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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012

Anni Albers's Modernist Philosophy in

Thread and Text
Christina Glover

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 THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

THE COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE & DANCE

ANNI ALBERS'S MODERNIST PHILOSOPHY IN THREAD AND TEXT

By

CHRISTINA GLOVER

A Thesis submitted to the

Department of Art History
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2012

Copyright by Christina Glover 2012

All Rights Reserved.
Christina Glover defended this thesis on March 22, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Karen A. Bearor
Professor Directing Thesis

Adam Jolles
Committee Member

Michael D. Carrasco
Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to give a heartfelt thank you to my advisor Dr. Karen A. Bearor for
encouraging me to pursue this topic, for her insightful comments, and for her time invested in
this project. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions from my committee, Dr.
Adam Jolles and Dr. Michael D. Carrasco, each of whom brought ideas to the table from their
respective areas.
I am grateful to the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for allowing me to conduct
research in their archives. Brenda Danilowitz was especially helpful in coordinating my trip and
assisting my research. Thanks to Ms. Redensek for giving me a tour of the Albers Foundation
and for sharing her knowledge of the archive, and thanks to Mr. Harding for patiently showing
me Anni's work. The FSU Department of Art History Helen J. Beard Thesis Research and
Travel Award made this trip financially possible.
Mom and Dad, thank you for your continuous love and encouragement. Friends, I am
glad I shared this experience with you.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi

Introduction......................................................................................................................................1

Chapter One: The Bauhaus Atmosphere .........................................................................................8

Chapter Two: Albers's Move to America and Her Return to Beginnings .....................................26

Chapter Three: Pan-American Sources of Universalism ...............................................................41

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................57

Endnotes.........................................................................................................................................60

Figures ...........................................................................................................................................73

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................87

Biographical Sketch .......................................................................................................................96

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Paul Klee, Zwei Kräfte (Two Forces), 1922...................................................................73

Figure 2: Gunta Stölzl, Wall Hanging, Slit Tapestry Red/Green, 1927/28 ...................................74

Figure 3: Anni Albers, Wallhanging, 1924....................................................................................75

Figure 4: Anni Albers, Wall Hanging, 1925..................................................................................76

Figure 5: Anni Albers, Black-White-Red, 1927/1964....................................................................77

Figure 6: Pre-Columbian textile fragments from Anni Albers's personal collection ....................78

Figure 7: Anni Albers, Monte Alban, 1936 ...................................................................................79

Figure 8: Anni Albers, Pictographic (1955) and Code (1962)......................................................80

Figure 9: Anni Albers, Development in Rose I, 1952 ....................................................................81

Figure 10: Anni Albers, Two, 1952 ...............................................................................................81

Figure 11: Joaquín Torres-García, Constructivist Composition, 1943 ..........................................82

Figure 12: Adolph Gottlieb, Augury, 1945 ....................................................................................83

Figure 13: Sheila Hicks, Zapallar, 1957-58 ..................................................................................84

Figure 14: Anni Albers, Thickly Settled, 1957...............................................................................85

Figure 15: Anni Albers, Tikal, 1958 ..............................................................................................86

v
 ABSTRACT

Anni Albers (1899-1994), weaver, printmaker, and writer, began her studies at the
Bauhaus in 1922, and she soon became a leading figure in the weaving workshop there. Leaving
Germany in 1933 when the Bauhaus closed under the pressure of Nazi power, Albers
permanently moved to America and began teaching at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina. Here, she headed her own weaving workshop, which was based on Bauhaus pedagogy.
In 1935 she visited Mexico for the first of twelve times; she visited Peru and Chile in 1953.
With each trip to Latin America, she developed an increased interest in the weavings of the
ancient Americas. From the mid-1930s to the early 1960s, she allowed aspects of ancient
textiles to figure into her own weavings, and she described her admiration for ancient weaving
cultures in her numerous writings.
Looking at the environments in which Albers worked, I situate her weavings and writings
in the intellectual atmospheres of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and her independent
studies and travels in the Americas. Doing so reveals the complexity of her personal philosophy
on art, which ultimately derived from the Bauhaus, and united art, craft, and design though
universalism. Her weavings and writings from 1924 to 1966 reflect this art philosophy. Looking
at the formal aspects of her wall hangings and analyzing her writings, I outline the extent of
Albers's understanding of the theories proposed by intellectuals sharing her milieu, in particular
Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965). I show Albers borrowed aspects of his theories; however, I do
not claim that she strictly adhered to Worringer's ideas. Instead, she deviates from them to
emphasize characteristics unique to her medium of weaving and its history based in craft
technique.
This thesis begins by establishing Albers's understanding of geometric abstraction
through the Bauhaus. I investigate claims that she was indebted to Worringer's Abstraction and
Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), which she and others likely read at
the Bauhaus. Worringer's argument put forward a way to link ancient and modern art through a
shared psychic state, characterized by feelings of chaos and the need for order, which he believed
was manifested as geometric designs. My study shows that Worringer offered Albers one way to

vi
relate the textiles of the ancient past to her modern weavings, but that she also found other
connections after her move to the United States.
After 1933 she became increasingly devoted to the textiles of ancient America. This is
confirmed by her use of Peruvian textile constructions, her collection of ancient American
textiles, and her discussions of these weaving cultures in her writings. Additionally, Albers
encountered other artists working in North and South America who likewise sought to apply
abstractions from ancient American art to modernism. I compare works by Joaquín Torres-
García (1874-1949), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and Shelia Hicks (1934-) to show a pan-
American desire to find indigenous roots applicable to the modern day through universalism.
These different avenues of Albers's work, her Bauhaus education, study of Peruvian weavings,
and dialogue with contemporary pan-American sources of universalism, point to her underlying
belief that art was successful if it communicated a universal appeal and timelessness.
In integrating Albers's weavings and writings in relation to her philosophy, I demonstrate
the extent to which her art and writings engage intellectually and stylistically with modernism.
This thesis contributes to the scholarship where previous studies of Albers have not thoroughly
acknowledged her participation in the discourse of modern art through her use of modernist
ideals, theories, and writings. I provide a unique intellectual history of a weaver's work that
shows how theoretical foundations equate her weavings and writings with vanguardism. Using a
language belonging to the plastic arts, she removed false divisions between art media and
advanced her concept of universalism by creating a link between ancient craft and modern art.

vii
 INTRODUCTION

Between 1924, the date of her first published essay, and 1966, the date of her final
weaving commission, Anni Albers's (1899-1994) textiles and essays about weaving interdepend.
Her weavings shaped the art philosophy she recorded and they visually carried out her written
claims. Developing as a result of her Bauhaus education, Albers's philosophy asserts that art and
craft can be equal, that direct experience with materials is necessary in the textile industry, and
that true art represents timeless aesthetics. She continued to build on these ideas after moving to
America in 1933, where her work became increasingly unique to her personal interest in pre-
Columbian weavings. Scholars have failed to consider her writings in connection with specific
textiles, which would reveal the materialization of her art philosophy. Thus, my thesis addresses
both aspects of her work to demonstrate an exchange between her practice and theory. This
close analysis additionally describes Albers's philosophical grounding in early-twentieth-century
intellectual concepts, particularly those that Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) argued in
Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908). Albers adopted
Worringer's claims, which explained contemporary trends in abstraction, to justify the modern
aesthetic of her visual works, but she also departed from his theory to create her own philosophy
that attended specifically to weaving. Although Albers shared ideas with Worringer, she reached
a different conclusion about abstraction. For Worringer, abstraction was a dominant style that
reappeared over time; for Albers, in contrast, abstraction was universal and timeless.
In my study I integrate the formal aspects of Albers's weavings with ideas drawn from
her writings. During her time at the Bauhaus, from 1922 to 1933, Albers created fabric to be
industrially mass-produced as well as individual wall hangings. She continued to make both
types in America, but here she began referring to her singular textiles as "pictorial weavings,"
although they were always abstract, never representational or illustrative. The pictorial
weavings, like her earlier Bauhaus wall hangings, were unique works of art made on a handloom.
My thesis chapters treat Albers's work chronologically, limiting my scope to her Bauhaus wall
hangings and American pictorial weavings. I will not attend to her prints, which she made after
1970 and after she stopped writing.

1
 Her thirty-six individual texts remain largely unaddressed in the literature. Albers's
writings appear in the form of essays for her published books, articles for art and craft journals,
lectures, and unpublished statements. In conjunction with her weavings, they illuminate how she
perceived her weavings as modernist works indebted to ancient examples. Her writings identify
that geometric abstraction is innate in weaving, that Peruvian textiles serve as ideal sources, and
that principles of universalism allow for connection of modern and ancient visual works. This
thesis will attend to these three directions in Albers's art and writings.
Neil Donahue's method of intellectual history serves as a model for my research. In
Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (1995) and Forms of
Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (1993), he evaluates the effects of Worringer's
writings on contemporary artists, authors, and intellectuals; however, he does not focus on
Albers and other Bauhaus members. Donahue's approach looks beyond the main topic of a piece
of literature to illuminate underlying cultural issues and scholarship that shaped the author's
thoughts. Utilizing this method, I place Albers's writings in a socio-cultural context to critically
reveal how she perceived the craft of weaving within a discourse of modernism shaped in part by
Worringer's social psychology.
Scholars have only cursorily attended to her use of Worringer's text to support her own
ideas and art. Nicholas Fox Weber, in The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (2006),
briefly summarizes how Albers defended her geometric style by using Worringer's theories.
Virginia Gardner Troy, in Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black
Mountain (2002), focuses on Worringer's interest in the psychology of "primitive" peoples,
without making direct connections to Albers's work.1 Brenda Danilowitz briefly discusses
Albers's written work in the introduction to the anthology Anni Albers: Selected Writings on
Design (2000), identifying several themes in Albers's essays, including order and chaos, art and
craft, and universal principles; however, she does not mention Worringer's writings on similar
topics.
These sources provide only superficial investigations without addressing the extent of
Worringer's influence on Albers's writings and visual work. My thesis fills this void by
revealing the impact of Worringer's theories, which further enriches our understanding of
Bauhaus artists and Bauhaus pedagogy. My study of Albers shows Abstraction and Empathy
offered her one way to justify her modernist weavings; however, I also explain that after 1933

2
she departed from Worringer's theories and began using textiles from ancient Peru as her primary
model for abstraction.
One main purpose of this thesis is to address a weaver who worked as a modern artist.
Studies giving credit to weavers' dialogues with intellectual sources are absent from the
literature. This paper shows the ways that Albers, as a weaver, tried to participate in the
discourse of modern art, which at the time was dominated by painters and sculptors. I look
specifically at her connections with Worringer to construct, in part, her intellectual atmosphere.
In doing so, this study begins to situate weavers as active players in modernism. While I focus
on only a few aspects of Albers's Bauhaus education and American context, I hope to provide a
model for further research on other weavers that acknowledges their use of modernist ideals,
theories, and writings to operate within the same sphere as avant-garde painters and sculptors.
With this study, I also expand upon the interconnections of modern artists and weavers working
in North and South America.
Essential to this thesis are Albers's own writings, many of which appear in the two
collections she published during her lifetime: On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965). In
addition to these essays, mostly pertaining to her art philosophy, Albers also contributed to a
book Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures: The Josef and Anni Albers Collection (1970), which
reproduces ancient figurines that she purchased with her husband, and a small exhibition
catalogue, Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings (1959). Brenda Danilowitz, in Selected Writings on
Design (2000), assembles essays from On Designing and On Weaving, individually published
articles, lectures, and previously unpublished statements. Danilowitz also includes an extensive
bibliography of Albers's writings.
Albers likely felt the need to write about her work because in the first half of the
twentieth century, the written word carried more weight than a medium assumed to be craft, and
at that time, weaving was not considered an art form. Albers's writings gave her textiles
academic backing, and they revealed the intellectual aims of her compositions, mainly, that they
were meant for contemplation and visual escape. Beginning in the 1920s, the medium gained
status and attention in the art world, mostly through the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus and
other modernist textile artists working in Europe.
In America, Albers encountered some weavers who did not appreciate her avant-garde
interests. For example, Albers submitted an essay, "Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black

3
Mountain College" (1941), to the craft magazine The Weaver. Here, she plainly outlined the
goals of her weaving workshop at Black Mountain College, roughly based on her own education
at the Bauhaus. The traditionalist American weaver Mary Atwater fired back an essay of her
own in the following issue. "It's Pretty–But Is It Art?" lambasted Albers's claims that weaving
could be art. Atwater wanted weaving to remain a simple pastime, based on replicating patterns
from "recipe" books.2
Not only was weaving-as-art not well understood at the time in America, abstraction in
general was viewed as suspect. Thus, Albers had two concerns at stake. But not all of the
assessments of her written work were negative. Numerous reviewers of her book On Weaving,
many of them important authors in the field of textiles, such as Lili Blumenau and Irene Emery,
responded favorably. Each was impressed with her discussions on aesthetics, her philosophy
about weaving, and the universalizing qualities she attributed to the medium.3
In general, Albers's writings reached an audience either interested specifically in the
crafts or more broadly in the arts. In addition to The Weaver, mentioned above, she contributed
essays to the magazines Craft Horizon and Design. On Weaving was directed toward textile
artists interested in both theory and technique. Other essays appeared in Arts and Architecture, a
showcase magazine having a major impact on the development of modernism in the U.S., and
various exhibition catalogues of her work and that by other artists. Some of her writings were
also published for smaller audiences in the Black Mountain College Bulletin and Yale's
Perspecta.
According to Weber, Albers read Worringer when she first arrived at the Bauhaus and
latched on to his idea of visual resting places.4 She later discussed these visual resting places in
her essay "Designing" (1943), and she specifically described Worringer's text Abstraction and
Empathy in a 1950 book review of Ben Nicholson's Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings. It is unknown
if she read any of Worringer's other publications, such as Form Problems of the Gothic (1910),
his important follow-up to Abstraction and Empathy.
The foremost direction of research on Albers in the last decade focuses on her interest in
pre-Columbian textiles. The exhibition catalogue Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American
Journeys (2007), edited by Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock, includes essays about her
collection of woven artifacts and how ancient and modern Latin American cultures influenced
her artwork. It also outlines the couple's thirteen trips to Mexico between 1935 and 1967 and

4
their single trip to Chile and Peru in 1953, where they visited archeological sites at places such as
Monte Albán, Teotihuacán, and Machu Picchu. Virginia Gardner Troy's extensive study on the
topic, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles (2002), concentrates on Albers's lifelong
interest in pre-Columbian textiles and the ancient Andean source materials available to her.
Both Albers and Worringer were interested in modernism's ties to the art of ancient
peoples. Robert Goldwater, who would later become the first director of the now-defunct
Museum of Primitive Art in New York, with its collection of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the
Americas, directly contextualizes Worringer's views on so-called "primitives" in his pioneering
and influential Primitivism in Modern Art (1938). More broadly he describes a general interest
in ancient Peruvian art as a means for affecting the direction of modern culture. His book is
helpful in understanding the context in which Albers formed her own views.
As previously indicated, my thesis ultimately illuminates Albers's idea of art as universal,
a divergence from Worringer's theory. Albers first became aware of universalism at her time at
the Bauhaus. Scholars, such as Frank Whitford in his Bauhaus (1984), have proposed that Theo
van Doesburg prompted the interest in universal art at the Bauhaus.
In addition to sources at the Bauhaus, Albers tapped into pan-American sources of
universalism. There was a growing trend in Latin America during the 1920s and 1930s towards
constructivist aesthetics, which was often combined with ancient sources to juxtapose the local
and universal. Indeed, Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-Garcia (1874-1949) was instrumental in
promoting this linkage throughout Latin America after 1944 with manifesto for Constructive
Universalism. Albers likely encountered modernist art on her travels to this region and related to
them because of her Bauhaus education and her interest in pre-Columbian artifacts. Tricia
Laughlin Bloom, in her essay in Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America,
1920s-1950s (2010), and Barbara Braun, in Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World:
Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (1993), outline the pan-American artistic trends
occurring simultaneously with Albers's work in the United States. In both, Albers is cited as
participating in these trends.
My thesis examines Albers's visual and written work chronologically and within the
context of German intellectual history, particularly Worringer's main argument in Abstraction
and Empathy, which explained modern art by comparing its abstract tendencies to that of
"primitive" cultures. Worringer believed that modern people, like those of the ancient past,

5
perceived the world as being full of chaos, and, therefore, they made abstract art to create order
and control. Albers and Worringer sought to contribute to the development of the modern world
by connecting to aspects of "primitive" life. Their ideas did not seek to return to earlier times,
but to relate to the assumed psychology of ancient peoples as a way to rationalize the art and
culture of the present day. My thesis chapters show that Albers justified her work through
Worringer's psychological concept of abstraction, but that she also departed from his ideas to
create her own philosophy, which specifically attended to weaving and the notion of
timelessness.
In the first chapter, I focus on the intellectual atmosphere at the Bauhaus as it relates to
Worringer's claims and to the weaving workshop. I argue that Worringer directly influenced the
Bauhaus at this time through his association of a chaotic world with a need for order, and I show
how Albers was a part of this trend, which also included artists such as Wassily Kandinsky
(1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Josef Albers (1888-1976), and László Moholy-Nagy
(1895-1946). Albers wrote in her essay "Wohnökonomie" (1924) that modern life required
objects that functioned easily, and with that came reductive forms lacking in ornamentation. In
later essays, she elaborated on the chaos of the modern world, and she offered a solution in
simplified, angular shapes indebted to the Bauhaus style. The pervasive sense of unrest,
particularly in the early-twentieth century in Germany, was what Worringer, Albers, and others
were responding to in their work. They felt that this sense of anxiety could be transcended
through geometric abstraction and order.
Immediately after her move to America, Albers still held on to Worringer's notion of
connecting chaos to abstraction and the modern world. Her weavings retained geometrical
elements, but they became more tactile and organic. In the second chapter, I assert that with her
distance from the Bauhaus atmosphere, Albers began to turn away from Worringer's ideas,
particularly from his claim that the materials have little impact on the final work and his
disassociation of craft and art. Albers's interest in returning to the origins of the working process
through direct contact with the raw materials and basic weaving constructions was related to her
interest in pre-Columbian textiles. Nevertheless, Albers's new direction still functioned within
the psychology underlying Worringer's claims that more broadly united the current direction in
art to humankind's earliest times. Worringer resorted to monolithic terms in his writings, but
Albers was much more specific in the non-western cultures she admired, placing great value on

6
the work of ancient Peruvian weavers. Her interest in the tactility of fabric also may have been
related to the pedagogy used by other Bauhaus members, such as Moholy-Nagy and Josef
Albers, who were concerned with the haptic nature of materials. She believed the modern world
needed this contact with materials as a means to invoke a primal state of mind and to provide
stability to cope with contemporary problems.5 In her new American context, Albers integrated
experiments with materials derived from the Bauhaus and her studies of pre-Columbian textiles
into her own pedagogy at Black Mountain College.
While Albers was introduced to universal principles at the Bauhaus, I assert that she also
encountered pan-American sources of universalism after moving to the U.S. Many artists in
Latin America at midcentury worked in a constructivist style and sought to convey universal
aspects in their art. This sense of universalism that expanded across both American continents
may have contributed to her work through her preexisting interest in pre-Columbian cultures.
This area of research has not been specifically pursued in the current literature on Albers, but it is
one I investigate in my third chapter by comparing the formal and theoretical similarities
between Albers and Torres-Garcia and by examining her travels in Latin America. After
discussing Albers's notion of universalism, which she paired with timelessness, I show how her
understanding of art differed from Worringer's theory. Worringer's broad view of art history
attempted to explain the occurrence of two alternating dominant trends in art (abstraction and
naturalism). Conversely, Albers wanted to situate herself in the art world, and she did this by
connecting the aesthetics of ancient and modern art through a shared universal language that
supposedly anyone could understand.
In her writings, Albers argues that art is one of the few constants in the world and that it
provides mental security for modern people. Albers is able to formulate her art philosophy and
relate her weavings, abstract in design, to this sense of timelessness because of her initial
understanding of Worringer's claims in Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer helped guide her to
an increased interest in pre-Columbian cultures, and he provided her with an explanation of
modernism that related to art and life of the past. Still, she diverged from his ideas when it came
to the use of materials, universal principles, and timelessness. In my thesis, I argue that Albers
came to her personal philosophy about art and her concept of universalism by combining
intellectual theories that shaped the Bauhaus, formal elements of ancient crafts, and
contemporary pan-American sources of universalism.

