate
kinds of artistic production that were frequently denigrated.19 In ‘Material as
Metaphor’, for example, Albers stated:
Most of our lives we live closed up in ourselves, with a
longing not to be alone, to include others in that life that is
invisible and intangible.
To make it visible and tangible, we need light and material,
any material. And any material can take on the burden of what
had been brewing in our consciousness or subconsciousness, in
our awareness or in our dreams.20
In this essay, Albers defines artistic production as work with ‘any
material’ that makes one’s inner life, one’s thoughts, ‘visible and tangible’ to
others through a dialogue with the material at hand.21 Significantly, Albers
does not restrict what material can be. By citing the human desire to
communicate one’s ‘invisible and intangible’ life to others as the source
underpinning all artistic production, Albers places all media on the same
level. Materials, in her definition, act as the intermediary through which
ideas can find tangible expression, and the value of the resulting work lies in
how successfully thoughts and ideas have been communicated through a
dialogue with the chosen materials.
It seems clear, then, that the intent to inspire reflection was an
important component of the pictorial weavings, and this is underscored in
an unpublished, handwritten statement held at the Albers Foundation.
Albers wrote: ‘I want to make things for the contemplative mind, for those

19
Albers, On Weaving, 54. The chapter from which this quote is taken, ‘Designing as Visual
Organization’, was also reprinted in Selected Writings on Design, and subsequent quotations will
be taken from the latter book.
20
Albers, ‘Material as Metaphor’, 73. The essay is the typescript of a statement Albers gave at the
College Art Association’s annual meeting in 1982.
21
Ibid.

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moments when you sink back into yourself.’22 The emphasis on thought
seems clear enough, but when attempts are made to ascertain what thoughts
Albers sought to ‘make visible and tangible’ to others in these works, precise
answers seem out of reach, for the abstract elements of the pictorial
weavings do not narrate; no single, self-evident truth emerges from them.
Recourse to the available sources on Albers and her weavings yields
little information that could answer this question. While Albers was quite
clear about her intention for the pictorial weavings, namely that they be
taken seriously as works of art intended for contemplation, her other
statements regarding the pictorial weavings give little insight, particularly
into specific works. On the one hand, she stated that her concern was ‘with
form, line, color, proportions and surface per se’, suggesting that perhaps a
Formalist approach to viewing should be taken.23 However, it is unclear how
exactly the ‘beliefs, feelings, and ideas’ she tried to get ‘into them’ are
communicated through the formal elements of her often quite abstract
pictorial weavings, or how their manifestation might differ or develop
throughout these works.24 Furthermore, while most pictorial weavings can
be quite precisely dated, little other information about them is known; for
example, no draft notations exist for them, and as a result, little is known
about their structures.25
This lack of information is compounded by the circumstances of their
creation. Most pictorial weavings, with the exception of four ark panel
curtains for synagogues, and the Six Prayers memorial to the victims of the
Holocaust, were not commissioned. 26 While weaving is often thought of as a

22
Albers, ‘Untitled Statement [I want to make things for the contemplative mind]’.
23
Welliver, ‘A Conversation with Anni Albers’, 44.
24
Ibid.
25
Danilowitz, interview with author.
26
See Kelly Feeney, ‘Anni Albers’, in Anni Albers, for a discussion of the commissions for the
synagogue ark panels and Six Prayers.

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communal process, Albers created her pictorial weavings alone, in private,

and they can thus be understood as personal explorations in which she did
not overtly reference the styles of others.27 For example, while Albers’s
admiration for Pre-Columbian weavings is well-documented – she even
dedicated On Weaving to her ‘great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru’ –
her pictorial weavings do not emulate them stylistically.28 Rather, she looked
to Pre-Columbian weavings to discover and learn about techniques such as
the leno weave, which is characterized by a loose, open, and layered
structure.29 The privacy in which the pictorial weavings were created, as well
as the fact that they are such unique objects, make it difficult to establish an
interpretive framework for them.
At the center of this essay, then, stands the lack of information about
the pictorial weavings themselves. While it is noteworthy that the most
sustained engagement with this absence by commentators has been limited
to passing characterizations, for example in exhibition reviews, of Albers’s
work as ‘mysterious’ or ‘enigmatic’, more significant is the silence on the
part of Anni Albers herself.30 It is unlikely that Albers, who constructed her
weavings and writings with such care and attention to detail, would simply
have lost the draft notations for nearly all of her weavings in an unfortunate
accident. Nor is it likely that she would have been able to create them
without any kind of documentation; some of her larger weavings consist of

