It is rare to come from an exhibition so buoyed up, so ravished and so covetous as I did after seeing Anni Albers at Tate Modern. Her art gives pleasure to the eye and to the mind and to the touch, if only one were allowed to touch. One wants to feel the braid and nub, to finger the frays and proud threads, the tightness and looseness and differences between soft and wiry, metallic and plastics in her weavings. Smell, too, might play its part, but mostly all this is in the imagination. Sensuality – bordering on the sexual – and geometric rigour, variety and similarity (pleasures that demand being repeated) infuse the work of a lifetime in Albers’ show.
I almost inhaled this exhibition, that takes us from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College and to Yale – along with her husband, the painter Josef Albers – and from a very particular European modernism to postwar America. Berlin-born in 1899, Anni Albers began her studies at the Bauhaus in 1922. For all its aspirations to equality, like other female students Albers was discouraged from joining painting classes and was directed towards the weaving workshop. However, disciplines are porous and interconnected, and few more so than textiles. And as Julia Bryan-Wilson points out in her marvellous recent book Fray: Art and Textile Politics, “Just as textiles have stretched between art, craft and industry, they have also oscillated between being defined as leisure and as labour.” There are textiles everywhere in our lives, our history, our cultures, our politics.
At the Bauhaus, Albers found her medium. Who is to say that she would not have been similarly competent and creative had she entered the painting school, or any other? Here, as well as meeting Josef Albers, she came into contact with Paul Klee, whose influence remained strong throughout her career and particularly influenced what she called her “pictorial” weavings. Everything is a picture, even if it is only a conjunction of stripes, lozenges or rectangles. Even at its most pictorial, her art is abstract. Even at its most geometric it feels human and alive, less the product of the mechanics of the loom – the construction of a matrix of threads, and fibres, warp and weft – than of the hand and the mind.
Anni Albers’ textile art gives pleasure to a room, to a wall, a bed, a floor, to the spaces in between. Things are framed on walls, hang freely in space, are lain flat. The Tate exhibition goes from room to room, and in spaces created using walls of stretched translucent scrim, to outline not just her development but also her processes.
There are grilles and grids of woven colour, close-toned patterns and wandering webs, flexing chevrons and teaming bands, oddly reminiscent of the untuned pixelated glitches that bedevil the images when we’re streaming a movie. But here the jumbling visual noise resolves in clusters of pattern, tiny rows of pictograms and mysterious signs.
She drew knots and tangles, like madcap versions of those animated diagrams that help fishermen and sailors learn the mechanics of arcane knots, except here the pleasure is in following the twists and loops and over- and under-passes for nothing more than the pleasure of losing oneself in their inextricable entanglements.
This is all as good as any abstract art. Albers made textiles not as a substitute for painting, but on its own terms. Even so, whole careers could be made (and probably have been) from the dozens of different forays she made in her weavings, and later in her prints. She made drawings from pinpricks through paper and prints from nothing more than the embossment of abstract shapes on heavy white paper. As you move around these prints, light catches the ridges and depressions, first this way, then that, gleaming against whiteness.
Albers’ hand-woven art is a lesson in colour and geometry, method and singularity; tactile and optical, spatial and utilitarian; most of all, her work gives pleasure, and this exhibition (organised in conjunction with K20 in Dusseldorf) is a revelation and a delight.
Going from room to room, I thought of poet Wallace Stevens’ three statements presaging the parts of his Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction: it must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure, he wrote. Albers’ art did all these things, as this retrospective demonstrates. Although light levels are often low, to protect the works with their sometimes fugitive dyes and fragile materials, her art sings and vibrates and keeps you looking, following patterns and meandering lines, maze-like structures, grids and colourways. The only demand is that you look, getting up close and stepping away, going from the overall to the detail, sensing materiality as well as the optical. What a joy.