7
 CHAPTER ONE

THE BAUHAUS ATMOSPHERE

Albers encountered abstraction as a direction in modern art at the Bauhaus, where she
began classes in 1922 at the age of twenty-three. Her artistic experience prior to that time
consisted of figural studies in private lessons and painting studies with Martin Brandenburg, a
German impressionistic landscape painter. She also briefly attended the Kunstgewerbeschule
(School of Applied Arts) in Hamburg, a craft school that emphasized basic needlework
technique, pattern, and repetition.6 At the Bauhaus, she fully accepted a new aesthetic and
philosophy about art that allowed shapes in weaving to take on formal and conceptual
importance, reflecting a general trend in modernist directions of weaving in Western Europe at
large.7 Fabric artists at the Bauhaus challenged the hierarchy of fine art by maintaining that the
traditionally understood "craft" of weaving was a medium relevant to modernism and one that
could be artistic, utilitarian, or both. Albers and other members of the Bauhaus weaving
workshop played a vital role in changing conventional assumptions about their medium.
In this chapter, I begin with the intellectual context surrounding the formation of the
Bauhaus, focusing on Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Wilhelm Worringer, Alois Riegl (1858-
1905), and Gottfried Semper (1803-1879). Establishing this information provides a background
to understanding the visual work of Bauhaus artists. By introducing four Bauhauslers and four
weavers from Europe and Russia working in a modernist style, I show how Albers's work is
similar in design and theory to broader trends. After a discussion of Albers's Bauhaus weavings,
I examine two essays she published in 1924, both of which explain the style and purpose of work
she and others at the Bauhaus sought to achieve. To end my discussion of her visual and written
work at the Bauhaus, I consider Weber's linkage of Albers and Worringer through the idea of
visual resting places, and I speculate on the extent of her understanding of Abstraction and
Empathy. I argue Albers, like other modern artists in Europe and at the Bauhaus, applied the
theories of Worringer loosely as a rationale for her abstract style. Later chapters show how her

8
weavings and writings change in regard to Worringer and the intellectual atmosphere of the
Bauhaus.
The German architect Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 and directed the school until
1928. Although different aims were emphasized at different times, overall, the Bauhaus intended
to unite art, craft, and industry. Students were encouraged to create both works of fine art and
designs for practical application. Much of the school's curriculum was based on the modernist
notion, first discussed with architecture, "form follows function."8 As the motto implies,
students sought to make their art objects useful, efficient, and lacking in excess ornamentation.
A number of factors contributed to the formation of the Bauhaus and its pedagogy, a
context most thoroughly described by Rainer K. Wick in Teaching at the Bauhaus (2000). In
particular, Wick discusses preceding craft workshops and intellectuals of applied arts that laid
the groundwork for the Bauhaus to develop. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work
Federation), founded in 1907 in Munich, sought to integrate the artist into the process of machine
production to make artfully designed industrial products for a mass audience. These workshops
affected the focus of the Bauhaus principles in terms of industrial design, functionalism, and a
machine aesthetic. Barry Bergdoll, an architectural historian and curator, places Gropius's
writings under the auspices of the Werkbund because they combine industry and art in the same
fashion as the federation's mission.9
Semper, a German architect and author on the technical arts, encouraged the formation of
museums and schools focusing on the arts and crafts. In his essay "Wissenschaft, Industrie und
Kunst" ("Science, Industry, and Art") (1851), where he reflected on the Great Exhibition in
London, Semper addressed the lack of artisanship in modern industry. Semper's ideas may have
filtered into the Bauhaus through the workshops preceding it, such as the German Werkbund.
Bergdoll also connects Gropius to the time when Semper's ideas were most in vogue, revealing
that Gropius cited Semper in a 1919 lecture to some of the first Bauhaus students and that both
men considered craft to be the origin of architecture.10
One figure Wick does not address in his history of Bauhaus pedagogy is Worringer.
According to Reyner Banham, an architectural historian, Gropius attentively read Abstraction
and Empathy, cited Worringer in a 1913 lecture, and unknowingly exchanged images with
Worringer.11 In the last case, photographs of American silos and factories printed with his essay
"Die Entwicklung moderner Industriebaukunst" ("The Development of Modern Industrial

9
Architecture") (1913) reappeared in Worringer's book Egyptian Art (1927). Seemingly, Gropius
was most interested in Worringer's theory as it related to unornamented structures and simple
forms derived from architecture of ancient cultures, in particular Egypt. In Donahue's review of
the Gropius-Worringer connection, he asserts that both men felt certain styles were favored
because of an underlying psychological drive, one that could link the modern and the so-called
"primitive" worlds.12
The basic premise of Abstraction and Empathy is based on the assumption that cultures
have a unified group psychology that is visually manifested in art. Worringer's argument is
grounded in the notion that art "[arises] from psychic needs, [and] gratifies psychic needs."13 He
defines psychic states as "mankind['s] . . . relation to the cosmos . . . [and] . . . to the phenomena
of the external world."14 Worringer identified two dominant psychic states, chaos and harmony,
and two corresponding styles in art, abstraction and empathy. Worringer associated abstraction
with ancient or primitive peoples who found "beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the
crystalline" and the term empathy, broadly indicating naturalism in art, with the Western world's
preferred aesthetic of realism that ultimately derived from Classical art.15
In his book, he outlines, "Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy
pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the
urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of
the outside world."16 This establishes that ancient people feared the chaos of the unknown in
their world and that they created abstract art as a way to cope with this fear. Implicitly, the more
chaotic the world, the more abstract the art. Likewise, those who tended toward naturalism, and
were thus "empathetic," had a complex understanding of their world and lived in harmony with
it.
Worringer borrowed the term empathy from the German philosopher Theodor Lipps
(1851-1914). Lipps' term favored the subject of a work of art and its comparisons to nature, and
it implied the categories of pleasurable and unpleasurable, beautiful and ugly.17 However,
Worringer argued that applying such an aesthetic to art was biased according to one's
contemporary time and was not appropriate for all cultures and all eras. Instead, he asserted the
polarity of abstraction and empathy and claimed these styles were created under different
psychological dispositions. Therefore, art must be understood in the context of its associated
psychic state. Neither the reductive geometrics of abstract art nor the naturalism of empathic art

10
were better or more beautiful in Worringer's opinion, but simply represented the psychology of
the artist and the artist's larger culture. A culture's overarching psychology, not Lipps' notion of
empathic aesthetics based in Classical art, became Worringer's gauge in which to measure art.
Because Worringer linked art to a group's psychology and external environment, but not
its time, modern people could relate to those from the past through a shared sense of chaos and
uncertainty experienced, for example, during the political, social, and cultural turmoil in early-
twentieth century Europe.18 During Worringer's lifetime and while he drafted Abstraction and
Empathy, a great deal of industrialization and urbanization occurred in Germany, which resulted
in cultural and class strains. Military battle was on the horizon when Worringer was writing, and
this became a reality for his readers. The life of the Bauhaus (1919-1933) coincided with that of
the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and its political instability. In the early-twentieth century,
Germany entered economic depression and fell under Nazi power, which forced the Bauhaus to
close. This history clarifies why artists and intellectuals were preoccupied with fear, chaos, and
the unknown and why they sought some kind of escape, often through art. It sets a backdrop for
the explanation Worringer provides for modernism, that essentially times of chaos breed
abstraction in art. This aspect of his thesis provided a way for modern artists to rationalize their
abstractions, which were formally similar to art of ancient and primitive cultures who supposedly
lived in chaos as well.

Describing a primitive culture in a psychic state ruled by chaos, Worringer writes:

Tormented by the entangled inter-relationship and flux of the phenomena of the outer
world, such peoples were dominated by an immense need for tranquility. The happiness
they sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the
things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking
the individual things of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming
fortuitousness, of eternalizing it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner,
of finding a point of tranquility and a refuge from appearances. Their most powerful urge
was, so to speak, to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context, out of
the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e. of everything

11
 about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate it to its
absolute value.19

In this passage, Worringer touches on many concerns circulating in the European art
world during the early-twentieth century. He writes that for people living in times of chaos,
abstract art creates a feeling of tranquility and happiness, made possible by isolating the subject
from the external world. By eliminating the subject's appearance to the world and its relation to
three-dimensional space, it becomes a pure and distinct shape that is eternal, symbolic, and easily
grasped in the mind. He claims reductive shapes create stability and establish a known variable
through a visual "refuge" from chaos.
Worringer's explanation of psychology in art relied on the work of the Viennese art
historian Riegl. He used Riegl's term "absolute artistic volition" (or, das Kunstwollen, "the will
to art") to situate inner psychic needs as the driving force of creativity.20 Essentially, both were
concerned with the stylistic tendencies of a group, arguing that these tendencies were grounded
in a unified psychology. Worringer used absolute artistic volition like Riegl to claim that art was
solely dependent upon an inner urge to create and entirely independent of skill, training,
materials, and utilitarian purpose. By emphasizing the psychologically driven "will" of the artist
and deemphasizing the artist's ability, both Worringer and Riegl allowed for aesthetical beauty in
ancient and primitive art because it was created from a different urge than that of the Classical
world and therefore should not be judged by the same standards. Worringer believed that the
conventions of classical aesthetics do not, and should not, apply to the abstractions of what he
perceived to be primitive cultures. This interest in groups not traditionally considered within
mainstream Western culture, in Worringer's case, Egyptian, pre-Columbian, and early Gothic,
may also be attributed to Riegl, who focused primarily on Late Roman and Medieval art.21 Both
approached aesthetics from the viewpoint that all cultures were valuable to the study of art.
Another aspect important to Worringer's thesis and that he borrowed from Riegl was the
duality of the haptic and the optic. The term haptic implies an understanding achieved through
the sense of touch, while optic suggests an understanding through the sense of sight. The haptic
is often associated with objectivity, as one assumes that the texture of an object is real and cannot
be feigned. The optic is associated with subjectivity because the eye can be tricked and does not
always register a true image of a three-dimensional space. In the Riegl-Worringer line of

12
thinking, ancient artists perceived their world primarily through haptic (tactile) means, as
opposed to those in later Western cultures, operating from the standpoint of classical aesthetics
that were optic in nature.22 According to Worringer, ancient people felt a "spiritual dread of
space," that is, they feared the expansiveness and uncertainty of the three-dimensional world,
perceived optically.23 Therefore, he argues that these people depended on their sense of touch as
means to reassure their limited understanding of the world.
Worringer further linked tactility to geometric abstraction through the flat plane, created
only with a horizontal and a vertical surface. He likewise associated the optical suggestion of
depth to naturalism. To arrive at this conclusion, he used Riegl's "plane theory," where the
certainty of definite shapes "was possible only within the [two-dimensional] plane, within which
the tactile nexus of the representation could be most strictly preserved."24 In Abstraction and
Empathy, he quotes Riegl as saying, "[The] plane is not the optical, with which, if we are at any
distance from things, the eye deludes us, but the haptic (tactile), which is suggested to us by the
perceptions of the sense of touch; for it is upon the certitude of tangible impermeability that, at
this stage of development, the conviction of material individuality also depends."25 By
identifying the emphases on a flat plane, single forms, and suppression of three-dimensional
space as characteristics of abstraction, Worringer implies that abstraction is firstly understood
through a haptic sense.26
Matière refers to either the tactile sensation of materials or the exploration of surface
qualities.27 As such, it corresponds with the haptic. Bauhaus instructors, such as Josef Albers
and Moholy-Nagy, used matière studies when teaching their Preliminary Courses. Their
students experimented in a variety of media, including paper, fabric, wood, and found objects,
and they focused on the innate characteristics of the material's unique strengths. Josef Albers
distinguished the terms material and matière in his courses, material being the raw substance,
matière being the sensation afforded by the material.28 Moholy-Nagy in particular was interested
in training the sense of touch; such training intended to improve society at large and not just
increase one's perception.29 Moholy-Nagy and others at the Bauhaus assumed that "primitive"
people worked more closely with their materials and thus achieved a sense of purity and
supposed truth. Modern man could tap into such truths by using ancient working methods, or as
Worringer suggests, a shared psychology. Naturally for Anni Albers and the weaving workshop,
tactility was closely associated with weaving. It also related to the broad concern of the Bauhaus

13
expressed by her husband Josef as "contact with material."30 She discusses the tactile nature of
her work through the concept of matière in one of her final essays, "Tactile Sensibility" (1965),
in a way that still echoes the principles of Bauhaus pedagogy.
In the weaving workshop, experimentation with materials bridged the conventional
categories of art and craft. While Worringer addresses the haptic nature of early art, he rarely
discusses craft specifically, nor does he suggest that art and craft can be the same. He identifies
his main concern as the "plastic arts."31 When he does talk about objects that might be
considered craft, such as clay figurines, he connects them with an "imitation impulse." He
identifies this impulse as a part of the history of handicraft, claiming, "[It] has prevailed at all
periods, and its history is a history of manual dexterity, devoid of aesthetic significance.
Precisely in the earliest times this impulse was entirely separate from the art impulse proper; it
found satisfaction exclusively in the art of the miniature, as for instance in those little idols and
symbolic trifles that we know from early epochs of art and that are very often in direct
contradiction to the creations in which the pure art impulse of the peoples in question manifested
itself."32
Worringer never discusses weaving, and his "imitation impulse" theory does not
generally apply to the medium. Nonetheless, as he is concerned with fine art, and distinguishes
between the history of art and the history of handicraft, one surmises that Worringer felt that
craftspeople did not respond to environmental changes in the same way artists did, craftspeople
adhering to tradition or imitation rather than expressing the overarching psychology of the era
through their work. Conversely, Semper did not distinguish between art and craft. Yet, like
Worringer's and Riegl's widened concern for all cultures, Semper did not use conventional
classical aesthetics limited to the Western European world to identify beauty or successful
works. The strongest aesthetic examples in modern times, Semper believed, were created when
artists applied their knowledge of materials and ancient working methods to the industrial arts.
In his book Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (two volumes, 1861 and 1863), he asserted,
"Stylistic correctness depends first on the natural properties of the raw material to be treated;
these properties must be thoroughly known to anyone intending to produce a technical work or
anyone called upon to prepare instructions, directions, and patterns for the producer."33
The first two volumes of Semper's book focus on materials, working techniques, and the
function of the art object. These sections pegged Semper as a materialist. In their writings,

14
Worringer and Riegl openly opposed Semper's materialistic theory, which emphasized technical
ability over a psychological drive to create art. Important to note, Semper originally intended to
publish a third volume that focused, as his biographer Harry Francis Mallgrave put it, "almost
exclusively on style's external variables . . . that is, on the personal, social, and cultural
conditions giving rise to style," which may have attended to psychological states as a
determining factor of style.34
The traditional comparison of Worringer's notion of an artist's "will" to Semper's "skill"
further extends to the usual division between plastic arts and craft, where art is created
spontaneously by a "genius" and craft is based on technical knowledge and conventions. Albers
continuously challenged this division through the choices made in her weavings and through the
arguments made in her writings. Her aversion to these traditional categories was clearly based
within the context of her education, as the Bauhaus workshops embraced aspects of both art and
craft and aimed for unity between the two.
After publishing Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer was not widely accepted in
academia because his argument lacked empirical evidence and made sweeping claims that
glossed over the differences among cultures; however, his book was timely for many modern
artists who already were drawn to art of the past. Worringer's book played into the growing
trend of primitivism in Europe, existing earlier with artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
and contemporaneously with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and German expressionists like Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938).
Worringer provided a theoretical reasoning for artists to connect modernism with abstract
shapes found in ancient art by claiming that both groups felt psychologically bewildered in a
world of chaos. While artists accepted him as providing a means to justify the aesthetics of
modern art and their use of primitive source material, he was not initially elevating either
abstraction or realism but attempting to identify and explain two dominant trends in art.
However, between 1910 and 1921, he essentially became a spokesperson for modernism, in
particular expressionism. Donahue established that Worringer's follow up to Abstraction and
Empathy, Form Problems of the Gothic (1910), was a "disguised manifesto for the new art of
German Expressionism," although Worringer later rejected modernism in his essay "Questions
about Contemporary Art" (1921).35

15
 Art historian Magdalena Bushart draws attention to a problem pertaining to Worringer
and modernism, that is that Worringer was writing before expressionism and various forms of
geometric abstraction had solidified as artistic styles.36 He completed Abstraction and Empathy
in 1907, and he obviously could not foresee what would develop in the art world. Donahue,
however, asserts Worringer was a catalyst for modernism.37 With this in mind, it is essential to
understand Abstraction and Empathy as a text that artists exploited for their own work as they
saw fit, with a general disregard for the details of Worringer's argument.38
Discussions of Worringer and his text appear in the scholarship on several Bauhaus
artists and build a case for his influence there. It is possible that Gropius was responsible for
integrating Worringer at the Bauhaus, as he was familiar with Abstraction and Empathy by 1913.
According to Weber, Abstraction and Empathy was on the Bauhaus reading list for incoming
students, which is where Albers supposedly first encountered the book.39 Art historian Peter Selz
identifies numerous connections between Worringer and contemporaneous avant-garde painters
in his book German Expressionist Painting (1957). Importantly, Selz discusses Kandinsky and
Klee, both of whom taught at the Bauhaus, in terms of Worringer's thesis.
Considering the influence of Worringer at the Bauhaus, I briefly examine here the visual
work of four artists at the school. Their work is formally similar to Albers's, all representing a
widespread trend at the Bauhaus in using grids, bands, stripes, and other angular shapes. At the
end of this section, I establish a broader context for geometric abstraction in avant-garde
weavings.
Kandinsky discovered Abstraction and Empathy as soon as it was published. In 1908, he
met Worringer, who influenced Der Blaue Reiter by providing an explanation applicable to the
main intentions of the group, namely the expression of one's inner psychology through abstract
art and aesthetics derived from "primitive" cultures.40 Kandinsky was initially interested in
expressionistic line, which Worringer associated with early gothic art from Germany. For
Worringer, the linear elements of Gothic art represented the transcendental qualities of
abstraction. Like many of his contemporaries, Kandinsky attempted to use art as an escape from
the chaos and fear of the world. He outlined this and the mystical aspects of his abstraction in
his text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).41 Kandinsky's later work at the Bauhaus moved
away from his previous use of expressionistic line and more toward geometric, hard-edged
shapes. His paintings became less poetic and less decipherable as a story or narrative. Albers