27
I am grateful to Brenda Danilowitz for pointing this out to me. Danilowitz, interview.
28
Albers, On Weaving, v. For a discussion of the influence of Pre-Columbian textiles on Albers’s
work, see Gardner-Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles.
29
Danilowitz, interview with author.
30
For example, Sarah Booth Conroy, reviewing the 1985 retrospective of Albers’s work for The
Washington Post, commented: ‘Her work is full of hidden thoughts, mysterious suggestions, secret
meanings, mantras for meditation.’ Booth Conroy, ‘Weaving an Artistic Path’, D1. Another
emblematically vague description of the pictorial weavings can be found in Wortmann-Weltge,
Bauhaus Textiles, 170.

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up to 1000 warp threads alone, necessitating some sort of planning.31

However, though written source material that could guide interpretations of
the pictorial weavings is absent, this does not mean that understanding is
irrevocably blocked. The viewing experience opened up by the lack of
written information about the pictorial weavings is in line with the
emphasis, in Albers’s writings, on judging art intuitively rather than
intellectually. Thus, Albers’s writings are a good starting point when seeking
a rudimentary interpretive framework for the pictorial weavings.

II. The ‘Calligraphic Weavings’

Due to the scope of this essay, the focus will be on those pictorial
weavings which appear to have a written script embedded in their surface;
their interpretation, in particular, is made difficult by the lack of written
information. Termed ‘calligraphic weavings’ by Mary Jane Jacob, ‘a sense of
writing is created’ in this subset of the pictorial weavings ‘by inlaid weft
threads against plaid, vertically striped, or solid-color backgrounds’.32 The
appearance of writing is created through use of the supplementary-weft
technique, in which an additional set of weft threads is passed over the
ground weave during the process of weaving, enabling the creation of an
additional pattern on the textile itself.33 In the calligraphic weavings, these
threads climb up across the surface of the weave, generally at right angles,
creating interconnected horizontal rows that imitate writing. In Albers’s
1950 work Black-White-Gold I (plate 2), black, white, and a few golden-
brown supplementary-weft threads alternate within a rectangular format.
The sense that these are abstract writing is underscored by the rectangular

31
I am grateful to Karis Medina, who has been investigating the structure of Albers’s weavings, for
bringing this to my attention. Karis Medina, interview with author.
32
Jacob, ‘Anni Albers’, 96.
33
Medina, interview with author.

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format these threads are contained in, echoing the appearance of an

inscribed tablet or printed page. Even without the presence of rectangular
margins, like in the 1963 weaving Under Way (plate 3), the sense of writing
is not diminished. In this textile, the red and white supplementary-weft
threads have been compressed in places, and the resulting pattern of thick
and thin thread mimics the appearance of words and the spaces between
them. The term ‘calligraphic weavings’ could potentially be expanded to
encompass those works which include patterns of dots or dashes suggestive
of a code; there are several such textiles. In Haiku (plate 4), for example,
dots, dashes, and x marks are combined with the supplementary-weft
technique outlined above, evoking several different systems of written
communication simultaneously, not just alphabetic script. However, due to
the limited size of this essay, the weavings examined will be those that
adhere to a restricted definition of ‘calligraphic weaving’.
If attempting to interpret Albers’s pictorial weavings, the calligraphic
weavings are an appropriate place to start. The sense of enigma created by
the fact that their ‘script’ cannot be deciphered, and therefore does not lead
to a literal meaning, is complemented by the lack of written source material
pertaining to the calligraphic weavings. Even their titles have a tendency to
confuse rather than elucidate. The role that the titles of and written
information adjacent to objects under consideration play in guiding the
viewer’s understanding has been discussed at length, for example by Roland
Barthes, who argued that they act as anchors for interpretation.34 While
titles of several other pictorial weavings, such as the 1949 work City (plate
5), or Pasture of 1958 (plate 6), seem to connect to what is depicted, the
same cannot be said of the calligraphic weavings described above. In both
City and Pasture, what the titles signify is evoked in an abstract way. In

