BERN.- Anni Albers (1899–1994) is one of the most important artists and designers of the 20th century. After training at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, she emigrated to the United States in 1933, where she established herself as a weaver, textile designer and visual artist. In addition to her well-known signature pictorial weavings, Albers also devoted herself to developing new textiles for buildings and interiors, so-called ‘utilitarian’ or ‘serving objects’. Her innovative design principles and experimental approach to materials continue to inspire to this day.

The Zentrum Paul Klee is presenting the artist's first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The exhibition features works from all periods of her career, with a special focus on her architectural interventions, thus highlighting the connection between art, textiles and architecture, between building and weaving in Anni Albers' work.

From the Bauhaus to the USA

Anni and Josef Albers arrived at New York Harbour on Thanksgiving Day in 1933. The destination of their journey was the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Josef Albers had been invited by architect Philip Johnson to establish a curriculum in visual design. Both Anni and Josef Albers had already made a name for themselves at the Bauhaus in Germany, which had been forced to close months earlier under pressure from the National Socialists.

The language of threads

Soon after arriving in the United States, Anni and Josef Albers made the first of many visits to Mexico and later also visited Chile and Peru. Albers had already developed a passion for pre- Columbian textiles and artefacts at the ‘Völkerkundemuseum’ – today the Museum of Ethnology – in Berlin. During her travels, she was once again fascinated by the variety of patterns, techniques and colours used by Mesoamerican and Andean weavers and potters.

Inspired by her experiences, in 1936 she created Ancient Writing, one of her first ‘pictorial weavings,’ or purely artistic works. The monumental composition is loosely woven with a shiny black rayon weft in shifting bands of open-weave structures. Scattered across the central column are geometric forms in light-coloured supplemental threads that suggest texts and symbols from ancient archaeological sites. It was not without reason that Albers dedicated her groundbreaking publication On Weaving (1965) to ‘to my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru’.

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, in the catalogue for the exhibition Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings, 1959.

Ancient Writing is also an early example of a group of works that deal with language and writing. In Peru, Albers encountered the khipu, a complex instrument made of knotted camelid hair or cotton threads, which was used in the Andes for counting, recording data and communication. The small-format pictorial weaving Code (1962), for example, with its irregularly placed knots, refers to this encrypted language. The additional supplementary weft threads woven into the work are reminiscent of written lines – and speak to the viewer in the language of threads. After 1963 Albers continued to explore the boundaries of writing, knots and threads in her works on paper.

Paul Klee as a teacher

Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann joined the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar in the winter of 1922 after completing a one-year preliminary course. After she married Bauhaus artist Josef Albers in 1925, she shortened and modernised her name to Anni Albers. The theoretical foundations for her work were laid by Paul Klee, among others, who taught design in the weaving class from 1927 onwards and whom Albers greatly admired throughout her life.

Without formal instruction on the loom, the young Bauhaus weavers were left to their own devices. They experimented and studied on the looms and soon mastered the material. The experimentation that marked the very beginning of her career was to accompany Albers throughout her life and become a distinctive feature of her work.

Experimentation and innovation

For Anni Albers, weaving was a form of construction with threads, an experiment with new materials and closely related to architecture. Based on the materials and function of each project, she created numerous fabric samples. In 1930, Albers was commissioned by Bauhaus director, architect Hannes Meyer, to develop a design for acoustic wall coverings in the auditorium of the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB) in Bernau. Her experiments resulted in an ingenious, innovative combination of materials: while the fabric made of fluffy chenille yarn on the back absorbed the sound of the large hall, cellophane fibres on the front reflected the light in the room and radiated a silvery sheen. This experimental approach to new, unusual materials continued to influence her textile designs in the decades that followed.

Most commercial houses take their designs off the paper, nicht? With no regard for the fitness of that design for a given place. We of Bauhaus are not hostile to industry but we create patterns close to the materials and at the same time related to the use of the textile. -- Anni Albers, quoted in the New York Sun after her arrival in the USA on 24 November 1933.

Architectural commissions

In the United States, Albers also developed numerous new textiles for buildings and interiors, always tailored to the specific needs of the location. Between 1948 and 1950, for example, architect and former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius commissioned fabrics from Albers for the spacious dormitories in the new Harvard Graduate Centre, one of the first implementations of modernist architecture at a major university in the United States. Albers experimented with different materials, structures and colour effects and ultimately designed three versions of low maintenance bed covers with a checked pattern, which were intended to enliven the room and conceal the traces of ‘dirty shoes and cigarette burns’.

Albers also produced fabrics for sacred contexts. For the first of these projects, in 1957, she designed eight movable panels made of shimmering, machine-woven Lurex yarn in green, blue, gold and silver for the large Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas. These and five other projects in which Albers worked closely with architects are given special attention in the exhibition with large-format photographs and textile designs.

Textiles as ‘contributing thoughts’

In 1949, Anni Albers was the first textile designer to be honoured with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For the exhibition Anni Albers Textiles, which was shown in 26 museums across the United States, she designed a new range of textile prototypes, most notable among them free-hanging space partitions made of cellophane and synthetic materials combined with natural materials such as jute fibres and wood. These room dividers served as lightweight design alternatives to solid, immovable walls.

At the Zentrum Paul Klee, some of Albers’ textiles are installed as space-structuring elements, thus occupying – in keeping with Anni Albers' vision – the ‘place of a contributing idea’ in architecture:

[...] and textiles, so often no more than an afterthought in planning, might take a place again as a contributing thought. -- Anni Albers, in ‘The Pliable Plane’ (1957). The essay is published in German for the first time in the exhibition catalogue, together with two other texts by Anni Albers.