16
took Kandinsky's class "Theory of Form" at the Bauhaus in 1925, but she was already
knowledgeable about his experiments with the emotional qualities of pure shapes.42 Albers and
Kandinsky continued their friendship through correspondences after she moved to America.
Klee, too, soon found Abstraction and Empathy. He generally followed Worringer's
ideas, but he criticized the specifics of Worringer's argument more than did Albers. Like
Worringer, Klee was interested in the art of ancient cultures and the notion of chaos in modern
art; however, Klee desired to withdraw from the hardships of the world into a realm of artistic
play.43 Albers bought a painting by Klee, Zwei Kräfte (1922), while still a student at the
Bauhaus (Figure 1). The small watercolor is abstract with angular shapes that are marked by
solid arrows, suggesting directionality. Other areas are more ambiguous and are not delineated.
There is a variety of color but mostly earth tones. Troy writes that the painting indicated the two
motions of weaving, vertical (warp) and horizontal (weft), and therefore, explains Albers's
interest in it.44 From 1927 to 1929, Klee taught courses for the Bauhaus weaving workshop,
which gradually altered his direction in painting.45 During that time, he began using the gridded
structure and registers of weaving more overtly. Additionally, some of his paintings can be read
from multiple orientations like a textile, and he emphasized the canvas fabric.
Klee was an important figure to Albers. He introduced her to semiotics through his
studies of the pictograph, ideograph, and calligraph, aspects of which she increasingly used in
America.46 She called him "her god" and revered his work, even though she found his teaching
dense.47 She would come to understand Klee's teachings only after she moved to America,
perhaps reinterpreting his work in a way that allowed her to form her weavings through a sense
of loosened geometry like his.
There were other artists at the Bauhaus who had less to do with Worringer, but who are
nonetheless important comparisons to Albers. Moholy-Nagy brought his brand of abstraction to
the Bauhaus in 1923. His paintings, photographs, and graphic designs made at the Bauhaus
formally correspond to the constructivist style. As such, they are geometrically abstract,
emphasize reductive shapes on flat, solid grounds, and, according to the artist's beliefs, maintain
a social purpose.
Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923, a few months after Theo van Doesburg
(1883-1931). Van Doesburg's de Stijl manifesto, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art (1919), defined a
style of pure geometric abstraction that presumably communicated a universally understandable

17
message that would lead to a utopic ideal.48 Universalism became a widespread notion for
modern artists as a way to create affinities with various groups. This is something that Albers
continued to concern herself with in her writings throughout her lifetime. Van Doesburg is also
frequently cited as instilling a neoplastic style emphasizing "clarity and economy" at the
Bauhaus, although this has been challenged by Michael White.49 Interestingly for the
connections between geometric shapes and unity of the whole, the supposed origin for the name
of the art group de Stijl was the title of Semper's text (Der Stil).50 The utopic aims of both
constructivism and de Stijl generally parallel Worringer's claim that abstract art serves the
purpose of finding a visual escape from the external world, although neither group was
particularly indebted to him.
The trends of geometric abstraction did not only apply to Bauhaus painters, as Albers
attests. The weaving workshop textile designers saw their use of pattern and shape as
contributing to this new direction in modernism. They were not alone in this belief. A larger
trend of presenting textiles as modern art instead of craft was also reflected in Paris and Russia,
as is demonstrated below, where weavers also applied theoretical notions of abstraction to
weaving.
The weavers at the Bauhaus aimed to create both beautiful and functional textiles. Their
products emphasized abstract shapes, exploration with raw materials over basic technique, and
unification of handweaving and the machine aesthetic.51 Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) was the
workshop director from 1927 to 1931 and a close friend to Albers. According to art historian
Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann, Stölzl and Albers shared similar beliefs, particularly in that simplicity
of form represented clarified vision.52 Unlike Albers, Stölzl used more color and abandoned the
grid by avoiding shapes with right angles.
For example, Stölzl's Wall Hanging (1927/28) is variegated with bright, chemically-made
colors (Figure 2). There seem to be sections of patterns where similar shapes repeat, but these
patterns also vary across the textile. With the combination of horizontal, vertical, zigzag,
checked, and curved shapes, one gets a sense of movement and rhythm atypical to many
weavings. Stölzl was working against the tendency in weaving to form square patterns, and
therefore, shapes in her weavings do not always correspond to the larger whole. She differs from
Albers in this regard. The result is a textile that does not seem to form a unified whole, but one
that creates an overwhelming awareness of pattern and color.

18
 Simultaneously, in France, Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) created avant-garde weavings.
Her compositions compare with Stölzl's work through their emphasis on color and bold shapes,
often geometric, that do not necessarily correspond to the larger whole of the weaving
construction. Delaunay wrote about her work as did Albers, but not to the same extent. Her
writings tend to focus on her interests in color; however, in "Rugs and Textiles" (1925), she
wrote that art reflects "the spiritual condition of an epoch," which might possibly relate to
Worringer's theory of group psychology.53 One of Albers's Bauhaus wall hangings was
reproduced in Delaunay's book Tapis et Tissus (1929), which included work by numerous other
modernist fabric artists in Europe and Russia.
Russian artists Liubov Popova (1889-1924) and Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958)
rethought wearable textiles and industrially-produced fabrics by placing emphasis on the
machine and bold geometric patterns.54 In this sense, their work is akin to the aims of the
Bauhaus and the aesthetics of constructivism, and they share philosophies similar to Albers's.
Popova and Stepanova were also included in Delaunay's Tapis et Tissus. Meanwhile, working
back in Germany, Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943), like Albers, was responding to
the innate geometries of the weaving process. She navigated between the conventional
dichotomy of high art and craft by using objective, timeless shapes with utilitarian objects such
as costumes.55
Like other artists at the Bauhaus and in Western Europe at large, geometric and hard-
edged shapes characterize Albers's visual work in the 1920s. Her Bauhaus wall hangings are
typically composed of horizontal bands or patterned rectangles. The squared nature of these
shapes references the external, rectangular form of the weaving. All illusionism is banished to
emphasize the flatness of the plane. Her choice to work in an austere geometric style is no doubt
due to a variety of factors that influenced the Bauhaus.
The earliest phase of the Bauhaus, from approximately 1919 to 1921, sought to
reestablish the handicrafts within modernism.56 Bauhaus artists at this time often took
inspiration from expressionist tendencies in folk art or non-western traditions. Albers arrived at
the Bauhaus when this design principle was changing, so her work is not representative of this
trend. She retained from the earliest phase an interest in functionalism, as this aspect remained a
part of the Bauhaus pedagogy in varying degrees until the school's closing.

19
 Around 1922, partly because of the introduction of de Stijl by van Doesburg in that year,
Bauhaus students began making works of art that were cubic and reductive in composition. In
the weaving workshop, this meant creating wall hangings that essentially functioned like
modernist easel paintings. Albers would continue to work in this mode throughout her weaving
career, often drawing comparisons between paintings and textiles in her writings.
Supplementing the aesthetic changes brought by de Stijl, Bauhaus administrators transitioned the
focus of the school away from expressionism and toward lab work, where artists essentially
became technicians. According to art historian and curator Leah Dickerman, Albers and other
Bauhauslers started to implement the "logic of the grid" into their work.57 This was especially
true of the textiles produced by the weaving workshop. Klee's classes for weavers included
studies of matrixes, which emphasized gridded pattern. Two aspects of de Stijl encouraged the
use of the grid as well: elementism, as it emphasized right angles, and integration, as a way to
unite parts into a new whole.58
Looking at Albers's Bauhaus weavings chronologically reveals changes in her aesthetics,
the formal similarities with other artists, and the evolving principles of the Bauhaus. Her earliest
works, from 1922 to 1924, tend to be formed by wide bands, mostly horizontal. These works are
often symmetrical, or at least equally weighted on the left and right, top and bottom. The colors
are most often neutral.
In Wallhanging (1924), Albers created a static, unified whole by adhering to the
horizontal and verticals innate in the weaving process (Figure 3). The textile can be equally
divided into four similar quarters. Formally mirroring itself from top to bottom and left to right,
she achieved a sense of balance. This work is devoid of subject matter. By composing a work of
pure form, Albers avoided her own subjective nature, and, thus, created a weaving that she
perhaps thought of as timeless or universally applicable. Like all of her Bauhaus works, this wall
hanging is untitled, a feature she adds to her American weavings.
Her textiles from 1925 and 1926 bear a close resemblance to her husband Josef's so-
called "thermometer paintings" and glassworks, which is likely due to their similar Bauhaus
background and their artistic dialogue.59 In works from these years, narrow stripes, still mostly
horizontal, vary in length and may be stacked so as to create the illusion of a vertical shape.
These works are sometimes more colorful, and this is especially true of her gouache studies for
weavings. As early as 1925, the colors she chose for her weavings and preliminary studies were

20
often a combination of primary colors and neutrals, eliciting a visual comparison to de Stijl
paintings by van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Not coincidentally, van Doesburg
had already made an impression on the Bauhaus during his time in Weimar, and his Principles of
Neo-Plastic Art was republished by the Bauhaus in 1925.60
Wall Hanging (1925) is characteristic of her work from this time (Figure 4). She still
adheres to the innate geometric qualities of weaving construction; however, this work includes
more pattern and variation. It brings to mind a comparison with music, which has an underlying
harmony often modified throughout a song for interest. With this weaving, there seems to be
common denominator among the stripes that is perhaps doubled or tripled in width to create
different sized bands of similar proportions. Thus, when several thin stripes are layered, they
form a more defined rectangular shape. The repeating bands in this work create a more lively
effect than her Wallhanging from the previous year (Figure 3). The work from 1925 also
includes repeating elements at the top and bottom that act like borders.
Around 1927, her woven work became more patterned because of her use of repeating
rectangular shapes. Black-White-Red (reconstruction of the 1927 original) is composed of
twelve distinct columns and six rows (Figure 5). This format is more regular than her Wall
Hanging from 1925 (Figure 4). In this later work, stripe-filled rectangles alternate with crosses.
Four rectangles of each style repeat in every row, and two repeat in every column; however,
there still is not an exact pattern continuing across the textile. Again, Albers achieves a work
that conveys both harmony and variation. This work, like her Wallhanging from 1924 (Figure
3), can be divided into quarters that generally mirror each other. The heavily gridded
composition creates balance, and it contrasts with the movement in Stölzl's contemporaneous
work (Figure 2).
Albers's work at this time also reflects the third and final trend in Bauhaus pedagogy.
From about 1926 until the closing of the school, Bauhaus directors, under the pressure of the
government, felt the need to prove the ways in which the school was contributing to society. To
do this, they encouraged students to create useful objects and industrial designs that would unite
fine craftsmanship, functional objects, and modern aesthetics. Albers made designs for
utilitarian objects, such as tablecloths and rugs, and prototypes to be mass-produced, such as
drapery material and theater curtains. This was the main direction of her work during her last
years at the Bauhaus. She continued to make utilitarian objects and fabric samples after her

21
move to the U.S. in 1933, but in much smaller numbers. In America the wall-hanging format
became her primary mode of working.
While at the Bauhaus, Albers published her first two essays on weaving (both in 1924),
which correspond with her way of working with textiles. "Bauhausweberei" ("Bauhaus
Weaving") was printed in a special edition of Junge Menschen, a monthly magazine published in
Hamburg between 1919 and 1927, on the Bauhaus. She begins her essay, "[In ancient times],
because of the close relationship to loom and material, fabrics were created that were good,
because they were woven according to the inherent properties of handicraft and material. . . . The
Bauhaus seeks to restore the overall contact with the material."61 Thus, the weaving workshop
was firstly concerned with applying traditional materials and working processes to modern art
and design. The themes of working within the limits of the material and integrating ancient
crafts with modern design recur in Albers's later writings.
"Wohnökonomie" ("Economic Living") appeared in a Bauhaus supplement for the
women's magazine Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur, published in Karlsruhe beginning in
1913, and it addressed the New Woman in Germany. In the essay, Albers identifies the need for
efficiency in the bustle of modern life, and she simultaneously asserts the Bauhaus's role in
designing these more physically economical prototypes (door handles, teapots, chairs, etc.) for
production. The objects of the previous decades no longer served modern needs and could not
simply be improved, but needed to be redesigned completely. In this essay, she identifies the
primary goal of the Bauhaus: "It wants things clearly constructed, it wants functional materials, it
wants this new beauty."62 She continues, "This new beauty is not a style which matches one
object with another aesthetically by using similar external forms (facade, motif, ornament).
Today, something is beautiful if its form serves it function, if it is well made of well-chosen
material." The essay relates more to utilitarian objects than fine art, but it nonetheless calls for
simple forms without ornamentation.
The two essays she wrote for Bauhaus publications were primarily related to
communicating the school's social objectives. While Albers certainly accepted the Bauhaus
pedagogy whole-heartedly (it remained a part of her own art philosophy for the rest of her life),
the articles essentially served as propaganda for the school and are limited to discussions on
materials and creating utilitarian, aesthetically pleasing objects. They reaffirm Albers's Bauhaus
education as it relates to materialism and functionalism, which makes her writings seem more

22
akin to the ideas of Semper than Worringer. Still, describing ancient working methods for
contemporary artists and the need to control the modern world through order could suggest her
knowledge of Worringer as well. "Bauhausweberei" and "Wohnökonomie" mostly express the
goals and principles of the Bauhaus, but they also set the precedent for Albers's later writings by
discussing her method of working, theoretical concerns pertaining to the mindset achieved by
using ancient weaving techniques, and sustained interest in the effects of particular materials.
During her time at the Bauhaus, Albers's visual work adheres to geometry and order. In
later writings, she claims order in art provides a solution to chaos, but at the Bauhaus, she offers
only that well-designed, simple objects will make modern life easier. Albers's writings and
weavings at the Bauhaus cannot be directly tied to a psychological response to chaos, but some
of her American essays from the 1930s and 1940s specify that clear, open forms provide a space
to rest one's eyes, mind, and spirit from the disorder of the modern world.
Notably, two of her American writings that address the psychic state of the modern world
are reflections on the Bauhaus: "Weaving at the Bauhaus" and "On Walter Gropius." This
suggests that she was familiar with Worringer's theory during her education. An essay for the
exhibition catalogue Bauhaus: 1918-1928, "Weaving at the Bauhaus" (1938), begins, "In a world
as chaotic as the European world after World War I . . . [a]nyone seeking to find a point of
certainty amid the confusion of upset beliefs, and hoping to lay a foundation for a work which
was oriented toward the future, had to start at the very beginning."63 For Albers and others in the
weaving workshop, starting at the beginning referred to the basic materials. She explains, "They
[the Bauhauslers] believed that only working directly with material could help them get back to a
sound basis and relate them with the problems of their own time."64 These problems, the chaos
of a nation, bring to mind Worringer's theory of psychology. Like Worringer's theory, Albers's
solution is a "sound basis," some sort of stability afforded by working directly with materials as
did ancient civilizations.
The essay "On Walter Gropius" (written in 1947 but published only in 1969 as an
obituary for the Bauhaus founder) describes how Gropius created stability for students by
defining a direction for them. Here, she writes, "Outside [the Bauhaus] was the world I came
from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes."65 In a language similar
to Worringer's, Albers asserts in both of these essays that her time at the Bauhaus was imbued
with a sense of chaos, namely political instability caused by warfare.

23
 In other writings, she begins essays with statements such as: "Life today is very
bewildering," "Our world goes to pieces; we have to rebuild our world," and "Times of rapid
change produce a wish for stability, for permanence and finality."66 In response to chaos, she
calls for order and constancy in art as a way to regain control. Essays like "Art–A Constant"
(1939) assert that through the unchanging qualities of art, society can deal with the unknown and
realize transcendental truths.67 Science, religion, and philosophy fail to provide this sense of
stability because they are either too dogmatic or they are not timeless, as the fields are always
changing. She is not interested in the progression or evolution of art. Partly because of her
Bauhaus education, Albers makes abstract art static through the concept of universalism. In
doing so, the permanency of art imparts security from the fear that exists in the world, especially
the modern world.
Art can relieve the sense of unease by its permanency but also by abstract shapes
removed from the recognizable world. These reductive but distinct shapes can be grasped in the
mind as an eternal symbol. Such shapes are what Worringer called a "refuge from
appearances."68 Weber, Albers's biographer, identifies her use of visual resting places in her
weavings as a link with Worringer.69 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer singles out pure
geometric abstraction as a means to "create resting-points, opportunities for repose, necessities in
the contemplation of which the spirit exhausted by the caprice of perception could halt awhile."70
Worringer brings this up as he begins to explain the style of abstraction. Elsewhere in his text,
he establishes that abstract forms are the best way for people to create a visual space that allows
them to escape the chaos of the external world. He writes, "These regular abstract forms are . . .
the only ones and the highest, in which man can rest in the face of the vast confusion of the
world-picture."71 In this statement, he does not distinguish the ancient or modern person, but
from the context of his book, it is surmised that he is speaking of any society ruled by a psychic
state of chaos.
Similarly in her "Designing" (1943), Albers establishes the need for "objects of art . . .
which protect and serve us, give us rest and ease," the same objects that "[lead] to
contemplation."72 This statement, coupled with several other essays that mention the need to
create order in a world of chaos, lead me to conclude that Albers was familiar with Worringer's
ideas and resorted to parts of his theory in her own philosophy and work. Although Weber states

24
Albers read Abstraction and Empathy at the Bauhaus, this cannot be determined from Albers's
writings or her archives.
Being a part of a larger group at the Bauhaus who were certainly familiar with Worringer,
such as Klee and Kandinsky, provides circumstantial support that Albers was aware of his ideas
during that period. Albers may have found rationalization in Worringer's modernist explanation
for abstraction through group psychology. Like other artists she did not use Worringer's text as
an explanation of the history of art, but she related it to the aesthetics and purpose of her own
work. At the Bauhaus, she developed an interest in geometric abstraction as way of ordering her
compositions and visually coping with the stresses of the world. Justification for these interests
suggest her recourse to the writings of Worringer, especially to his idea of visual resting places.
As demonstrated in this chapter, a combination of factors contributed to the intellectual
atmosphere surrounding the Bauhaus and its pedagogy. These include an increased number of
craft and applied arts workshops, a concern for design in industry, and an underlying theoretical
reliance on Semper's materialism and functionalism. Worringer's theories offer one rationale for
modernist abstraction, but he only addresses the plastic arts. Semper's ideas may have resonated
more with Albers, as he attends specifically to weaving in his writings; however, there is little
evidence for his direct influence on her in the scholarship. Still, I suggest Albers found aspects
of these intellectual figures' theories within the Bauhaus sphere, and she applied their work,
along with her education, in a way that unified art, craft, and design through geometric
abstraction.
After Albers moved to America, the abstract art of ancient cultures became increasingly
important in her weavings and writings. She relaxed the geometry in her work. Her writings
show an increased interest in chaos and modern applications of ancient working methods. In the
U.S., she expanded beyond Worringer's text in terms of non-western cultures and the haptic
nature of weaving. Her personal philosophy for weaving, which developed within the context of
the Bauhaus, became fully realized after she began working at Black Mountain College (1933-
1957), an experimental liberal arts school in North Carolina. With her transition from Bauhaus
student to professional artist, her philosophy shifted to stress her understanding of pre-
Columbian craftwork and reflected her new American context.