34
Barthes, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, 39.

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City, the gridlike design of the central section is reminiscent of a city skyline.
Rectangular shapes, skyscrapers in this context, emerge from a golden-
brown background, which can be interpreted as the sky and its reflection in
a body of water. In Pasture, the pattern of green, white, and orange shapes
could be seen as an aerial view of fields containing different crops, or
perhaps the different plants found in one field, with sheep grazing amongst
them. While the ‘city’ and ‘pasture’ depicted are both abstract ones, meaning
that each viewer’s response will be dependent on personal experience, the
signifier and signified still connect. By engaging with the tactile qualities of
these weavings, the way the threads have been constructed, the viewer is
able to come to an interpretation that satisfactorily answers the question of
what is depicted.
The same cannot be said of the calligraphic weavings. The title Haiku,
for example, makes the reference to writing clear enough, but how can the
work’s pattern of dots, dashes, and x marks be connected to the form and
appearance of an actual haiku? In the case of Black-White-Gold I, the almost
Whistlerian title references the formal aspects of the piece, but not the
‘writing’ or the meanings that might stem from it. Under Way is particularly
perplexing; due to the title’s ambiguity, it is unclear whether a reference is
being made to the formal elements of the piece or the evocation of writing
through the arrangement of supplementary-weft threads. A definitive
answer cannot be proven; speculation seems both pointless and beside the
point. In short, there is only sparse written information about the
calligraphic weavings that could suggest what thoughts Anni Albers was
working through in the process of their creation; often even the titles
confuse, rather than guide, interpretation.
As a result of the script-like appearance of the supplementary-weft
threads, it is tempting to try to ‘read’ these works, to search for a literal

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meaning embedded in the weave itself. Indeed, the imitation of writing

initially seems to suggest the appropriateness of such an approach.
However, if looking for a literal, easily decipherable meaning when
examining the calligraphic weavings, viewing inevitably becomes a puzzling
and vexing process. It has been argued that the calligraphic weavings are
meditations on the idea of language and the nature of communication
itself.35 However, a fundamental aspect of language and communication,
namely understanding, is prevented in these works because the ‘scripts’
cannot be decoded. Perhaps the meaning of the calligraphic weavings – if
there is only one - does not reside in the successful decipherment of the
‘writing’, but rather, is implied by the appearance of script itself. Tracing the
supplementary-weft threads can trigger a process of contemplation. This
interpretation seems to be supported by the writings of Anni Albers herself.

III. Establishing an Interpretive Framework

In her writings, Anni Albers repeatedly emphasized the importance of
engaging with the tactile qualities of materials, rather than being led solely
by intellectual information about them. In Albers’s definition, ‘intellectual
work’ constituted the absorption of pre-formulated information, for example
by reading a book or listening to music, rather than gaining understanding
through engagement with an unformed material.36 Albers argued that work
with unformed material facilitated an understanding of the ‘irrevocable
laws’ governing it, thus providing a sense of logic and constancy in a world
seemingly characterized by flux.37 She was critical of the tendency to, as Bill
Brown has put it, ‘look through objects (to see what they disclose about
history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us)’,
35
Gardner-Troy, Anni Albers, 148.
36
Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, in Selected Writings, 27.
37
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 7.

