This work greatly excites me and deserves to have a little time spent looking at it. In fact, I think it would be in my top twenty textiles. Well, I’ve been aware of it for many years, the reason it is here now is a confluence of events.
Firstly, Anni Albers was at the front of our minds because we’ve been working on reviewing the exhibition of her work at the Lower Belvedere, Vienna, that has just closed. At the same time, I was reading a review in the newspaper about a new biography of Anni Albers written by Nicholas Fox Weber, who runs the Albers Foundation. While this piece is featured in the exhibition catalogue, it immediately resonated with numerous comments, and indeed Albers’ own words.
Paul Klee was Albers’ mentor at the Bauhaus, and she even once called him her artistic ‘god’. And this work could be seen as a weaver’s manifestation of his advice to ‘take a line for a walk’. Her own interpretation of this phrase could be glimpsed in the following passage from her book On Weaving (1965, chapter 8):