25
 CHAPTER TWO

ALBERS'S MOVE TO AMERICA AND HER RETURN TO

BEGINNINGS

Albers encountered ancient textiles during her studies in Germany, but moving to the
U.S. in 1933 provided her with more accessibility to these artifacts. According to Troy, the
Bauhaus owned examples of ancient fabric samples, particularly from Andean countries,
emphasizing Wari and Tiwanaku cultures (Middle Horizon period, A.D. 600-1000), and some
Bauhauslers in the weaving workshop chose to imitate the iconography from these samples.73
Albers did not participate in this trend, but she was interested in ancient weaving constructions.
At this early stage, Albers was drawn to the artifacts of ancient Peru. She acquired books written
by German archeologists working in Latin America, notably Walter Lehmann's Kunstgeschichte
des Alten Peru (The Art of Old Peru) (1924).74 She also visited anthropology museums, such as
the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Ethnologisches Museum), which housed extensive
pre-Columbian collections.75
The abstract patterns, pure forms, techniques, and visual language of the ancient Peruvian
textiles resonated with Albers. Simultaneously, it suited her Bauhaus style and Worringer's
thesis that aligned geometrical shapes with both ancient and modern cultures. Albers maintained
elements of the Bauhaus mode of working, such as geometric design and concern for utility,
throughout her life; however, she abandoned uniform texture and the mechanized working
process in her personal art after 1933.76 By working on a handloom, Albers achieved the tactile
quality of the ancient weavings while continuing to use geometric shapes.
In this second chapter, I assert that, with her distance from the Bauhaus atmosphere,
Albers began to turn away from Worringer's ideas, particularly from his claim that the materials
have little impact on the final work and his disassociation of craft and art. I argue that Albers
countered these notions in two ways. First, with her personal study of ancient weaving cultures
of the Americas, Albers sought to work as closely as possible with the raw materials and basic
constructions of her medium. Second, through playful experimentation that derived from
Bauhaus pedagogy, she emphasized the haptic nature of the materials and final fabric in her work
and in her teaching. Both aspects intertwined with her belief that the modern world needed
26
contact with the original materials to invoke a clarified state of mind and to provide stability in a
world of chaos, which relates to Worringer's theory on a broad level.
Albers differed from most artists and intellectuals of the early-twentieth century in her
understanding of "primitive" cultures through the terminology she used, her interest in
exhibitions, collecting of ancient artifacts, and friendship with researchers in anthropology. In
this chapter, I outline the main avenue of research on Albers in the past decade, which intersects
with studies of primitivism and postcolonialism. Attending to her collection of pre-Columbian
textiles and miniatures, I set up a discussion of Albers's weavings. To conclude this chapter, I
look closely at Albers's writings as they pertain to Peruvian textiles, experimentation, and work
with materials. Chronologically, this chapter will focus on stylistic changes and continuances
occurring in Albers's written and woven work in the decades following her move to America.
During the 1930s in both Europe and America, many artists adapted formal elements
from so-called "primitive" cultures to their modernist aims, as had vanguard artists from Gauguin
to Picasso to the German expressionists before them.77 Complex political and socio-economic
factors resulting from the end of World War I, including renewed colonization efforts and
realignments of administrative power, as well as the rise of Nazism and the consequent
emigrations of Jewish intellectuals and artists, led both to trans-Atlantic cultural exchanges and
to national obsessions with collective origins. European artists continued to derive inspiration
from African and Pacific cultures, while a number of artists and arts professionals in the U.S.
turned their attentions to their own hemisphere, looking to the work of ancient and tribal peoples
from the Americas. Primitivism based upon African prototypes existed in this new context,
particularly through the work by the Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals, but this was
paralleled by a primitivism dependent upon an interest in the indigenous cultures of the
Americas, a heritage separate from that of Europe.
This heightened interest in the artifacts of ancient cultures seemingly helped traditional
artisanship rise to the level of fine art in both Europe and America. Albers participated in and
promoted this movement by aligning her visual work with ancient Peruvian weavings through
her working process, construction techniques, and writings. She further engaged with this
dialogue through the craft magazines in which she published her writings. For example, she
submitted three essays (in 1943, 1961, and 1969) to Craft Horizons, a magazine that often

27
featured articles about non-western art and craft's relation to the conventional distinctions of fine
and modern art.78
Where Albers was specific about the culture she was interested in and praised, Worringer
had been much more general, using monolithic terms in his writings that group together all
ancient and "primitive" people. In Abstraction and Empathy, he mentions twice the "shimmering
veil of Maya," but otherwise neglects ancient American art in his discussions.79 Albers was
never this vague when speaking of the ancient Peruvians. She singled them out and elevated
their work, calling their artifacts "art" and claiming that they invented everything we know about
weaving, aside from contemporary chemical dyes, synthetic fibers, and mechanical production.80
As Albers saw it, modern people had much to learn from ancient Peruvian culture, particularly in
the realm of design. While Worringer may have helped stimulate Albers's interest in the art of
ancient cultures, he is not a model for her study of pre-Columbian cultures. Instead, her interest
in the subject is primarily personal.
As Fiber Artist Ed Rossbach describes, when Albers arrived in America, her style of
working was viewed as foreign and intellectual.81 This, however, added credibility to her work
because European modernism was believed to be a step ahead of America in the 1930s. The way
she discussed ancient cultures was cautious and scholarly, as opposed to someone like the
American weaver Mary Atwater who, in Albers's eyes, carelessly borrowed iconography from
other cultures. Atwater exemplified American craft-revival traditions, and she could be called
Albers's rival. Her "recipe" books diagramed Peruvian patterns to be replicated by modern
hobbyists, and she adamantly denied that weaving could be art.82 Albers and Atwater had a
written exchange on the pages of The Weaver, each criticizing the other's work.83
Another way Albers specified her interest in pre-Columbian cultures was by actively
seeking out relevant exhibitions, books, and classes. She saved newspaper and magazine articles
on Peruvian artifacts and gallery displays, which are now in the Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation archive.84 When her husband worked at Yale University in the 1950s, she took
classes with the renowned pre-Columbian scholar George Kubler. In his class she wrote a paper
called "A Structural Process in Weaving: A Suggestion Applied to a Weaving Problem of a
Remote Past and Applicable Today" (1952), later published in her book On Designing (1959).
The paper provided her explanation of how ancient Peruvians of the Paracas culture (Early
Horizon period, 900 B.C.-A.D. 200) were able to weave extremely large textiles, a problem

28
facing all weavers as the dimensions of their looms typically limit their work. In this essay,
Albers describes the various loom types used by the Peruvians and the dimensions of textiles
found in burial contexts. She suggests the largest textiles were made with double weaves,
tubular weaves, and elaborations on these techniques with the help of heddle rods. Essentially,
Albers concludes that layers of cloth were woven individually, but simultaneously, on a single
loom, joined at an edge, and unfolded when removed from the loom to create a much larger
textile than normally possible. She corresponded with Junius B. Bird, an important pre-
Columbian archaeologist and Andean textile specialist, about the structure of ancient weavings,
and reworked this essay she wrote for Kubler's class after a lengthy discussion with Bird.85
Within a year of moving to the U.S., Albers visited Mexico and began acquiring ancient
textiles (Figure 6). She sometimes cut these samples apart to share with other collections or to
study their constructions. She diagramed with a specialized notation in On Weaving how these
textiles were made, explained these techniques in her writings, and replicated them in her own
weavings. Her collection expanded to 113 Andean textile pieces, representing a diverse crosscut,
which Kubler helped catalogue.86
She also collected ancient miniature figurines with her husband. Like the textiles, she
found these artifacts in local markets, most frequently in Mexico, as described in her
introductory essay for Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures, although some came from galleries
specializing in "primitive" art, such as Altman Antiques.87 With this book, small pre-Columbian
objects were reproduced in a large format to show that the miniatures could compete with bigger,
and more popular, sculptural works. Although she argues in her essay that great art does not
depend on scale, the layout seems to contradict the intentions of her book.88
In the past decade, the main avenue of research on Albers, led by Danilowitz and Troy,
focuses on her knowledge of pre-Columbian textiles and artifacts.89 Evident by the language she
used in her writings, she understood the ancient Peruvians as a specific group, not generalized
with other ancient weaving cultures. It should be noted that Albers rarely identified specific
cultures within her larger notion of "ancient Peru." This is partly due to the fact that
chronologies had not been firmly set for these cultures, and modern archaeology was still
relatively new to the region. Notable also, the cool, dry climate of Peru preserved many textiles
for thousands of years, where few have survived elsewhere. Thus, availability of fabric
examples likely shaped Albers's interest. It is also necessary to recognize weaving in Latin

29
America as a living tradition. In addition to ancient examples, Albers acquired textiles from
modern Mexican cultures, and contemporary weavers there taught her how to use a backstrap
loom and expanded her knowledge of several textile constructions. In turn, she taught these
techniques to her students at Black Mountain College.90
Two such constructions Albers learned on her travels in Latin America were
supplementary weft and leno weaves. The supplementary weft (also called floating weft)
involves weaving nonstructural threads into the textile as one is working, so as to create the
effect of a drawn line. This line may be more organic as opposed to geometrical because it need
not follow right angles. With supplementary weft one can include freeform linear elements into
a design. A leno weave (also called open weave) is created by pulling apart some of the vertical
(warp) threads. As altering the warp affects the structure, gaps are created in the weaving. With
this technique, the textile is not a solid plane. Leno weave is not readily possible on a machine,
and the use of handwork on a loom is very evident with this weave. Ancient pre-Columbian
weavers used both of these techniques, and Albers owned examples of each.
Common motifs in pre-Columbian weavings include stripes, checkerboards, meanders,
and repeating pictographic figures. These abstract patterns of hard-edged forms maintain the
geometry innate in the weaving process. Amy Rodman and Vicki Cassman in their study
"Andean Tapestry: Structure Informs the Surface" (1995) describe the structure of textiles unique
to four cultures of the Peruvian highlands: Recuay (200 B.C.-A.D. 500), Wari (A.D. 500-900),
Tiwanaku (A.D. 400-1000), and Inca (A.D. 1440-1532). Bold color and designs characterize
these Andean weavings, which are understood to have carried societal value, particularly by
signifying the elite who wore elaborate tunics to symbolize their power.91
Scholars do not provide a time span for the ancient Peruvian cultures that Albers
preferred. Broadly speaking, weaving technology developed in the Andean region around 7000
B.C. The last textiles of the pre-contact era belong to the Inca Empire, which was claimed by the
Spanish in 1532. While Albers studied the different groups from this area and occasionally
distinguished them, she often wrote about the "ancient Peruvians" as a collective group from the
Andean region before conquest, thus spanning over 8000 years. She also collected some
contemporary weaving examples, further extending her period of interest.
Albers's collection of Andean textiles is not publically documented, and only 28 are
reproduced in the literature on Albers or in her On Weaving (Figure 6). It is unclear if these 28

30
textiles and fragments are representative of Albers's larger collection of 113 pieces. Of the
textiles that are published, she owned two Nasca fragments (Early Intermediate period, A.D.
200-600) and two fragments from the Middle Horizon period (A.D. 600-1000), one of which is
specifically designated as Wari. Rebecca Stone-Miller and Gordon F. McEwan describe such
weavings in their essay "The Reproduction of the Wari State in Stone and Thread" (1990).92
Wari textiles tend to alternate plain and patterned areas. Their compositions are typically
organized according to an underlying grid and four to eight columns. Motifs are repeated but
with variation. In Albers's Wari piece, one half depicts a stylized human head from the front,
and the other half is a series of diamonds that alternate color and are marked with cross-shapes.
Neither of these features specifically appears in Albers's work beyond the general notion of
geometric and repeating shapes, although that is a critical aspect of her weavings.
Three textiles published from her collection are Incan or from the Late Horizon period
(A.D. 1440-1534). Joanne Pillsbury describes such characteristics in her study of Inca tunics.
She identifies a strict sense of geometry, blocks repeating a small number of motifs, abstracted
animal and human imagery, and four major designs: key style, diamond waistband,
checkerboard, and tokapu (rectangles inclosing other geometric shapes).93 Albers's three pieces
include motifs that could be read as animals, perhaps birds or snakes, or geometric patterns.
Decorating the borders are wave, meander, and stepped patterns. One piece is identified as a
garment fragment, one a band fragment, and the other is unidentified. Two are primarily red and
yellow, while the other unusually incorporates blue. Albers's three examples do not appear to
come from the elite Inca tunics, and therefore, do not represent any of the four design patterns
identified by Pillsbury.
The majority in her collection that has been published, however, is from the Late
Intermediate period (A.D. 1000-1476), numbering eleven fragments mostly from the Chimu and
Chancay cultures and focusing her interests on several hundred years. Although important
weaving cultures, they are not discussed in Rodman and Cassman's study, which may or may not
carry significance. Albers may have collected these examples because of availability or personal
preference. All share similar colors of reds, yellows, creams, and black. Many are highly
patterned with small motifs repeating with some variation. Motifs tend to be stylized birds and
human figures. A few of the pieces come from tunics and one is a net fragment, but most are
unidentified with regard to their original function. One is a painted textile.

31
 Six lesser-related pieces reproduced from her collection include a lace work from an
unidentified culture in ancient Peru, several undated lace works from Mexico, and an ancient
looped bag from Salta, Argentina. Another is a poncho of unknown date from Cuzco, Peru. It
appears to be of a much later date than the other samples because of its complete condition and
atypical color. The poncho likely reflects the contemporary weavings Albers also collected.
In relation to Albers's own woven work, she borrowed aspects from these ancient textiles
that applied to her existing idea of art. Some of the patterns found in her collection of Late
Intermediate pieces, for example, stripes, bands, dots, zigzags, meanders, checks, and an
underlying grid, reappear in her works like Pictographic (1953) (Figure 8, left). Several
fragments in her collection are composed of two colors, creating a tension between foreground
and background, a technique Albers also used in her work, such as in Two (1952) (Figure 10).
Interestingly, in Stone-Miller and McEwan's study of Wari textiles, the authors suggest grid-like
compositions were a way to signify the organization of chaos.94 This recalls the need to order
chaos described by both Albers and Worringer in their writings.
Albers did not try to replicate ancient American textiles but integrate some of their formal
and structural features. She tends to deviate from the ancient models in her use of color.
Pillsbury describes the Inca palette, which is applicable to other pre-Columbian groups, as
primarily red, yellow, ocher, brown, and black.95 Green, white, blue, and purple are rare in
Andean textiles, but they appear frequently in Albers's American work.
The ways that Albers relied on ancient textiles were partly derived from formal
characteristics and weaving techniques, but also from what Albers perceived to be the ancient
way of working, where one artisan created a weaving from the beginning to end instead of the
piecemeal method used in modern industry. She tried to replicate this in her work by directly
manipulating the raw materials on the handloom and by considering the seamless integration of
supplies, design, and final product before beginning a textile. The compositional elements in her
American weavings became more tactile and organic because of her use of the handloom and
ancient construction techniques, both of which allowed her to emphasize the hand of the weaver.
Borrowing formal characteristics, working methods, and types of constructions from ancient
weavings are three ways Albers depended on earlier textiles to create her own work.
The wall hanging Monte Alban (1936) was created a few months after her first trip to
Mexico, which included a visit to the eponymous pre-Columbian archaeological site in Oaxaca

32
(Figure 7). In Monte Alban, Albers employed the supplementary weft to create the mountainous
shapes. She inserted individual threads by hand among the other more repetitious construction
of the weaving's structure. These freeform linear elements, unique to her work at this time, pull
the viewer's eyes across and down the textile. Albers used the supplementary weft more
frequently in her later works, particularly those related to the theme of language.
Around this time, Albers began to give her weavings titles. Here, the title provides an
entrance to interpreting the work. The earth tones and suggestive lines further indicate the
landscape or the layers of ruins at the archaeological site. Referencing the pre-Columbian world
through construction technique, title, and, presumably, subject matter likely appealed to her
contemporaries through the concept of primitivism.
Unlike her Bauhaus work, Monte Alban is more organic in its handling (compare Figure
4). This is most noticeable with the inclusion of the supplementary weft, but true of the
geometric forms, which seem handmade as opposed to machine-made. If one were to imagine
this work without the supplementary weft design, the continuation of her Bauhaus format would
be clearer. It is still essentially composed of columns and rows: a vertical dark rectangle
between two lighter ones, crossed by faint horizontal bands. Her interest in geometry is
maintained through the border and registers. The border in Monte Alban is an unusual feature
for Albers's work, and here it functions like margins on a page.96
This last visual semblance is not accidental. According to Troy, Albers appreciated the
visual languages of the pre-Columbian cultures.97 She likewise desired her works to be read
visually. Albers's later works, like Pictographic (1953) and Code (1962), continue to suggest the
idea of language through mark-making and titles.
The title of Pictographic (1953) implies a language, but it is obviously one invented by
Albers (Figure 8, left). It could relate to a number of world languages, including pre-Columbian
cultures of Mexico such as the Maya who used pictorial glyphs. Albers made this weaving the
same year as her only trip to Peru, perhaps suggesting her consideration of that culture's
language, which was woven into textiles as motifs, as opposed to a conventional written
language. In this work, it is as if Albers used the dark squares to stand for letters or syllables,
combined them to make words, and indicated their syntax by their organization and x's that draw
connections between the shapes. Each shape seems to repeat and create a visual pattern, but

33
upon closer inspection, one realizes that no two shapes are alike. She placed these shapes on a
flat ground made of faint squares the same size as the "letters" to create a unifying grid.
Similarly, the title of Code (1962) clues viewers in to the language aspect of the work
(Figure 8, right). This weaving is typical of her later weavings that use a supplementary weft to
indicate words or script. The linear and dotted elements, along with the title, bring to mind
Morse code or some other abbreviated language. Like Pictographic, it is a language of Albers's
invention.
Her interest in semiotics resulted from a combination of the teachings of Klee at the
Bauhaus, who emphasized the pictograph and ideograph, and her knowledge of pre-Columbian
cultures, being familiar with artifacts like the quipu– knotted strands of thread used by the
ancient Andeans to record information.98 While not decipherable, many of her weavings suggest
symbols related to language, often an ancient language. Hers are invented and do not reference a
specific time or place.
Several factors, including her knowledge of ancient construction techniques and
continuing interest in playing with materials, led to Albers's more organic style in her American
work. Works like Development in Rose I (1952) fully display this quality and severely contrast
with her earlier Bauhaus wall hangings (Figure 9). Development in Rose I is a complex leno
weave, which, as described above, creates a textile plane that is not solid. This weave is one
Albers learned from ancient American examples. The geometry is very subtle in this work; an
underlying pattern of horizontal and vertical stripes is overlaid with a lyrical variation on top.
Here, she is experimenting with loosening the grid and the weaving process's tendency to create
geometric shapes, although both aspects quietly remain as in Monte Alban (Figure 7). In the
method of a painter's study, particularly evocative of the color analyses in her husband's Homage
to the Square series, begun in 1949, she explores the shades of a single color. In this case, she
completed two variations in rose, its companion piece being Development in Rose II (1952).
Like the ancient Latin American weaving constructions, many common motifs in the
ancient examples Albers owned appear in her work, most notably the meander and the
checkerboard pattern. Her wall hanging Two (1952) utilizes both of these elements (Figure 10).
In this weaving, as the title indicates, two groups of meanders spread across the surface. These
meanders, however, are a variation on those typical in pre-Columbian art, which are more
regular. The meanders here do not create a pattern, only the sensation of repetition.