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rather than at them as things. 38 In ‘Art – A Constant’, she wrote, ‘[w]e often
look for an underlying meaning of things when the thing itself is the
meaning. Intellectual interpretation may hinder our intuitive insight’.39
Though it is unclear whether Albers was familiar with the work of
philosopher Martin Heidegger, her insistence that engaging intuitively,
rather than intellectually, with objects will bring the viewer closer to their
essences as things, echoes Heidegger’s critique of the Kantian belief that
‘things in themselves’ are inaccessible, and must be mediated by knowledge
formation.40
However, while Albers argued that engaging with the tactile qualities
of materials would give far more insight into things themselves than
absorbing information about them, she felt that looking ‘through’ objects
had become pervasive. As a result of industrialization, the scope of
information, and also the speed at which it could be transmitted, increased,
and the process of production was broken up into steps. ‘With expanding
knowledge goes limitation in range’, she wrote in ‘Design: Anonymous and
Timeless’, first published in 1947.41 Where formerly, individuals had been
involved in the entire process of creating objects, one result of mass
production was that the ‘process of manufacture is necessarily broken up
into separate stages, each one in different hands’.42 Both the producers and
consumers of objects had become disconnected from the process of shaping
materials. In ‘Tactile Sensibility’, Albers observed, ‘[o]ur materials come to
us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and

38
Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 4.
39
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 14.
40
I am grateful to Drs. Shona Kallestrup and Sam Rose for explaining this to me. See Heidegger,
‘The Thing’. For recent scholarship on the debate about how objects are best understood as things,
see Brown, ‘Thing Theory’.
41
Albers, ‘Design: Anonymous and Timeless’, in Selected Writings, 37.
42
Albers, ‘Designing’, in Selected Writings, 18-19.

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sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter
to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread’.43 Albers defined ‘raw
material’ broadly, as ‘concrete substances and also colors per se, words,
tones, volume, space, motion’, and all of them mostly reached the viewer
‘already transposed into a certain key’.44 She summed up the situation thus:
‘we are overgrown with information, decorative maybe, but useless in any
constructive sense. We have developed our receptivity and have neglected
our formative impulse’.45 In short, Albers was critical of the tendency to look
‘through’ rather than at objects, for it prevented individuals from engaging
with the world they lived in.
Furthermore, the situation was perpetuated by prevailing methods of
education, which Albers felt neglected ‘a training in experimenting and
doing’, promoting instead a sense of safety in spectatorship.46 Here, too, the
expansion of knowledge played a part, for the ‘tremendous field of
knowledge to be covered in a short time’ resulted in ‘dependence on
authority’.47 This was to the detriment of students, who, awash in reams of
information, far too much of it to make sense of, oscillated ‘between
admiration and uncertainty’, not having developed faith in their own
abilities.48 The ‘overemphasis’ on what Albers called ‘intellectual work’ also
led to a devaluation of the judgments formed from lived experience, thus
transposing ‘understanding into assumed experience which can be right but
may be wrong’.49 If this ‘assumed experience’ is indeed wrong, the

43
Albers, ‘Tactile Sensibility’, in Selected Writings, 69.
44
Ibid.
45
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 6.
46
Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, 25.
47
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 6.
48
Ibid, 6-7.
49
Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, 27.

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discrepancy between it and lived experience only heightens confusion and

uncertainty, because what one has been taught to expect bears no relation to
what is actually experienced.
To Albers, the solution to the vast sense of uncertainty exacerbated by
the reliance on ‘preformulated material’ was work with raw materials
themselves, particularly those that are difficult to form.50 In ‘Work with
Material’, she wrote, ‘we must come down to earth from the clouds where we
live in vagueness, and experience the most real thing there is: material’.51 On
one hand, work with material could decrease confusion by giving ‘some
insight into those principles of nature to which we are all subjected’.52 It
could also, Albers argued, increase faith in oneself, for ‘unformed or
unshaped matter, is the field where authority blocks independent
experimentation less than in many other fields’.53 As a result, individuals are
dependent upon their own judgment in the process of working with
material.
It is here that the lack of information provided about the pictorial
weavings can be seen to align with Albers’s beliefs, for she argued that the
tendency to be guided by intellectual rather than intuitive interpretations
prevented an understanding of art. Looking ‘through’ an object to trace its
history and context can sometimes prevent an appreciation of the work
itself. Therefore, it seems more useful to approach the act of viewing the
calligraphic weavings as a process that can stimulate contemplation, a space
for articulating one’s own thoughts, rather than an effort to decipher them,
to search for codes embedded in the threads themselves. The tactile qualities
of Albers’s weavings certainly aid in this. The layering and varying structural

50
Albers, ‘Tactile Sensibility’, 69.
51
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 6.
52
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 14.
53
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 7.

