Anni Albers is a name now synonymous with weaving and textiles, but her preliminary studies on paper made with ink, gouache, pen, pencil – and even the keys of a typewriter – were integral in the designing of these seminal weavings.
Anni Albers’ (1899-1994) life traversed three continents, sometimes for research and at other times out of necessity. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, as Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann, Albers rebelled against the traditional roles of wife and mother expected by her parents and instead tracked the life of an artist. In 1922 she became a student at the Bauhaus in the weaving workshop when the now-famous school was situated in Weimar. Here she met her husband-to-be, Josef Albers, and together they would continue their art investigations side by side.
When the Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1923, Anni and Josef moved with it. There Anni, along with weavers such as Gunta Stolzl and Otti Berger, developed a strong, critical theory of weaving and textiles that reverberates through the years and continues to influence many designs today.
In 1933 the Albers, like many others, were forced to leave Germany. Anni and Josef headed to the US to Asheville, North Carolina, to teach at the experimental new Black Mountain College, which also attracted artists Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa and John Cage. Anni’s move to the United States allowed travel to Latin America during the summers – a place the Albers would revisit many times – and in Mexico, Chile and Peru, Anni learnt different weaving techniques and fell in love with the textiles.
Anni brought these techniques, along with the experimental spirit of Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, into her own practice, using innovative materials such as cellophane, newspaper and horsehair alongside natural fibres of jute and cotton. Although some of her weavings may look experimental, with hairy tufts and burst of metallic shine, they were considered and planned structurally through drawings often made on gridded graph paper.
The grid is the structure all threads are woven through, and Anni would often create preliminary drawings on gridded paper, plotting out the pattern using graphic materials such as pencils, ink, felt tip pen, watercolour and gouache. If we consider thread as a line, we can imagine why a graphite pencil or ink line would be a perfect substitute for thread in these paper studies. Sometimes these lines would be organic in style, swishing and swooshing; at others a typewriter would be used, with a repeated key – an S, or a colon, or % – forming its own pattern. In other studies – such as ‘Design for Wall Hanging’ (1927) – Anni would mimic the tactility of a fabric, using gouache and ink on paper where the Indian ink had been delicately sprayed to create a mottled, fabric-looking effect.
Anni’s weaving designs on paper often included a key grid of colours painted in gouache, with pencil notes next to the key and annotation again on the design indicating the specific colour or fabric that was being proposed. Others had roman numeral codes and pencil written notes of mediums used like “gouache, Indian ink, sprayed” or “size: sketch: 75/8” x 101/8”” with her name pencil written as “Anni Albers” or “Annelise Albers”. These ink and pencil studies are worthy of their own critical fame and can be found in museum and institution collections around the world. Her gouache on paper designs for wall hangings are beautiful in their own right, whilst also performing the vital task of allowing Anni to map out on paper the structure and design of her complex and experimental textiles.
Find out more about Anni Albers and her work via the Black Mountain College website.