34
Additionally, where ancient examples used checkerboard patterns with high contrast, Albers's
checks that form the structure of the weaving are muted and subtle. Two is geometrical like the
majority of her work, but there is still a noticeable tactile quality present in her American
weavings that is absent from her earlier Bauhaus textiles.
Through color and pattern, Albers played with figure-ground relationships in Two. The
surface design suggests an exploded view of the weaving structure itself, the meanders
mimicking the interlacing of threads. Troy suggests two source materials for this weaving,
namely de Stijl aesthetics lingering from her time at the Bauhaus and a specific Wari textile from
the Yale University Art Gallery Collection that Kubler introduced to Albers.99 In Troy's way of
thinking, de Stijl paintings and Wari textiles share a design aesthetic of intricate geometry that
appears in Albers's work. If Troy's idea is correct, Albers may have consciously linked Peruvian
and Bauhaus textiles, and ancient and modern art, in Two.
Albers's distinct understanding of pre-Columbian cultures extended to her writings. Her
American essays frequently mentioned the ancient Peruvians, and she dedicated her book On
Weaving to "my great teachers, the weavers of Peru." "Constructing Textiles" (1946) presents
her most lively comparison between ancient and modern weavers. In the essay, she speculates
what an ancient Peruvian weaver would say about weavings today. First Albers offers that he
(she always used masculine pronouns, even though it is speculated by Troy that most ancient
weavers would have been female) would be amazed at the mechanized process that can create
textiles with rapid speed and great accuracy.100 He would be intrigued by bright chemical dyes
and the capabilities of synthetic fibers. She offers, "The wonder of this new world of textiles
may make our ancient expert feel very humble and may even induce him to consider changing
his craft and taking up chemistry or mechanical engineering."101 Yet, she follows this by saying
that the ancient weaver would realize the monotony of our fabrics and the simplicity of our
industrial weaves. He would also criticize the division of labor between designer, materials, and
machine. Then, she posits, "He would have a good chance of regaining his self-confidence. . .
He himself would feel that he had many suggestions to offer." She ends her essay by suggesting
that art and industry can work together by bringing the designer back in contact with the raw
materials.
Albers always included ancient Peruvian weavers in her historical writings, for example
"The Loom" (1965), on the history of weaving equipment, and "Tapestry" (1965), on the history

35
of a specific method of working. In "Early Techniques of Thread Interlacing" (1965), she
discusses the types of fabric made by ancient weavers from the Americas and passing this
knowledge on to her students. In this essay, she writes, "I find it intriguing to look at early
attempts in history, not for the sake of historical interest, that is, of looking back, but for the sake
of looking forward from a point way back in time in order to experience vicariously the
exhilaration of accomplishment reached step by step. . . . I try to take my students also on this
journey back into early time, to the beginnings of textiles."102 This hypothetical return to earlier
times was essential to her Black Mountain College pedagogy.
Starting at the beginning involved experimentation, which was exactly how the
Bauhauslers went about their work. They tested the capabilities of their materials; however, this
did not mean that they simply used materials in unusual ways. By working within the limitations
of the materials, the artist has the necessary boundaries to create organized and harmonious
compositions. Albers's method of teaching at Black Mountain College continued this element of
Bauhaus pedagogy, and she described it in her writings, for example "Work With Material"
(1937), which was the first essay she wrote in America and which was published in the Black
Mountain College Bulletin. Material exploration is a common theme in her writings, from the
first ones at the Bauhaus (1924) to her last published works in On Weaving (1965), and it is one
way that she associated her work with that of ancient Peruvian weavers.
Both Bauhaus and Black Mountain pedagogy emphasized the haptic nature of materials.
At the Bauhaus especially, ancient cultures were aligned with haptic perception. Worringer, for
instance, believed that ancient people depended on their sense of touch to reassure their
understanding of the world.103 Moreover, because the ancients favored abstraction, one surmises
that Worringer equated the haptic and the abstract. Albers felt that modern artists and industrial
designers would benefit from exploring the haptic qualities of weaving materials. She stated in
the essay "Art–A Constant," "Work with material, a material of our tangible surroundings, will
give us some insight into those principles of nature to which we all are subjected."104 This
suggests that she believed modern people could better understand the external world through
close contact with raw materials.
She writes that she fears modern society is losing the sense of perceiving textures, that
our ability is "degenerating" because we do not have to work with raw materials.105 This is a
result of mass production, which makes everything for us. In her essay "Tactile Sensibility"

36
(1965), Albers recalls some of the experiments she made at Black Mountain with her students.
With these studies, students organized natural elements (seeds, grasses, twigs, leaves, etc.) into
"textile orders" or patterns that suggested a weaving.106 These studies also imply the human
tendency to apply order on nature as a way to control chaos.
In the same essay, she defines matière as a perceptual sensibility of the surface of the
material, and she distinguishes it from structure and function, although weaving ultimately
depends on both (material and matière) for the structure may also be the surface. This use of the
term matière and her interest in the haptic derives from the Bauhaus, and here it is applied in the
context of her American work. She tells readers that these experiments with materials and
tactility are not ends in themselves but are intended to generate a new vocabulary that can be
applied to true weaving. The results of studies in heavy texture and underlying order appear in
works like Development in Rose I (Figure 9). For Albers, this move toward tactility in her
American weavings resulted from contact with handmade pre-Columbian artifacts and a
developing appreciation for play with materials attributable both to ancient artisans and the
Bauhaus mode of working.
This concern over materials and process of working was the same for both art and craft,
Albers asserted. She desired to make "no distinction between the craftsman designer, the
industrial designer, and the artist–because the fundamental, if not the specific, considerations are
the same."107 Instead, she stressed that the difference was the final product. Art presented a
"vision," something beyond the material object, and offered "resting places" for the
contemplative mind.108 Crafts resulted in objects that were primarily useful, but with the rise of
industry, she claimed that the contemporary Western world had little use for craft products.109
With this distinction, Albers was firstly concerned that visual works avoid the "twilight zone"
between craft and art.110 This was a challenge Albers faced throughout her life, struggling to
identify herself as an artist using craft materials and techniques. For Albers, the ancient
craftspeople were undeniably artists, and their work served as a touchstone for her weavings and
her belief that art, craft, and design were equal. What was most important about ancient craft
was applying this working process to art and industry.
Like Albers, Semper was interested in early craftwork for its direct connection to
materials. Semper was primarily concerned with how materials and technique influenced the
construction of artworks. Neither Albers nor Semper sought to return to earlier times, but they

37
suggested modern artists and designers could expand their artistic language by applying ancient
methods of working to contemporary products. For both Albers and Semper, craft and the
machine could work together to convey clear constructions.
In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer claims, in opposition to the Semperians, that
materials have little impact on the final work.111 For Worringer, the driving force of art is the
maker's "will," not the materials. This is something that Albers challenged in her writings. For
example, in the essay "Designing as Visual Organization" (1965) she begins by identifying
geometric order as characteristic of humankind, but she then turns to the specific case of
designing a wall-covering material for a museum. In doing so, she describes the process of
selecting a certain type of thread because of its unique qualities that would assist the function of
the final product, here, one that will not fade or collect dust. Similarly, she factors in the
technique best suited for creating a wall covering, which she concludes is a plain weave because
of its simple construction and durability. Thus, it is not simply about what an artist or designer
wishes to create but what the materials can do best. In the same way, the limitations imposed by
craft techniques prevented one from creating a work that was overly subjective. She abandoned
Worringer on the point of artistic volition to assert her own claims about her medium and
materialism, taking up Semper's viewpoint instead and using Peruvian examples as her prime
model.
Not only did Albers reject Worringer's argument for the overriding factor of an artist's
"will," she also believed that craft could be art, or that craft techniques were applicable to fine
art. Worringer did not address craft in Abstraction and Empathy, choosing instead to focus on
the plastic arts. When Worringer discussed an object that might be considered craft, for example
an ancient clay figurine, he connected it with imitative naturalism as opposed to abstraction.112
Thus, one concludes that Worringer considers ancient craft to be more empathic or optic, while
ancient art is more abstract, material based, and haptic. Similarly, he believed craftspeople did
not respond like artists (to a sense of "will") because they adhered to craft traditions. Curiously,
Albers confirms this through her interests in universalism and applying ancient working methods
to modern art and design. Ironic as well, Worringer thought that ornament was the clearest
display of style, but ornament seems to be more conventionally associated with craft than the
plastic arts.113

38
 Albers, like Semper, did not make a distinction between art and craft. She directly takes
on this traditional split between craft and art in "Work with Material," where she asserts that
weaving "may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art."114 As she
distinguishes it, craft first serves a practical need, while art primarily serves a spiritual need
(although it may be a utilitarian object as well). Where Worringer addresses the haptic nature of
early art, ignoring craft almost entirely, Albers extends the notion of tactility, perhaps still paired
with abstraction, as does Worringer, to include both the ancient and modern craft of weaving.
Through her interest in early art, raw materials, the weaving methods of Peru, and playful
experimentation with materials, Albers linked Worringer's theory of psychology, Semper's
materialistic determination, ancient textiles, and modern art. These connections became possible
after Albers moved to America and became more involved with ancient American textiles as
source material. Her collection of ancient art reaffirmed her admiration for working truthfully
with raw materials. Her work in the U.S. incorporated ancient constructions in ways that
depended upon her prior knowledge of geometric abstraction and a haptic interest in materials.
By regaining direct contact with the possibilities of material through ancient techniques of
handweaving, Albers returned to the elemental nature of working with threads, and, in her mind,
escaped the bewilderment of the modern world. In her writings, she spoke of returning to the
beginning of the working process and understanding it from a primal mindset so as to improve
the art and industrial designs produced in contemporary times. It was only after her Bauhaus
education and experiencing firsthand the artifacts of Latin America that Albers united this into
her personal philosophy. Albers was able to legitimize her medium in America because of her
Bauhaus education, which equated craft, design, and fine art, but she also depended on her
writings and rooted her work in the traditions of the ancient Peruvians to make her work
relevant.
Albers's use of order in the form of the grid relates again to her emphasis on truthful
constructions in weaving. In the case of weaving, working honestly with the materials meant to
show the process of forming: the crossing of threads at right angles. In doing so, she calls for
truth to materials comparable to other fine art forms, claiming in "Fundamental Constructions"
(1965) for example, "Just as a sculpture of stone that contents itself to live within the limits of its
stone nature is superior in formal quality to one that transgresses these limits, so also a weaving
that exhibits the origin of its rectangular thread-interlacing will be better than one which conceals

39
its structure and tries, for instance to resemble a painting."115 Adhering to the inherent quality of
the medium and materials resulted in a truthful work. Albers's use of the grid was associated
with avant-garde trends in geometric abstraction in Europe and the Americas; however, the grid
also had direct ties to the ancient crafts. Through the grid, Albers expanded her concept of
universalism that linked ancient and modern art, a topic that is central to the next chapter.

40
 CHAPTER THREE

PAN-AMERICAN SOURCES OF UNIVERSALISM

Albers and other modernists of her time depended on a preexisting principle of

universality as a rationalization for their abstractions. Both Albers and Worringer relied on a
universalist justifications to make ancient artifacts applicable to modern art. Universalism firstly
implies an understanding across geographical regions; however, for many artists the term implies
timelessness as well, meaning that cultures across time and space can understand and appreciate
the same work. Like universalism, timelessness emphasizes a lasting aesthetic as distinguished
from popular taste. Albers allowed that all art carried the stamp of the time in which it was
created, but the strength of a work was in its ability to span centuries or millennia.
Albers's understanding of universalism was rooted in her Bauhaus education and the
intellectual atmosphere in early-twentieth-century Germany. At the Bauhaus, universalism was
manifested as good design based on objective forms as opposed to personal taste. Universalist
principles were particularly associated with de Stijl, neoplasticism, concretism, and
constructivism, constructivism being the broadest term with the greatest global impact.
Constructivism spread across the West as European artists migrated to America and American
artists studied and fought in Europe. In America Albers continued the dialogue with many of her
Bauhaus peers through Black Mountain College and her husband's work at Yale University, but
there was also a strain of pan-American constructivism at midcentury. This pan-American style
combined universalist theories with ancient American art in a way that likely appealed to Albers
and that, I argue, are paralleled in her weavings and writings.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the ways in which Albers turned away from
Worringer's concept of art later in her life to assert her own philosophy applicable specifically to
her medium, which incorporated textile constructions originated by ancient Peruvians. In this
chapter, I build on that argument, asserting possible contemporary pan-American sources for
Albers's interest in the universal. First, I outline the principles of universalism available to
Albers primarily through constructivism. I establish the context in which modern art developed
in Latin America just prior to midcentury, turning my attention to the work of Torres-García, an

41
Uruguayan artist who founded a style known as Constructive Universalism. Next, I discuss the
grid as a way of organizing space that is both avant-garde and linked to ancient craft and
architecture. As examples, I look at the work of Torres-García as well as the North American
artists Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) and Sheila Hicks (1934-) to show the artistic exchange
occurring between the Americas. Finally, I contextualize Albers's interest in universalism and
the grid with modernist trends in Latin America by discussing her contacts with modern artists,
her travels, and the Alberses' dialogue with Latin American art through their exhibitions and
teaching. A look at her weavings and writings provides further proof of this exchange. By
situating Albers within the discourse of the constructivist style present in both North and South
America, I argue pan-American sources of universalism afforded her another way to make her
weavings relevant to her modernist audience and that these sources shaped her work from the
1940s through the 1960s.
Research on avant-garde artists working in Latin America is a relatively recent direction
in scholarship. While these artists have been included in surveys of modern Latin American art,
such as Luis R. Cancel, et al., The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States,
1920-1970: Essays (1988), Dawn Ades, et al., Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-
1980 (1989), and Waldo Rasmussen, et al., Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century
(1993), O'Hare and the contributors to Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North
America, 1920s-1950s (2010) provide a more focused study of constructivism in the Americas.
Many artists in Latin America during the early- and mid-century worked in a
constructivist style and desired to convey universal aspects in their art. Major movements
toward avant-garde trends in Latin America began around Modern Art Week in São Paulo in
1922, which showed art by Brazilian modernists.116 The implication during the 1930s and 1940s
of the exhibitions in São Paulo was a general break away from figurative traditions. In 1935 the
Asociación de Arte Constructivo was founded by Torres-García, who sought to combine
European modernism and pre-Columbian symbols.117 In 1944, the single issue of Arturo, revista
des artes, a literary journal that included art by some Latin American artists, such as Torres-
García, but also the European modernists Kandinksy and Mondrian, was published. This
resulted in the formation of several art groups by the following year, notably Madí and Art
Concreto-Invención, both of which remained influential through the mid-1950s.118 The Madí,
based in Argentina and Uruguay, were more experimental in their work, drawing comparisons to

42
Dada. Arte Concreto-Invención generated constructivist-based art primarily in Argentina and
brought together many artists in South America who worked in a concrete or constructivist style.
The artists from these different groups sought international relevance with their work by
adopting a European language of avant-gardism and fusing it with local elements.119
The trend toward European abstraction in the Americas was shaped in part by artists
escaping their homeland during the World Wars. Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Marcel
Breuer (1902-1981), Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), and others fled Europe for the U.S.;
however, some, such as the German-born sculptor Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt, 1912-1994),
settled in Latin America. The Alberses fled to the U.S. in 1933, but a few years later, in 1939,
Anni's parents moved to Mexico to escape Nazi Germany.120
Several museums of modern art were established in Latin America in the 1940s and
1950s, including those in São Paulo (1946), Rio de Janeiro (1948), and Buenos Aires (1948), for
example.121 These museums were particularly interested in showcasing local examples of
modernism and drawing attention from North America and the global art world at large. Latin
American art, both ancient and modern, was increasingly shown in the U.S. "American Sources
of Modern Art" (1933), organized by Holger Cahill at the Museum of Modern Art, was just one
important survey that attempted to bridge the two continents by looking at how ancient art of the
Americas influenced modern artists, primarily from Europe and Latin America.122
With the construction of modern art museums in Latin America, there were also more
exhibitions of work by European modernists, such as the important exhibition of Max Bill's work
in 1951 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Bill (1908-1994) was a Swiss
artist and designer and the founder of the Ulm School of Design. His Tripartite Unity (1948-49)
was subsequently shown at the first Bienal de São Paulo (1951), and it won the highest prize for
an international sculpture.123 This work became a popular example of the concrete style in Latin
America. Earlier in the art review Art Concret (1930), van Doesburg set out his manifesto of
concrete art, declaring first that "art is universal," but that it is also constructed of purely
objective forms and is not derivative of nature.124 One distinction drawn between the European
and Latin American constructivists is that the Europeans tended to infuse their theories with a
social interest, usually through the concept of utopia, while Latin American constructivism
focused primarily on formal aspects.125