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combinations of the threads creates movement and rhythm; it is easy for the
viewer to become absorbed by tracing the movement of a single thread as it
disappears and reappears throughout the weave. If the notion that Albers’s
weavings must contain a literal content is put aside, they can become a
conduit through which contemplation is facilitated. Perhaps the titles and
evocative patterns of the pictorial weavings, such as Haiku and City, can be
generally understood as triggers or starting points in this process.
This is further supported by Albers’s statements about the process of
creating art. On multiple occasions, Albers explained that she did not begin
with a fixed idea of what the finished work would be. ‘We have plans and
blueprints but the finished work is still a surprise’, she once remarked.54 In
short, she was guided, step by step, through experimenting with the
possibilities that manipulating threads presented. Here, again, the focus is
on the intuitive, rather than what Albers called the intellectual. ‘I’m sure the
naming comes afterwards,’ she said in an interview with Neil Welliver, ‘As it
should. Which is something that art historians don’t easily understand. I
think they always think you start with a developed concept.’55 In short,
Albers insisted that works of art are not straightforward reflections of ideas,
but rather, their mediation, exploration, and development through the
process of working with material. The process of viewing the pictorial
weavings, then, should perhaps incorporate this emphasis on process and
exploration.
As T’ai Smith has pointed out, it is interesting that Albers’s writings,
which, as texts, can be seen as examples of the ‘intellectual approach’ she
cautioned against, ultimately lead the reader back to her works, thereby
attempting to ‘restore “the experience of direct experience of the

54
Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, 26.
55
Welliver, ‘A Conversation with Anni Albers’, 45.

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medium”’.56 In short, her use of ‘preformulated material’ is a means rather

than an end; the aim is to bring readers back to unshaped matter itself with
the hope that they will re-learn how to engage with its tactile qualities.57 The
same seeming paradox is also present in the calligraphic weavings. Initially,
the viewer may attempt to discern what the ‘writing’ means by trying to
decipher it, rather than focusing on the weaving itself. However, as signs of
script only, these threads cannot be deciphered; they remain mysterious.
Therefore, whether or not the viewer will reach some kind of understanding
ultimately depends on the ability to engage with the weaving itself.
In Anni Albers’s pictorial weavings, then, emphasis is placed on the
thought that underpins all artistic production, regardless of the material
chosen, as well as the engagement with their tactile qualities. To Albers, the
ability to engage with the tactility of objects was immensely important, for,
as she wrote in ‘Art – A Constant’, only by redeveloping ‘those sensibilities
which can lead to immediate perception… can we regain the faculty of
directly experiencing art’.58 Amidst chaos and uncertainty, art took on a
spiritual meaning for Albers. She perceived ‘[a]ll art work, such as music,
architecture, and even religion and the laws of science … as the transformed
wish for stability and order’, a wish that increased during times of
vertiginous change.59 However, Albers argued that, due to the changes that
had transformed Europe in the preceding years, only art created through
work with material remained able to fulfil ‘lasting fundamental spiritual,
emotional, and sensuous needs’.60 Art, in Albers’s view, was a steadfast

56
Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory, 145. The quote Smith cites is from Albers, ‘Design:
Anonymous and Timeless’, 38.
57
Albers, ‘Tactile Sensibility’, 69.
58
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 14.
59
Albers, ‘Work with Material’, 7.
60
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 11. See this essay, especially pp. 10-11, for Albers’s reasoning behind
the statement that only art remained as a lasting guide.

