Anni Albers’s Art Combines Magic and Math | Art - National Review

The Bauhaus-trained artist, less famous than her husband during her life, finally gets the show she deserves, according to Brian T. Allen, art historian.

Photo: Left: Ancient Writing, 1936. Anni Albers. 
Cotton and rayon
.
(Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of John Young
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London
Photo: Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence)

---

Right: 
Pasture, 1958. Anni Albers. Cotton
.
(Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London)

Tate Modern’s fascinating show on the work of Bauhaus-trained fiber artist, designer, and writer Anni Albers (1899–1994) is timely and overdue. She was a great artist, but some dings unjustly diminished her stature. She worked in the medium of textiles, and in an art hierarchy that privileges painting, and then sculpture, photography, drawing, and even video — these seem to jostle — textile is still at the bottom.

This is so unfair. Something like Dotted, from 1959, is a work of great formal power. Its tangles, knots, braids, and loops make for a crossroads of magic and mathematics. It’s rigorous and sensual, too. None of Jackson Pollock’s dancing around a canvas pouring a bucket of paint willy-nilly.

Partly this is the silly division between craft and what snobs call “high art.” As a practical matter, most museum directors and chief curators started as paintings people. Many don’t understand textiles. What they don’t understand, they often don’t like.

Albers worked in the shadows of a famous husband, too. Josef Albers, whose bloodless painting I’ve never liked, might be intellectually bracing, but Anni was the better artist. He had the big titles, collectors, and academic cachet. And she was a woman. Textiles and weaving have always been considered women’s work, so it was devalued. A last ding is the most outrageous. Many museums, art historians, and critics never took her too seriously, and this is a laugh, in part because she worked off and on for Knoll, where she even had fabric lines named after her. It’s as if commerce never, ever, not in a million years, not even the smell of it, pierced the sanctuaries of high art...

Ancient Writing, from 1936, is what she considered a pictorial weaving and a departure from the purely abstract designs she’d made earlier. She sought to picture the layout of pyramids and temples in the most schematic way. La Luz, from 1947, goes a step further. She depicted in a weaving the look of Mexican light, not as a painter would but in a way faithful to her materials. At that point Albers was incorporating metallic thread to give the surface a touch of glint and reflective power. Pasture, in 1958, goes a step further. It expresses what could well have been the cultivated, green terrain of Bethany in Connecticut, where she lived for close to 50 years.
Read more... 

Source: National Review