43
 Many of the Latin American artists who worked in a geometric abstract style desired to
include aspects of ancient art as an attempt to connect to their cultural heritage. Comparable to
Albers, they combined ancient sources with constructivist aesthetics by using the reductive
shapes and patterns of ancient crafts as applicable to art of the present day. As discussed
throughout Constructive Spirit, Latin American artists, like Torres-García, often juxtaposed local
aspects unique to Latin American urbanism or pre-Columbian roots with the universal. Albers
differs in this regard, as she did not use local features in her work. Her use of pre-Columbian
source material is not her local, that is, it does not relate to her cultural heritage, place of origin,
or later U.S. citizenship.
Formal and theoretical similarities exist between the work of Albers and Torres-García.
Torres-García was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but he studied art in Spain. He was a part of
the New York art scene in the early 1920s. In 1926, he moved to Paris and he began to develop
his constructivist style. He formed his doctrine of Constructive Universalism after coming into
contact with neoplasticism (meeting Mondrian in 1927 and van Doesburg in 1928) and the
geometry of cubism.126 In the early 1930s he formed the Constructivist Art Group in Madrid,
based on neoplasticist principles.127 Leaving an impact on gallery owners from his time in New
York, Torres-García's work appeared in several American exhibitions: a group show at the
Museum of Living Art in 1933 (on display at New York University until 1943), "The Latin
American Collection" in 1943 at the Museum of Modern Art, and a show at Sidney Janis Gallery
in 1950 following his death.128 After returning home to Montevideo in 1934, he established a
school of fine and applied art based in utopic unity. The school, the Taller Torres-García, was
intended to function like a guild and incorporate what he perceived to be the pre-Columbian way
of working, striving for anonymity, unlike the academies of Europe.129
During World War II, Torres-García put a good deal of his energy into lectures and
writing about art in the Americas. He wanted to create a style that linked the Americas, one that
alluded to the area's unique past but still carried international relevance in the world of modern
art.130 He outlined his direction in his essay "The New Art of America" (1942), published in
Apex.131 Given his travels, art historian Cecilia de Torres writes, "Solidly rooted in Europe as
well as in the Americas, Torres-García was uniquely positioned to offer a broader perspective, a
frontierless, more universal viewpoint in the give and take of international modernism."132

44
 In 1944 Torres-García published his manifesto for Constructive Universalism, a concept
of art that combined modern geometric forms and pre-Columbian sources.133 This style of art
was intended to show the "real" and the "primitive." What he called real did not refer to
naturalism, but to an underlying truth. As for the primitive aspect of Constructive Universalism,
he was following what he called the "tradition of Abstract Man."134 Like Albers and others,
Torres-García thought of himself as psychologically and historically connected to the geometric
patterns and abstracted shapes of the ancient past. Important aspects of his constructivist style
include geometric shapes, ordered compositions, and a synthesis of the parts into a whole.135
Works such as his Constructivist Composition (1943) embody these characteristics
(Figure 11). The painting is divided into numerous rectangles, creating a complex grid;
however, the pieces are unified by a regular treatment of the surface, a repetitive design, and a
limited palette. Like Albers's work, he uses repeating but varied shapes that only perceptually
suggest a pattern. True to a constructivist style, Torres-García emphasizes linear elements and
distinct shapes. Symbols, some readable as a sun, train, person, and fish, appear in boxes.
Reading from the top, the small squares seem to create a track for the train, suggesting a
flattening of real space, but at the bottom of the painting, this reading falls apart with more
abstract symbols and letters. His use of letters here is similar to Albers's interest in language.
Some of the shapes, such as the arrow, sun, or cross indicating the cardinal directions, could
belong to a number of ancient cultural groups. The symbols are intended to be objective and are
not meant to appeal to an emotional sense.
Torres-García's style is different from that of Albers, yet he still maintains similar
elements of a gridded pattern and constructivist shapes. Comparing Constructivist Composition
with Albers's Pictographic or Two reveals how both artists sought to unite ancient and modern
art in a way that was relevant to their time, not simply return to the past (Figures 8, left, and 10).
Torres-García, like Albers, associated geometry with the art of ancient cultures.136 Utilizing
geometric abstraction in this way bolstered his art by establishing a heritage for it, notably one
that was rooted in the Americas.
Yet, Torres-García's ideas about constructivism are not only traced to his interest in
abstraction in early American art, but also to his interaction with European artists, namely
Mondrian and van Doesburg, in the 1920s. In theory, using geometric abstraction derived from
both an American tradition and his European contemporaries gave his paintings a universal

45
appeal. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, a historian of Latin American art, summarizes this
connection as "the universalist notion that an artistic tradition has existed since remote times that
expresses essential truths through geometrically determined archetypes."137 For Torres-García,
abstraction began in ancient times and was still useful in the present for communicating a
similar, ultimate truth.
The grid was one formal element Torres-García used in his paintings as a way to
participate in modernism and reference ancient constructions. Rosalind Krauss discusses the
modernist aspect of this ordering system in her essay "Grids" (1979), first published in October
magazine. She asserts that the grid is an emblem of both modernist aesthetics and the period.138
By approaching the topic from a postmodern viewpoint, she establishes two ways to read the
grid: the grid appears to be based in materialism or logic, but it can also be a disguise for the
spiritual in art.139 While the grid is most often discussed in terms of materialist principles,
Krauss writes that artists such as Mondrian and Malevich were primarily interested in
communicating a spiritual aspect. She writes, "They [Mondrian and Malevich] are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and
they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete."140 In this sense, Krauss relates
access to the spiritual as a way to communicate a universal truth. Here, I would qualify Krauss's
claims with Albers and other Bauhauslers, who were interested in both universal and material
aspects. Krauss continues in her essay, saying, "We have discovered that one of the most
modernist things about [the grid] is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the
antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical."141 This statement further situates the
grid as a structure capable of communicating the universal, as it is not bound by time or
evolutionary progress. Likewise, the grid is most closely associated with constructivism, de
Stijl, and neoplasticism, all interested in universalism.
Albers, like Torres-García, saw the grid as both modern and universal. In her essay "The
Fundamental Constructions," Albers makes clear connections between the innately gridded
nature of weaving, its strength in artistic design, and its universal character. She begins by
describing the nature of her medium as naturally geometric through the definition of weaving,
that is, "the interlacing of two distinct groups of threads at right angles."142 She continues on to
explain that this crossing at right angles creates both the structure and surface of the weaving.
She writes, "The horizontal-vertical intersecting of the two separate systems of thread is of great

46
consequence for the formative side of weaving. The more clearly this original formation is
preserved or stressed in the design, the stronger the weaving will be in those characteristics that
set it apart from other techniques."143 That is, for a weaving to be strong in formal qualities and
direct in message, the artist must maintain the natural geometry of the process. Linking the
woven grid with strong design, Albers goes on to attribute these characteristics with universally
understood and appreciated works. Relating ancient and contemporary weavings, she claims,
"The fundamental constructions, in common with all fundamental processes, have a universal
character and are used today, as they were in our early history, here and everywhere."144
Through her weavings and writings, Albers equates the nature of her medium with the avant-
garde concept of universalism to make her work applicable to her modern audience.
The modernist grid can be further understood as universal through Albers's and other
modernists' connection of gridded pattern with ancient construction techniques and designs. In
looking to earlier examples of art, many discovered ancient gridded designs could be easily
integrated with the modernist grid. As the Latin American artist Lygia Pape noted,
"Constructivists searched for a return to the beginning of things, and therefore the use of
geometric forms."145 In this way, they could approach art in an avant-garde way, maintaining
international relevancy while still making use of ancient, primitive, or local stylistic devices.
Several scholars concerned with primitivism, in particular Tricia Laughlin Bloom and César
Paternosto, have looked at early precedents for the modernist grid in the arts of ancient America.
Discussions of the ancient roots of abstraction and the grid appear throughout
Constructive Spirit, but they are most specifically addressed by Bloom in her chapter "Origin
Stories: Native Paradigms in American Abstract Art." Bloom begins, "Faced with the apparent
failure of modern civilization and the chaos of world war, abstract artists in the Americas began
to look in earnest for a new pictorial tradition."146 She asserts that there was an interest in cubist,
concrete, and constructivist art, but a general trend of avoiding the mechanical aesthetic popular
in European art for the handmade.147 This broader aesthetic choice, typical of the 1930s,
corresponds to Albers's move away from the European tendencies to more American forms of
abstraction, further paralleled by her physical move to the U.S.
Bloom establishes the combination of the ancient and modern grid with Torres-García
first and then expands her discussion to the Latin American artists Francisco Matta and Lygia
Pape and to artists working in North America, such as Adolph Gottlieb, Louise Nevelson, and

47
the Alberses. For all of these artists, the ancient grid was comparable to the modernist one
through its geometric, tectonic, and constructivist appearance. In the case of Torres-García, his
grids suggest both de Stijl compositions and Incan stonework.148 According to Bloom, Torres-
García referenced ancient architecture and textile design in his paintings.149 The geometry is
ordered yet handmade, which imparts an organic quality akin to the brickwork of ancient
buildings and the patterns of ancient weavings.
Similarly, Paternosto, an artist and a scholar of ancient and modern art, in The Stone and
the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (1996), directly compares pre-Columbian architecture
with the geometric abstractions of Josef Albers. Paternosto is particularly concerned with two of
this artist's little-known architectural works, America (1950) at Harvard University and RIT
Loggia Wall (1967) at Rochester Institute of Technology, each of which mimic pre-Columbian
patterns of brickwork from the Zapotecan friezes at the Palace Group in Mitla (Oaxaca).
Interestingly, Paternosto reads Josef's earlier Bauhaus glasswork as this same interest in early
American brickwork and also to "the structural geometry of textiles" (his emphasis).150 In terms
of the ongoing debate of who influenced whom (Josef or Anni), he suggests that Anni may have
influenced Josef through weaving constructions. Thus, Paternosto links Josef's Bauhaus
glasswork and later architectural wall pieces both to pre-Columbian brickwork and textile
constructions.151 This is an important connection to note, as it links ancient architectonic
structures and the building of a textile. Paternosto argues, among others contributing to this
discourse, Semper being an early example, that ancient stonework reflected the construction and
patterns of ancient textiles.152 He also looks at etymology to support his case that textile
structure influenced other types of construction, the Indo-European root of tectonic (teks)
referring to texere, meaning weaving or fabrication.153 Anni made similar connections by
discussing weaving as primarily a constructed form and by comparing the medium most closely
to architecture.
Looking at the work of Josef Albers, Torres-García, and others, Paternosto connects
ancient and modern art through the use of gridded structures. Paternosto summarizes, "The
symbiotic relation between [Andean] sculpture and construction technology gives rise to an
almost inevitable comparison with a certain artistic movement of the twentieth-century that was
also the direct result of the application of constructive techniques and the use of the industrial
materials of its time: Constructivism."154 He specifies that Albers (here he is talking about Josef,

48
but what he says is also applicable to Anni) and Torres-García first encountered the cubist grid
and applied pre-Columbian source material later.155
Most of Albers's weavings are clearly organized by a grid, but she often violated the
consistency of the grid to include variations. Such modified patterns create visual interest but
also draw parallels to semiotics and the structure of language. Comparisons could also be made
between her interest in variations on the grid and her husband's studies of variations of color in
his Homage to the Square series. The grid is most structured in her Bauhaus weavings,
ultimately owing to the cubist grid, but she developed a more organic sense of pattern and
repetition after her move to the U.S., travels to Latin America, and careful study of Peruvian
textiles.
As the term pan-American implies, the reductive aesthetics of constructivism appeared in
both Latin American and U.S. vanguardism. Looking at the work of Adolph Gottlieb, an
American painter influenced by Torres-García and associated with abstract expressionism, and
the weavings of Sheila Hicks, a fiber artist and acquaintance of Albers, demonstrates the
widespread application of ancient grid systems in modern art in ways that span the two
continents. The works of these artists help establish the U.S. context of gridded abstraction and
show the exchange between the north and south continents.
According to Barbara Braun, Torres-García influenced Gottlieb. Braun notes the
similarities between the two artists' work in Gottlieb's series from 1941 to 1952, which used the
same format as Torres-García's constructive paintings with grids filled with abstract symbols;
however, Gottlieb used the art of indigenous North Americans as opposed to Latin Americans.156
Still, Gottlieb sought a similar artistic heritage rooted in the Americas from which he could
borrow ancient motifs for his modern work.
His Augury (1945) is a characteristic example (Figure 12). Distinct shapes appear in a
grid-organized space that is reminiscent of an ancient textile. Predominant symbols, such as
faces, bodies, and eyes, appear figural. A few letters are included, suggesting language. Like
some of Albers's works, the title is essential to gaining insight about the work. In this case, the
title hints at the idea of an ancient or primitive culture through the reading of omens as a way to
comprehend the chaos and uncertainty of the external world. Gottlieb and Albers relate
primarily as contemporaries. They were interested in different ancient American cultures, but

49
their works share a similar underlying grid and use of geometric abstraction from indigenous
cultures.
Gottlieb thought of the symbols that he used in his paintings as a part of a universal
language that existed in the subconscious.157 His use of these symbols as a kind of escape, what
Braun calls a "psychic liberation," aligns him with the broader European notion of needing order
and simple shapes to counteract the chaos of the modern world. This is somewhat unlike Torres-
García who was primarily concerned with establishing a unified American identity.158
Sheila Hicks is an American weaver who spent many years living and working in Latin
America.159 Hicks studied with Josef at Yale University where she was majoring in art, and she
met Anni through him. Like Albers, Hicks sought to unite pre-Columbian artifacts with modern
art, using Peruvian textiles as source material for weaving techniques and constructions. This
combination of ancient and modern establishes her similar interest in universalism. In ways
similar to Albers, she emphasized the gridded nature of her work's construction, used marks
suggestive of language, and challenged modern art. Her study of pre-Columbian weavers was
equally deep, with her having worked with Kubler and Bird as well.160 Hicks was more
experimental in color and construction than Albers, in part due to her belonging to a later
generation in art known as the Fiber Artists, who emerged in the 1960s.
With works like Zapallar (1957-58), her deviation from Albers's style is clear (Figure
13). Colors are more vibrant and the structure of the textile is compromised for tactile effect,
although the construction does suggest the pre-Columbian leno weave. Weft (horizontal) threads
were beaten unevenly, making the sides of the weaving pull in and gather and causing the design
to undulate. Hicks challenged the innate characteristics of weaving by emphasizing what the
weaver must work against, such as the tendency for textiles to collapse in the middle and the
distortions caused by not beating the threads down evenly and tightly. The warps (vertical
threads) in the bottom portion of the textile were separated, knotted, and tied to create long gaps,
but they nonetheless continue to emphasize their innate verticality. Her sense of the grid is much
looser than that of Albers, yet the basic construction of horizontal and vertical remains. Unlike
Albers's work, pattern is not generated by shapes, but solely by repetition within the textile's
structure. The title of this weaving is a reference to the town in central Chile, not unlike some of
Albers's works named for the places she visited in Mexico, as in the case of Monte Alban (Figure
7). Yet, Hicks's use of this convention is more personal. Whereas Monte Alban seems to make a

50
clear reference to the site's natural and constructed landscape, it is unclear how Zapallar relates
to Hicks's experience in Chile.
Constructive Spirit and Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World (1993) outline
the pan-American artistic trends of constructivism, universalism, and gridded compositions
occurring simultaneously with Albers's work in the U.S. In both, Albers is cited as participating
in these trends, but mainly within a North American context. Turning my attention to Albers's
travels to Latin America, I consider her more direct contact with pan-American sources of
universalism, primarily through Latin American examples of constructivism. As evidence, I
offer examples of Latin American modern artists and exhibitions that Albers may have
encountered in this region and absorbed because of her Bauhaus education and her preexisting
interest in pre-Columbian artifacts. I then consider her weavings and writings from the period
during which she visited Latin America most frequently, from the 1940s to the 1960s, to further
assert her interest in pan-American universalism. The Alberses' travels have been most
thoroughly documented in Latin American Journeys (2007).161 This exhibition catalogue is
comprised of essays about how the Alberses' work was influenced by their travels; however,
their direct connections with modernist trends in Latin America is not fully developed here.
The Alberses had access to the trends of abstraction in Latin America in at least three
ways. First, they encountered some of these artists through their connections at Black Mountain
College and through later personal connections. Second, their visits to Mexico and South
America afforded them the opportunity to see the contemporary art scene as well as ancient
artifacts. Finally, their American work can be placed in a dialogue with the constructivist trends
in the southern hemisphere through Josef's exhibitions and teaching in Latin America. These
three means provide constructivist trends to pair with their own, creating a direct pan-American
exchange.
Josef appreciated the work of the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida (1891-1984), whose
later work infused constructivism with Mexican myth and symbols. Josef asked Mérida to teach
at Black Mountain College, although he was only a guest lecturer there and not a full time
professor.162 Latin American art critic Marta Traba asserts that Mérida also knew Gropius and
Moholy-Nagy.163 Another guest artist brought to Black Mountain by Josef was Jean Charlot
(1898-1979), a French painter who worked in the Americas.164 Both Mérida and Charlot visited
the college in the 1940s. The Latin American architects Luis Barragán (1902-1988) and Ricardo

51
Legorreta (1931-2011) along with the artist Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990) visited the Alberses'
home in 1967.165 Josef left an impact on modern Latin American architecture after his lectures
and exhibitions there. These instances show Latin American artists in a dialogue with the
Alberses in a North American context.
As for the couple's travels, they mostly visited Mexico (thirteen times between 1935 and
1967). Their first trip to Mexico was Anni's decision, and this is when they began collecting pre-
Columbian artifacts.166 They also made a trip to South America in 1953, staying in Chile for two
months and in Peru for one month. They met Max Bill in Lima, leading to Josef's later stints at
the Ulm School of Design. While traveling, the couple frequented archaeological sites,
anthropology museums, and galleries of pre-Columbian and modern art. They were personally
familiar with Diego Rivera, visiting his museum, Anahuacalli, in 1949. They were also close
friends with the Mexican artist Xavier Guerrero who introduced them to much of the Mexican art
they saw.167 Josef connected the ancient and modern art of Mexico, saying, "Mexico is truly the
promised land of abstract art, which here is thousands of years old."168
Josef's work circulated quite a bit in Latin America. He first exhibited in the lobby of the
left-wing newspaper El Nacional in 1936. In the newspaper, he was recognized as "one of the
founders of abstract art."169 He was featured in the September/October issue of the architecture
magazine El Arquitecto Peruano in 1953. Josef included works at the IV. Bienal de São Paulo at
the Museu de Arte Moderna (1957) and the Primera Bienal Interamericana de Pintura y Grabado
at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (1958). He had a large exhibition of his
Homage to the Square paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1964.
From this he received enthusiastic letters from the sculptor Gego and Inés Amor, the director of
the Galería de Arte Mexicano, after seeing his work. This exhibition traveled to Montevideo,
Buenos Aires, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Guayaquil, Bogota, Santiago, and Mexico City before
touring the U.S. The Alberses remained in contact with Amor. Josef showed his work in Amor's
gallery in 1967, and he was again featured in 1976 after his death. Josef also exhibited his
square paintings with Mérida at the University Museum of Science and Arts, National University
of Mexico in 1969. Overall, Josef received positive reactions to his art in Latin America.170
Anni did not exhibit her work in Latin America, except for one commissioned work in
1968 for the Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. The patron was Ricardo Legorreta, one of the