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guide, to be turned to ‘again and again’.61 Writing that ‘the whole of nature,
though we always seek it, remains hidden from us’, Albers argued that art
plays a reassuring role by trying ‘to show us a wholeness that we can
comprehend’.62 However, she felt that because of the disconnection from
materials themselves, art often became ‘strangely obscured’.63 Only by
restoring ‘the experience of direct experience of the medium’ and learning to
trust intuitive judgments over intellectual information in the process, could
an understanding of art be restored.64
However, focusing on the tactile qualities of the pictorial weavings
when viewing them does not restore ‘the experience of direct experience of
the medium’; Albers argued that only work with material can do that.65
‘Learning to form’, Albers stated in ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, ‘makes us
understand all forming. This is not the understanding or misunderstanding
we arrive at through the amateur explaining to the amateur – appreciating –
this is the fundamental knowing’.66 Though tactile qualities constitute a
crucial element of the pictorial weavings, these works cannot be defined as
unformed material. It must be asked, then, that if, as Albers contended,
‘fundamental knowing’ is limited to those who shape unformed material,
what the implications are in a world where, in Albers’s words, ‘only a few
people are genuinely responsive to art’ because most ‘merely toast the
bread’.67 Do Albers’s weavings, in this view, not become generally

61
Albers, ‘Oral History Interview’, 6.
62
Albers, ‘Designing as Visual Organization’, 68.
63
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 14.
64
Albers, ‘Design: Anonymous and Timeless’, 38.
65
Ibid.
66
Albers, ‘One Aspect of Art Work’, 28.
67
Albers, ‘Art – A Constant’, 12.

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inaccessible because, in her assessment, they do not communicate in the

‘rational or symbolical’ manner that is generally expected?68
Albers’s position seems rather close to the Formalist Clive Bell’s, who
stated in ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’ that true appreciation of art is
predicated on the ability to perceive ‘Significant Form’, a phenomenon
nebulously defined as ‘lines and colors combined in a particular way’.69 Bell
argued that the perception of ‘Significant Form’ lifted the viewer ‘above the
stream of life’.70 While, in this definition, pre-formulated information is not
a prerequisite for understanding, it is nonetheless tinged with elitism
because those able to perceive ‘Significant Form’, and therefore be lifted to a
realm of higher understanding, are argued to be a select few, endowed with
insight that most others lack. This is where the limitations of the Formalist
approach make themselves felt; it easily becomes and exclusive and
exclusionary approach, in which those who do not agree with accepted
interpretations of works are dismissed as lacking the insight required to
perceive ‘Significant Form’.
Similarly, insisting that the pictorial weavings can only be understood
by a subset of those viewers who have worked with unformed material
terminates discussions of them. However, contemplation, which Albers
stressed as a crucial element of viewing her works, is not limited to those
who shape unformed matter. Even for those who do not work with material,
repeated engagement with the pictorial weavings could therefore facilitate a
process of understanding based on trust of one’s intuitive judgments.
Understanding does not have to be immediate, emerging in a flash of
inspiration. It can be a gradual process through which once fragmentary

68
Ibid.
69
Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, 7-8.
70
Ibid, 7.

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thoughts become articulate, forming themselves. Therefore, if the act of

viewing the pictorial weavings is approached as a long-term process, a
personal understanding can be reached without a background of work with
material.

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Bibliography

Unpublished Sources
Albers, Anni. ‘American Craftspeople Project: The Reminiscences of Anni
Albers’. Interview by Richard Polsky. American Craftspeople Project,
Columbia University, 11 January 1985. Transcript held at the Josef
and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT.

Albers, Anni. ‘Untitled Statement [I want to make things for the

contemplative mind]’. Undated. The Anni Albers Papers. Box 38,
Folder 17. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT.

Danilowitz, Brenda (Chief Curator, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation),
interview with author, 23 October 2017.

Medina, Karis (Associate Curator, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation),
interview with author, 24 October 2017.

Secondary Material

Albers, Anni. On Designing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,

1971.

Albers, Anni. On Weaving. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,

1965. Reprinted with an afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber and
contributions by Manuel Cirauqui and T’ai Smith. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2017. Page references are to the 2017
edition.

Albers, Anni. ‘Oral History Interview’. Interview by Sevim Fesci. Archives of

American Art Oral Histories Project, Smithsonian Institution, 5 July
1968. Transcript. Retrieved from:
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-
interview-anni-albers-12134.

