Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, furniture manufacturer, weaver, fabric designer, and artist Anni Albers (1899-1994) studied weaving before immigrating to America with her husband, Josef, a painter and instructor at the Bauhaus School Art School in Weimar Germany.

As a weaving student at the Bauhaus and once a believer that ” weaving was sissy… just three threads”, to Anni’s surprise she would also soon realize the craft could be compared to architecture, an act of construction relying on hundreds of individual elements. Working at her loom hour after hour, Albers also found an inner peace she believed other artists often lacked.

While at the school Anni also learned from Paul Klee the expressive liberties of the formal grid, and in the fabrics of ancient Andean cultures she recognized a powerful visual language. She developed her own style of ‘pictorial weavings’ which she mounted on linen bases. She became known for her surprisingly rich explorations of texture and pattern. More than any other weaver, she succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structure of fabrics. In her mind fabrics were meant to serve, not dominate, so bold colors and flashy patterns were never part of her oeuvre. Instead, crisp geometric designs in bold colors marrying unlikely materials played into her signature style. From a velvety sound absorbing fabric for the walls of an auditorium in Germany (1929) made from partly composed shimmering cellophane to the Philip Johnson guest house of Blanchette and John D Rockerfeller III where Albers blended cotton chenille, white plastic and copper-foil yarn into gently sparkling full-length curtains, her innovative mixture of materials spoke to the alchemist in her. Many patterns were conceived as mathematical games, mosaic like combinations of rectangles, squares, triangles and other geometric motifs. One woven tapestry in particular entitled ‘Six Prayers’,  used black and white threads that evoked written Hebrew letters without the formation of words.

In 1965, The Jewish Museum approached Anni Albers with a commission to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust.  Albers elevated textiles from utilitarian product to a medium of powerful aesthetic statement. Her Holocaust memorial, ‘Six Prayers’, achieves both universality and intimacy and gently, though powerfully, provokes the viewer into private contemplation.

Albers’s elegy is composed of six vertical tapestries woven of beige, black, white, and silver. While the use of so limited and somber a palette might call attention to the problem of differentiation in response to mass murder, Albers varies the weave, allowing one of these colors to dominate in each of the six panels, thereby giving each segment a unique tone. Against the structural grid of warp and weft, Albers sets meandering threads of black and white whose spontaneous irregularity is suggestive of an individual will-or individual wills-charting some personal terrain across an imposed order of overlapping verticals and horizontals. Poised within the restrained quiet of abstraction, these ambling filaments are texts that spread across the scroll-like tapestries, transcending the limited utterances of verbal language for a more universal elegy. Words are at once evoked and denied by the appearance and disappearance of these threads. Though the six commemorative stelae are solemn in their monumentality, there is an intimacy to the tapestries. Weaving-which consists of the intertwining of disparate threads-symbolically suggests the process of tikkun, or social repair.

Towards the end of her career, Anni Albers traded her loom in for colorful lithographs and silk screen prints. The funky prints offer the same kind of visual thrill as her textiles.

‘Six Prayers’ And The Tapestry of Anni Albers was posted at J&O Fabrics Store Newsletter Blog. | https://www.jandofabrics.com/blog