52
Latin American architects who had previously visited the Alberses' home. The work was a large
wall hanging that featured rows of triangles and was constructivist in style.
Josef also taught several courses in Latin America that were loosely based on Bauhaus
design curriculum. He taught at Gobert College in Tlalpan (1939), the University of Mexico in
Mexico City (1949), the Universidad Católica Architecture Department in Santiago (1953), and
the Escula Nacional de Ingeniores del Peru in Lima (1953). In the 1930s and 1940s, the
University of Chile and the Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC) Art and Design Schools were
based on the Bauhaus model.171 Josef further shaped these programs in 1953, when he offered a
version of his preliminary course.172 Hugo Palmarola Sagredo writes in his essay on Josef's
course in Chile that the artist fused "European idealism with American pragmatism."173 In the
early 1950s, in part because of Josef's lectures, Chile's avant-garde artists abandoned figurative
work and formed the Grupo Rectángulo (1953).174
Through these various means, the Alberses had access to modern works of art in Latin
America, and they were able to participate in a widespread dialogue of abstraction in the
Americas. Latin American artists, such as Mérida, were working within the same circle as the
Alberses. They saw collections of modern art on their trips to Mexico, and Josef had a particular
impact on modern art in Latin America through exhibitions of his geometric abstractions and his
teaching. Anni was commissioned for one work in Mexico City, and her weavings and writings
from the time also suggest the influence of pan-American abstraction on a broad scale.
Braun writes that the Alberses' interests in constructivism and pre-Columbian artifacts
were "paralleled but [were] entirely independent of that of Torres-García," but I challenge this
given the Alberses' travels and their dialogue with Latin American artists.175 Moreover, a formal
comparison of Albers's weavings reveals similarities to the constructivist paintings of Torres-
García. Like Torres-García, she is drawing upon a connection between ancient patterns and
modern aesthetics and utilizing a grid to organize her compositions. In these ways, her weaving
Thickly Settled (1957) (Figure 14) is formally similar to his Constructivist Composition (Figure
11).
Thickly Settled is divided into roughly square shapes. Being handmade, the regular
squares become more organic. The same shapes repeat with different fill, again creating a
tension between repetition and variation. The combination of shapes in this weaving recalls the
semiotic patterns in Pictographic (Figure 8, left) and the glyphic symbols in Torres-García's

53
work. None of the motifs are recognizable symbols; they consist only of linear elements that call
attention to a single thread moving across the textile. As such, the underlying structure of the
weaving, as well as its surface pattern, is emphasized. Three vertical panels, bound by borders
on the top and bottom, organize Thickly Settled. Albers has given this weaving a more poetic
title than some of her works, making it difficult to read literally. Thickly Settled also shares a
similar composition to her Black-White-Red from 1927, although in the later work, there is more
variation, more linear motifs, and an organic sense of geometry (compare Figure 5).
Nonetheless, they seem to be built on the same principles of pattern and variation, and they are
organized by columns and rows divided into numerous smaller units.
Where Thickly Settled appears similar to the constructivist works of Torres-García that
are based theoretically in the ancient arts of America, weavings like Tikal (1958) make a direct
reference to Latin American places and cultures (Figure 15). Tikal was originally a major
Mayan city in Guatemala during the Classic Period (A.D. 200-900) and is now an important
archeological site. The Alberses likely visited Tikal in 1952 during their travels in the region of
the Yucatán Maya.176 Albers combined plain and leno weaves in this work, the leno weave
being one she learned in Mexico. With this textile, turquoise squares are arranged in a grid-like
fashion that suggests the checkerboard patterns found in pre-Columbian weavings or perhaps
even the meander design. The composition is similar to Thickly Settled, but it also suggests a
subtle reworking of Two (Figures 14 and 10). The color and pattern of this work seem to mimic
the jade and turquoise inlay technique used on elite and ritual objects throughout the
Mesoamerican region. This could relate to Albers's interest in weaving's ties to other craft forms.
Bloom reads the design of this work as a reference both to the stepped pyramid architecture at
the site and to "bands of text, reflecting Anni's belief in the power of textiles to communicate."177
While I focus mostly on Albers's work that relates directly to pre-Columbian sources, Bloom
brings up the other main direction in Albers's weaving in the 1950s and 1960s, her concern with
language.
In her weavings, Albers used the grid to create objective works of art that avoid the
personal, emotional, and subjective. Her writings further suggest her interest in pan-American
universalism by emphasizing reductive aesthetics as a way to create broad appeal and to link this
style to cross-cultural principles. "Art–A Constant" most clearly establishes Albers's approach to
the universality of art. Here she outlines three ways to achieve this universalism. The universal

54
firstly represents more than the personal choices of the artist. Albers begins by addressing the
individual creator, writing, "Art directs itself to our lasting fundamental spiritual, emotional, and
sensuous needs. . . . It transcends the merely personal in our desires."178 Reducing the subjective
emotions in art eliminated the personal and allowed a work of art to maintain its relevance into
the future.
Second, universal art is not limited to the time when it was created. She continues in her
essay to expand the anonymity of the artist by deemphasizing the context of a work's creation,
stating, "And though most art can be classified as belonging to a specific time and place and
though it often has the stamp of a definite author, still, great art is in essence unaffected by
subjectiveness, by period and location, and does not pass through the cycle of rise and fall. Art
is always new and radiates through any sediment of contemporary meaning."179 By eliminating
these identifying aspects of artist, location, and period, she opens up the possibility that art may
be equally appreciated by any culture if not tied to popular taste.
A final characteristic of universal art Albers discusses is that it communicates a lasting
truth. Albers writes, "Obscuring to some degree the direct experience of art are modes of taste,
i.e., inclinations of periods toward specific forms, overlaying the general and lasting assertions of
art. Tastes are expressions of transitory demands and are of powerful and often devastating
effect. They exalt that which answers a momentary inclination to prominent position and
condemn what does not appeal to them."180 This brings to mind how Worringer challenged
Lipps' notion of empathy, which valued art that shared the aesthetics of one's own time. Albers,
like Worringer, sought for a way to appreciate art of another time and culture. She chose to do
this through the concept of universalism.
Part of the notion of the universal depends on communicating the same message to all
who encounter it. As Albers saw it, communication at midcentury was about the temporary;
therefore, people were in need of a constant.181 On this she writes, "Today we find ourselves
again in search of a lasting truth. Our world changes rapidly and often we feel perplexed and
filled with doubt."182 Describing other fields that were once thought to be a constant, such as
philosophy, science, and religion, she claims that only art objects are truly stable and ageless in
their message as "only art is left to us in unchanging absoluteness."183 She concludes, "to
comprehend art means to confide again in a constant."184

55
 Albers takes up the topic of communication again in a later essay, "Tapestry" (1965).
Here she is argues her medium can communicate a powerful message like other art forms. She
writes, "A fabric can be great art if it retains directness of communication in its specific
medium."185 Much of this essay pertains to the weavings of ancient Peru, suggesting that theirs
was a universal language, or at least applicable to modern times, as Albers continuously argues.
Albers's reinforces this idea in her introductory essay to Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures,
stating, "[Art] has a restorative power that we need again and again. It assures us of a timeless
meaning across epochs and regions. . . . Perhaps it was this timeless quality in pre-Columbian art
that first spoke to us, regardless of our ignorance of the special significance it must have had to a
contemporary community."186
Albers's knowledge of universalism certainly originated at the Bauhaus where she was
exposed to neoplasticism and constructivism, both of which were based heavily in utopic ideals
and aesthetics thought to convey cross-cultural messages; however, there were other factors that
contributed to Albers's use of the notion in America. Universalism extended beyond Europe
with figures like Max Bill and Torres-García. As Albers moved away from Europe herself, she
encountered pan-American concepts of universalism. Her travels and interest in pre-Columbian
textiles led her to connections with avant-garde Latin American artists at midcentury who
embraced a similar concern with uniting the modern and the pre-Columbian. At this time, a type
of universalism unique to the Americas developed and took on a form that joined ancient
traditions with modern aesthetics, especially the visual structure of the grid. As an art form with
wide appeal, spanning time and location, Latin American artist Francisco Matta wrote of
geometric abstraction, "There is neither an ancient art nor a modern one, only art exists.
Universal Art. It is the greatest harmony a human being can attain."187 In the Americas, Albers
found others who shared many of her ideas, setting up the possibility for influence and placing
her work in a new context.

56
 CONCLUSION

Building on her Bauhaus education after her move to America, Albers increasingly
turned to American sources, specifically Peruvian examples, to frame her own modernist work.
Making this connection allowed her to draw parallels between ancient working methods and
modern art, not only giving her medium a lengthy history through early roots, but also linking
ancient and modern peoples on an essential psychological level, one enhanced, in her thinking,
by a reinvigoration of haptic senses atrophied by modern manufacturing. By linking ancient and
modern weaving, Albers argued that the traditional craft of weaving could be art by using pure
abstraction, objectivity, and straightforward work with materials. For her, adapting elements of
ancient textiles created art that was universal or timelessness. This art could be understood
across time and culture by communicating a lasting truth, a sense of stability, and a feeling of
order from the chaos of the world.
My study has carefully considered Albers's philosophy in her writings and placed her
written work within the context of her weavings, the intellectual atmosphere of the Bauhaus, and
a North American search for indigenous roots and solidarity across the Americas. Looking in
depth at Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy showed how Albers, along with other European
modernists, worked within the framework presented in this text, but also showed that she was
selective in the aspects she emphasized. As with her Bauhaus education, features of Worringer's
theory remained with her throughout her life, but she found other ways to link ancient and
modern weaving through construction techniques, the grid, and the impact of philosophies of
other writers, like Semper.
Albers noticeably differed from Worringer's claims in her interest in timelessness. For
Worringer, art continually alternated between abstraction and naturalism. Thus, Worringer's
sense of the universal was not a linear notion, but one that changed with psychic states. Albers
linked ancient and modern art through an abstract style, and she presented this as the endless
direction into the future. Likewise, Torres-García did not see his style of art as an episode in art
history but as "the continuation of an ancient utopian quest for universal values."188

57
 Albers generally ignored all aspects of naturalism. For many artists of her time, their
notion of universalism was selective, of course, making universalism a flawed concept—
particularly so in her case, as she also chose to emphasize the art of one culture, the ancient
Peruvians. As Albers explains in her essays, the modernist aesthetics indebted to ancient ones
were here to stay. The style she favored was one used by the ancient artisans and one she
thought would soothe modern anxiety as it supposedly did for our predecessors. She generally
rejected the temporal aspect of Worringer's thesis, that art changes over time, relying instead on
pan-American sources of universalism and principles relating to anonymity and timelessness, to
extend the relevance of her work.
The Peruvian weavings were her prime model of art that had already stood the test of
time, although she also thought of Klee's work as a modern example of lasting art.189 She
differentiated Klee from the contemporary New York School, for instance, which she criticized
for incorporating personal elements.190 For Albers, not all modernism was here to stay, only
work based in geometric objectivity. In On Weaving, she reproduced examples of modern
weavings by Sophie Täuber-Arp, Jean Arp (1886-1966), and Michel Seuphor (1901-1999) as
examples of the latter, while reserving space for reproductions of some of her own work as well.
The way to achieve this eternal quality was through clear, geometrical construction and design
and by abandoning overtly personal expressions.
For Albers, the themes of universalism, timelessness, and anonymity developed from
Bauhaus pedagogy of design, but they also paralleled the nature of Peruvian weavings, where the
artist and context was unknown. She used pre-Columbian examples as models for modern art as
a way to challenge the typical distinctions of high and low art, fine art and craft, and the
individual and the anonymous worker. Much of this has to do with Albers's approach from a
design background, where her ideas intersected with those of people like Semper who sought to
elevate the applied arts through schools and museums.
The contributions of Albers's weavings and writings to these larger discourses on
modernism have been the focus of this thesis. Where other scholars have failed to connect her
weavings with the ideas drawn from her thirty-six individual texts, themselves largely
unaddressed in the literature, I teased out the concepts that unite her woven geometries with
intellectual discourses attempting to promote and address geometric abstraction in vanguard
painting and design. I placed her work within the discourses on primitivism and universalism,

58
while also connecting her interest in Latin American textiles and figurines to a broader interest
on the part of some North American artists and arts professionals of finding indigenous sources
for modern art separate from those for European modernism. More significantly, I placed her
perception of the craft of weaving within a discourse of modernism, shaped in part by
Worringer's social psychology, and within her intellectual contexts at the Bauhaus and in the
Americas. My nuanced reading of the areas of overlap between her thinking and Worringer's—
particularly as hers evolved after her move to the U.S.—allows us to understand more fully the
extent, as well as the limits, of his impact on a variety of artists during the anxiety-filled years
during the first half of the twentieth century.
There remain other directions to explore with Albers's work. More is still to be
considered about how she perceived weaving in comparison to other media, particularly
architecture. A focused look at her designs for industry and how she understood craft's
contribution to industry is similarly in order. This would benefit from a more thorough study of
Semper and the German workshops preceding the Bauhaus than currently exists. Another
avenue would be to continue looking at the ways in which Albers sought to elevate her medium
through the avant-garde concept of geometric abstraction, her exhibitions at modern art museums
and their reception, and how she related weaving to painting and to printmaking. As this study
shows, scholars need to take another look at how weavers participating in modernism have been
discussed in the literature, as there lacks a thorough effort to acknowledge weavers' use of
modernist ideals, theories, and writings to operate within the same intellectual spheres as avant-
garde painters and sculptors. Perhaps this thesis may serve to inspire some of this more
insightful investigation into Albers's body of work and expand our understanding of her and
other artists like her who sought to dissolve the boundaries artificially drawn between craft and
art.

59
 ENDNOTES
1
"Primitive" is a Eurocentric term that has been used to describe a variety of cultures considered
by some to be less evolved or civilized. The term generally includes both ancient cultures and
"tribal" (another word suggesting lower social evolution) cultures of the present day. Using the
word primitive denies modern indigenous cultures their own autonomy by comparing them to
what the Western world has defined, in its own image, as civilized. Although a problematic
term, I use it to refer to the ideas of early-twentieth century intellectuals, particularly Worringer,
who discussed "primitives" in their work.
2
Mary Atwater, "It's Pretty- But Is It Art?," The Weaver 6, no. 3 (July-Aug 1941): 13-14; Mary
M. Atwater, Byways in Hand-weaving (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954).
3
Lili Blumenau, "Review of Anni Albers: On Designing," Craft Horizons 20 (March 1960): 51;
Irene Emery, "Review of On Weaving," American Anthropologist 70, no. 1 (Feb 1968): 180-181.
4
Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2009), 382.
5
Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 149
and 176, on Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers; Anni Albers, "Work with Material," Black
Mountain College Bulletin 5 (1938): unpaginated.
6
Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, "Anni Albers 1899-1994," in Anni Albers, eds., Nicholas Fox
Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1999),
154.
7
Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 98 and 186.
8
This term is attributed to the American architect Louis O'Sullivan, although it is also associated
with his assistant Frank Lloyd Wright. O'Sullivan coined the phrase in his essay "The Tall
Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896).
9
Barry Bergdoll, "Bauhaus Multiplied: Paradoxes of Architecture and Design in and After the
Bauhaus," in Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, eds., Barry Bergdoll and Leah
Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 41.
10
Ibid., 42-43.
11
Neil H. Donahue, "From Worringer to Baudrillard and Back: Ancient Americans and
(Post)Modern Culture in Weimar Germany," in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art
History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State

60
University Press, 1995), 144. Here Donahue summarizes Banham's work, A Concrete Atlantis:
U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900-1925 (1986).
12
Ibid.
13
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style
(New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 13.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 4.
16
Ibid., 15. Worringer follows up this statement a few pages later with: "The simple line and its
development in purely geometrical regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of
happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena," ibid., 20.
Here he specifically defines geometrical abstraction as an escape from the chaos of the external
world.
17
Ibid., 4 and 6.
18
Neil H. Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993), 15.
19
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 16-17.
20
Ibid., 9.
21
Another possibility is that Worringer's interest in non-western cultures may be linked to
German colonial expansion and German archaeological expeditions at the turn of the century,
particularly in Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. See Virginia Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and
Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002),
25.
22
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 41. See also Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament,
The Structure of Style: Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 54-55 and 184.
23
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 15-16.
24
Ibid., 39-41.
25
Ibid., 41.
26
Ibid., 21.

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27
Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, 177.
28
Ibid., 178.
29
Ibid., 142 and 149.
30
Leah Dickerman, "Bauhaus Fundaments," in Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,
eds., Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 32 and
34.
31
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 3.
32
Ibid., 11-12.
33
Gottfried Semper, with an introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave, Style in the Technical and
Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 171.
34
Semper, Style, 19.
35
Neil H. Donahue, "Introduction: Art History of 'Sublime Hysteria'?," in Invisible Cathedrals:
The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 3. It should also be noted that Abstraction and
Empathy resonated with German artists in particular because one section focuses on German
Gothic art and distinguishes its value apart from classical aesthetics.
36
Magdalena Bushart, "Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of
His Epoch," in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed.
Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 71.
37
Donahue, Forms of Disruption, 16-17.
38
Bushart, "Changing Times, Changing Styles," 80, in speaking of members of Der Blaue Reiter
writes that, "[Worringer's] scholarly findings gave their own theoretical efforts much greater
weight." Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 26-27, points out that Worringer's book contained no images, which
made it all the easier for artists to interpret his claims in various ways.
39
Nicholas Fox Weber, "Anni Albers to Date," in The Woven and Graphic Art of Anni Albers,
ed. Nicholas Fox Weber (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 18; Troy, Anni
Albers, 40.
40
Peter Howard Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957), 9, 13, and 184, for connections between Worringer and Kandinsky. Franz Marc also read
Abstraction and Empathy.

62
41
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).
Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art were
advertised together in the Piper Press of Munich in October 1912, see Anger, Paul Klee, 51.
42
Troy, Anni Albers, 88.
43
Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 197-198.
44
Troy, Anni Albers, 120.
45
Ibid., 84.
46
Ibid., 119.
47
Weber, The Bauhaus Group, 374.
48
Theo van Doesburg, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic
Society, 1968).
49
Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 120, for one who asserts van
Doesburg as a driving force at the Bauhaus. Michael White, "Mechano-Facture:
Dada/Constructivism and the Bauhaus," in Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the
New World, edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume, (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), 83-84, offers a
challenge to this assumption. White believes that van Doesburg may have had less to do with the
Bauhaus aesthetic than previously thought. He argues that Bauhaus students were already on
this trajectory toward pure abstraction; however, their work always retained a tactile nature, even
with the use of machines.
50
James Stevens Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 743.
51
Weltge-Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles, 47 and 186.
52
Ibid., 46 and 97-98.
53
Robert and Sonia Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia
Delaunay, edited by Arthur A. Cohen (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 199. The spiritual aspect
of this idea could also be related to Oswald Spengler's 1918 The Decline of the West.
54
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 271-
272.
55
Ibid., 271.