Albers, Anni. Pictorial Weavings. Cambridge(?), MA: Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, 1959.

Albers, Anni. Selected Writings on Design. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan

University Press, 2000.

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Barthes, Roland. ‘Rhetoric of the Image’. In Image-Music-Text. Essays

translated and selected by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press,
1988, pp. 32-51.

Bell, Clive. ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’. In Art. London: Chatto & Windus,
1914. Reprinted with edits by J.B. Bullen. Oxford: Phaidon, 1987, pp.
3-37.

Booth Conroy, Sarah. ‘Weaving an Artistic Path: Anni Albers and the
Threads of Her Life’. Washington Post. 13 June 1985, pp. D1, D9.

Brown, Bill. ‘Thing Theory’. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1-22.

Cardoso, Raphael. ‘Craft Versus Design’. In The Craft Reader. Edited by

Glenn Adamson. Oxford: Berg, 2010, pp. 321-332.

Edwards, Steve, and Paul Wood. Art of the Avant-Gardes. Art of the
Twentieth-Century, no. 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in
association with the Open University, 2004.

Eisenman, Stephen, and Thomas E. Crow. Nineteenth Century Art: A

Critical History, 4th ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011.

Fox Weber, Nicholas, and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, eds. Anni Albers.
New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1999.

Gardner-Troy, Virginia. Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From

Bauhaus to Black Mountain. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.

Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Thing’. In The Craft Reader. Edited by Glenn

Adamson. Oxford: Berg, 2010, pp. 404-408.

Hyde Minor, Vernon. Baroque and Rococo: Art & Culture. London:
Laurence King Publishing, 1999.

Jacob, Mary Jane. ‘Anni Albers: A Modern Weaver as Artist’. In The Woven
and Graphic Art of Anni Albers. Edited by Lloyd E. Herman.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985, pp. 65-105.

Paoletti, John T., and Gary M. Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy, 4th ed.
London: L. King, 2011.

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Pollock, Griselda. ‘About Canons and Culture Wars’. In Differencing the

Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London:
Routledge, 1999, pp. 3-21.

Smith, T’ai. Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of

Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the

Graphic Arts from 1350-1575, 2nd ed. Revised by Larry Silver and
Henry Luttikhuizen. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc, 2005.

Sutherland Harris, Ann. Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture.

London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005.

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. ‘Artists: Chronology’. Accessed 4

November 2017. Retrieved from:
http://www.albersfoundation.org/artists/chronology/#slide1.

Welliver, Neil. ‘A Conversation with Anni Albers’. Craft Horizons 25, no. 4
(July/August 1965): 17-21, 40-45, ACC Library & Archives Digital
Collections.

Wortmann-Weltge, Sigrid. Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the

Weaving Workshop. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

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Illustrations

Plate 1: Anni Albers, Textile Sample, n.d. Image courtesy of the Albers
Foundation.

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Plate 2: Anni Albers, Black-White-Gold I, 1950. Image courtesy of the Josef

and Anni Albers Foundation.

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Plate 3: Anni Albers, Under Way, 1963. Image courtesy of the Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation.

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Plate 4: Anni Albers, Haiku, 1961. Image courtesy of the Albers

Foundation.

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Plate 5: Anni Albers, City, 1949. Image courtesy of the Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation.

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Plate 6: Anni Albers, Pasture, 1958. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

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Appendix A

Albers, Anni. Pictorial Weavings. Cambridge (?), MA: Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, 1959, opening page.
Though some of the earliest weavings
unearthed after thousands of years
have the magic of things not yet found useful
and later periods have shown us weaving as art,
thousands of years
of establishing and expanding the usefulness of woven materials
have made us see in them first something to be worn, walked on,
sat upon, to be cut up, sewn together again,
in short, largely something no longer in itself fulfilled.

To let threads be articulate again

and find a form for themselves to no other end
than their own orchestration,
not to be sat on, walked on,
only to be looked at,
is the raison d’être of my pictorial weavings.

ANNI ALBERS

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