63
56
Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, 69. See Chapter 4, "The Fundamentals of Bauhaus Pedagogy:
Premises, Parallels, Trends," for his description of the Bauhaus phases.
57
Dickerman, "Bauhaus Fundaments," 19 and 21.
58
Ibid., 20.
59
Weber, The Bauhaus Group, 259-340, on Josef Albers (1888-1976). Josef and Anni married
in 1925.
60
Troy writes that Albers likely saw a copy of van Doesburg's De Stijl at the Bauhaus and that
the Alberses owned the Bauhaus Book series. See Troy, Anni Albers, 149.
61
Anni Albers, "Bauhausweberei," Junge Menschen (Hamburg) 5, no. 8, (Nov 1924): 188.
Transcript copy, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, III. B, 28.3.
Originally published under maiden name, Annelise Fleischmann. Translation in Troy, Anni
Albers, 33.
62
Anni Albers, "Wohnökonomie," in Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur, vol. 1. Karlsruhe,
1924. Translated by Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 210.
63
Anni Albers, "Weaving at the Bauhaus," in Bauhaus: 1918-1928, edited by Herbert Bayer,
Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 141.
64
Albers, "Weaving at the Bauhaus," 141.
65
Anni Albers, "On Walter Gropius." Craft Horizons 29, no. 5 (Sept-Oct 1969, originally written
in 1947): 4, also talks about starting at the beginning at the Bauhaus.
66
Albers, "Work with Material," unpaginated; Albers, "Weaving at the Bauhaus," 141; Anni
Albers, "Art–A Constant," in Anni Albers, Anni Albers: On Designing, (New Haven, CT:
Pellango Press, 1959), 42; Anni Albers, "We Need the Crafts for Their Contact with Materials,"
Design 46, no. 4 (Dec 12, 1944): 21; Albers, "On Walter Gropius," 4, respectively.
67
Albers, "Art–A Constant," 42-48.
68
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 16-17.
69
Weber, "Anni Albers to Date," 18; Nicholas Fox Weber, "The Last Bauhausler," in Anni
Albers, eds., Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi (New York: Guggenheim
Museum Publications, 1999), 126. See also Weber, The Bauhaus Group, 371-373; Troy, Anni
Albers, 9-12.
70
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 34-35.

64
71
Ibid., 19.
72
Anni Albers, "Designing," Craft Horizons 2, no. 2 (May 1943): 9.
73
Troy, Anni Albers, 41. According to Troy, a general trend at the Bauhaus began with a
superficial understanding of design in Andean textiles (early 1920s) and moved to a complex
understanding of construction techniques (mid-late 1920s). Troy places Albers within this
context without discussing her work.
74
Ibid., 36. Albers also owned Raoul and Marguerite d'Harcourt's Les Tissus indiens du vieux
Pérou (1924).
75
Ibid., 26, suggests that Albers visited this museum as a child. It may have been her first
encounter with pre-Columbian artifacts. The museum housed almost 45,000 pre-Columbian
items at the time.
76
She did continue to make fabric samples for industry that were mass-produced in factories.
Ultimately, these were made mechanically; however, it was Albers's goal to unite handwork and
machine work, so she strove for a tactile quality in her American sample pieces as well.
77
For sources on primitivism, see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1986); Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World:
Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993).
78
Elissa Auther, String Felt Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 12. The three essays Albers published in
Craft Horizons were "Designing" (May 1943), "More Serving, Less Expressing" (July-Aug
1961), and "On Walter Gropius" (Sept-Oct 1969).
79
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 16 and 129. Robert Goldwater in Primitivism in
Modern Art (1966) contextualizes Worringer's view on "primitives" and more broadly describes
a general interest in ancient Peruvian art as a means for affecting the direction of modern culture,
helpful to understanding Albers.
80
Anni Albers, "Constructing Textiles," Design 47, no. 8 (April 1946): 22-23.
81
Ed Rossbach, "Fiber in the Forties," American Craft 42, no. 5 (Oct/Nov 1982): 15. Becky
Peterson, "Experimentation, Identification, Ornamentation: Avant-garde Women Artists and
Modernism's Exceptional Objects" (PhD diss., The University of Minnesota, 2010), 34, in
speaking of Albers, claims that published writings elevated "the status of the textile and the
textile maker."
82
Mary M. Atwater, Byways in Hand-weaving (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954); Ed
Rossbach, "Mary Atwater and the Revival of American Traditional Weaving," American Craft
43, no. 2 (April/May 1983): 22-26.

65
83
Anni Albers, "Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College," The Weaver 6,
no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1941): 3-7; Mary Atwater, "It's Pretty- But Is It Art?," 13-14.
84
For example, Albers received mailings and exhibition catalogues from the Stolper Gallery
(Los Angeles), Aaron Furman Gallery (New York), Andre Emmerich Gallery (New York), and
Museum of Primitive Art (New York), see The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. V.
AA, 34.4-7. See also The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. V. AA, 34.3 for other
pre-Columbian gallery listings and catalogues. Albers also kept photographs of pre-Columbian
weavings in museum collections, see The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. V. AA,
33.1. For some of the articles Albers saved on pre-Columbian weaving and archaeology, see The
Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. V. AA, 33.7 and 32.2.
85
Troy, Anni Albers, 147.
86
Albers's collection is housed at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany,
Connecticut. Albers also organized the Harriett Englehardt Memorial Collection of Textiles,
acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 1958. Ibid., 143-146, discusses both collections.
87
Anni Albers with a foreword by Ignacio Bernal and introductory text by Michael D. Coe, Pre-
Columbian Mexican Miniatures: The Josef and Anni Albers Collection (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1970). Essentially, many of the ancient weaving fragments came from grave robbers
or farmers who dug them up in their fields. Troy, Anni Albers, 143.
88
See Albers's introductory essay to Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures, unpaginated. Albers's
issue with scale seems to be derived in part from her dislike of large abstract paintings, also
popular in the art market in the 1960s. She continued in her essay, "Today, when large size in art
is carried to an absurdity, the smallness found here [in her miniatures collection] seems to be a
special virtue, when contrasted with the arrogance of exaggerated scale." In her essay, she also
described seeing Diego Rivera's artifact collection and the displays at the Museum of
Anthropology in Mexico City (now the Museo Nacional de Antropología).
89
Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock, eds., Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American
Journeys (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007), describe the couple's trips to Latin and South
America and what aspects of ancient woven artifacts inspired Albers. Troy, Anni Albers and
Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002),
details the ancient Andean source materials available to Albers throughout her lifetime.
90
Troy, Anni Albers, 129; Virginia Gardner Troy, The Modernist Textile: Europe and America,
1890-1940 (Burlington, VT.: Lund Humphries, 2006), 148. Albers's students also learned how
these ancient artisans dyed fibers.
91
Amy Oakland Rodman and Vicki Cassman, "Andean Tapestry: Structure Informs the
Surface," Art Journal 54, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 33.

66
92
Rebecca Stone-Miller and Gordon F. McEwan, "The Reproduction of the Wari State in Stone
and Thread: A Comparison of Architecture and Tapestry Tunics," RES: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, no. 19/20 (1990/1991), 67.
93
Joanne Pillsbury, "Inka Unku: Strategy and Design in Colonial Peru," Cleveland Studies in the
History of Art 7 (2002), 71.
94
Stone-Miller and McEwan, "The Reproduction of the Wari State in Stone and Thread," 75.
95
Pillsbury, "Inka Unku," 71.
96
Mary Jane Jacob, "Anni Albers: A Modern Weaver as Artist," in The Woven and Graphic Art
of Anni Albers, ed. Nicholas Fox Weber (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1985), 90. The border also appears in Monte Alban's possible companion piece Ancient Writing
(1936).
97
Virginia Gardner Troy, "Thread as Text: The Woven Work of Anni Albers," in Anni Albers,
eds., Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi (New York: Guggenheim Museum
Publications, 1999), 28. Troy discusses Albers's interest in language most thoroughly.
98
Ibid., 28 and 32.
99
Troy, Anni Albers, 153.
100
Troy, Anni Albers, 136; Albers, "Constructing Textiles," 22-23.
101
Albers, "Constructing Textiles," 22-23.
102
Anni Albers, "Early Techniques of Thread Interlacing," in Anni Albers: On Weaving, Anni
Albers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1993), 52.
103
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 6.
104
Albers, "Art–A Constant," 46.
105
Anni Albers, "Tactile Sensibility," in Anni Albers: On Weaving, Anni Albers (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993),
62-65.
106
Mervin Lane, Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 43. Albers describes her teaching at Black
Mountain College in an interview reprinted in Lane's text.

67
107
Anni Albers, "Designing as Visual Organization," in Anni Albers, Anni Albers: On Weaving
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
Inc., 1993), 67.
108
Albers, "Art–A Constant," 47-48, and Albers, "Designing," 9, respectively.
109
Albers, "We Need the Crafts," 22.
110
Anni Albers, "More Serving, Less Expressing," Craft Horizons 21 (July-Aug 1961): 52.
111
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 8-9.
112
Ibid., 11-12.
113
Ibid., 51.
114
Anni Albers, "Work with Material," unpaginated.
115
Anni Albers, "The Fundamental Constructions," in Anni Albers: On Weaving, Anni Albers
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
Inc., 1993), 38-39.
116
Marta Traba, Art of Latin America, 1900-1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1994), 53.
117
Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and the Tradition of Constructive Art," in
Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, eds., Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht, and
Elizabeth Ferrer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 78.
118
Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American Art of the 20th Century (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1993), 121 and 124.
119
Nelly Perazzo, "Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction," in The Latin American Spirit:
Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970: Essays, Luis R. Cancel, et al. (New York: Bronx
Museum of the Arts, 1988), 106.
120
Weber, Anni Albers, 169.
121
Perazzo, "Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction," 120.
122
Tricia Laughlin Bloom, "Origin Stories: Native Paradigms in American Abstract Art," in
Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-1950s, ed. Mary Kate
O'Hare (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 2010), 63.

68
123
Adele Nelson, "Monumental and Ephemeral: The Early São Paulo Bienias," in Constructive
Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-1950s, ed. Mary Kate O'Hare (Newark,
NJ: Newark Museum, 2010), 130.
124
Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), 245.
125
Perazzo, "Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction," 119.
126
Bazzano-Nelson, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and the Tradition of Constructive Art," 74.
127
Traba, Art of Latin America, 77.
128
Perazzo, "Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction," 115.
129
Bazzano-Nelson, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and the Tradition of Constructive Art," 79.
130
Cecilia de Torres, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and American Art: A Lasting Dialogue," in
Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-1950s, ed. Mary Kate
O'Hare (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 2010), 58.
131
Patrick Frank, Readings in Latin American Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 135.
132
Torres, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and American Art," 58.
133
Traba, Art of Latin America, 75.
134
Frank, Readings in Latin American Modern Art, 138.
135
Traba, Art of Latin America, 77.
136
Perazzo, "Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction," 113.
137
Bazzano-Nelson, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and the Tradition of Constructive Art," 72.
138
Krauss, "Grids," October 9 (Summer 1979), 50 and 52.
139
Ibid., 54 and 63.
140
Ibid., 52.
141
Ibid., 64.
142
Anni Albers, "The Fundamental Constructions," 38.

69
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
145
Bloom, "Origin Stories," 79.
146
Ibid., 60.
147
Ibid.
148
Ibid., 64.
149
Ibid.
150
César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996), 208 and 210.
151
Chronologically, this is a little problematic. According to Troy, there were some Latin
American items at the Bauhaus, but the Alberses' interest fully developed after they moved to
America. Paternosto goes on to say this, but nonetheless correlates Josef's, and by extension
Anni's, Bauhaus work to Latin American examples. See Troy, Anni Albers, 39-71.
152
Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread, 210.
153
Ibid., 211. Teks also refers to art, skill, or craft.
154
Ibid., 199.
155
Ibid., 200.
156
Braun, Pre-Columbian Art, 304.
157
Ibid.
158
Ibid.
159
Joan Simon and Susan C. Faxon, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010); Nina Stritzler-Levine, ed., Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006, on Hicks.
160
Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979),
367.

70
161
The chronology I use in describing the Alberses' movements in Latin America comes from
the timeline compiled by Jessica Csoma in Danilowitz and Liesbrock, Latin American Journeys,
207-224.
162
Traba, Art of Latin America, 67.
163
Ibid.
164
Brenda Danilowitz, "'We are not alone.' Anni and Josef Albers in Latin America," in Anni and
Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, eds., Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock (New
York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007), 25.
165
Jessica Csoma, "A Chronology," in Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, eds.,
Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007), 220.
166
Csoma, "A Chronology," 210.
167
Danilowitz, "We are not alone," 20. See Csoma, "A Chronology," 221 for a list of galleries
and collections they saw in 1967. They also made trips to New Mexico in 1940-41 and 1946-47.
Josef was friends with Raymond Johnson, an abstractionist from Santa Fe who incorporated
Pueblo pottery designs and Native American symbols into his art.
168
Danilowitz, "We are not alone," 22.
169
Ibid., 20.
170
Ibid.
171
Hugo Palmarola Sagredo, "Mapping the Preliminary Course: Josef Albers and Chile," in Anni
and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, eds. Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock (New
York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007): 177.
172
Ibid., 175.
173
Ibid., 176.
174
Ibid., 180.
175
Braun, Pre-Columbian Art, 303.
176
Csoma, "A Chronology," 217.
177
Bloom, "Origin Stories," 78.

71
178
Albers, "Art–A Constant," 43. See also "Design: Anonymous and Timeless" (1947), in which
she deemphasizes the identity of the designer. She writes, "The more we avoid standing in the
way of the material and in the way of tools and machines, the better chance there is that our work
will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old-fashioned
someday instead of antique," 53.
179
Albers, "Art–A Constant," 43.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid., 44.
182
Ibid.
183
Ibid., 45.
184
Ibid., 47.
185
Anni Albers, "Tapestry," in Anni Albers, Anni Albers: On Weaving (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993), 68.
186
Albers, Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures, unpaginated.
187
Bloom, "Origin Stories," 71.
188
Bazzano-Nelson, "Joaquín Torres-Garcia and the Tradition of Constructive Art," 83.
189
Anni Albers, interview by Richard Polsky, Jan 11, 1985, American Craftspeople Project, The
Reminiscences of Anni Albers, Columbia University. Typescript at The Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, II. F, 21.4.
190
Anni Albers, interview by Richard Polsky; Anni Albers, interview by Sevim Fesci, July 5,
1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

72
 FIGURES

Figure 1. Paul Klee, Zwei Kräfte (Two Forces), 1922. Watercolor and ink on paper. 28.4 x 19.2
cm. Formerly in the collection of Anni Albers, now in Die Sammlung Berggruen, Staatlichen
Museen, Berlin. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

73
Figure 2. Gunta Stölzl, Wall Hanging, Slit Tapestry Red/Green, 1927/28. Cotton, silk, and linen.
150 x 110 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

74
Figure 3. Anni Albers, Wallhanging, 1924. Cotton and silk. 168.3 x 100.3 cm. The Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation: 1994.12.1. ©2007 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

75
Figure 4. Anni Albers, Wall Hanging, 1925. Silk, cotton, and acetate. 145 x 92 cm. Die Neue
Sammlung Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Munich. ©2008 The Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

76
Figure 5. Anni Albers, Black-White-Red, 1964. Reproduction of a 1927 original. Cotton and silk.
175 x 118 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. ©2008 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

77
 Figure 6. Three examples of Pre-Columbian textile fragments from Anni Albers's personal
collection. Top left: Nasca period (100 B.C.-A.D. 700). Bottom left: Late Intermediate period
(A.D. 1100-1400). Right: Middle Horizon period (A.D. 500-900).

78
Figure 7. Anni Albers, Monte Alban, 1936. Silk, linen, and wool. 146 x 112 cm. Busch-Reisinger
Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. ©2008 The Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

79
 Figure 8. Left: Anni Albers, Pictographic, 1953. Cotton. 45.7 x 101.6 cm. The Detroit Institute
of Arts. ©2008 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Right: Anni Albers, Code, 1962. Cotton, hemp, and metallic thread. 58.4 x 18.4 cm. ©2007 The
Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

80
Figure 9. Anni Albers, Development in Rose I, 1952. Cotton and hemp complex leno weave. 55.9
x 43.2 cm. ©2007 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York.

Figure 10. Anni Albers, Two, 1952. Linen, cotton, rayon. 45.7 x 104.1 cm. ©2007 The Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

81
Figure 11. Joaquín Torres-García, Constructivist Composition, 1943. Tempera on board. 80 x
90.2 cm. ©2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

82
Figure 12. Adolph Gottlieb, Augury, 1945. Oil on canvas. 101.6 x 76.1 cm. ©Adolph
Gottlieb/VAGA, New York.

83
Figure 13. Sheila Hicks, Zapallar, 1957-58. Wool. 23.5 x 12.1 cm. Private collection.
Photograph by Bastiaan van den Berg.

84
Figure 14. Anni Albers, Thickly Settled, 1957. Cotton and jute. 78.7 x 62 cm. Yale University
Art Galley, New Haven, Connecticut. ©2008 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

85
Figure 15. Anni Albers, Tikal, 1958. Cotton. 76.2 x 58.42 cm. American Craft Museum, New
York City. ©2008 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York.

86
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by Anni Albers

Albers, Anni. Anni Albers: On Designing. New Haven, CT: Pellango Press, 1959. Reprint,
Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.

–––. Anni Albers: On Weaving. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Reprint,
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

Includes the following essays: Weaving, Hand; The Loom; The Fundamental
Constructions; Draft Notion; Modified and Composite Weaves; Early Techniques of
Thread Interlacing; Interrelation of Fiber and Construction; Tactile Sensibility; Tapestry;
Designing as Visual Organization.

Only "Weaving, Hand" was individually published (in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963)
prior to Albers's book On Weaving. The other nine essays originated with On Weaving.

–––. Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1959.

–––. Anni Albers: Selected Writings on Design. Edited by Brenda Danilowitz with a forward by
Nicholas Fox Weber. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

–––, with foreword by Ignacio Bernal and introductory text by Michael D. Coe. Pre-Columbian
Mexican Miniatures: The Josef and Anni Albers Collection. New York: Praeger Publishers,
1970.

Essays, Originally Published Individually, by Anni Albers;

Arranged Chronologically

Albers, Anni. "Bauhausweberei." Junge Menschen (Hamburg) 5, no. 8, (Nov 1924): 188.
Transcript copy, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, III. B, 28.3.
Originally published under maiden name, Annelise Fleischmann.

–––. "Wohnökonomie." In Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur, vol. 1. Karlsruhe, 1924.

Translated in Frank Whitford, Bauhaus, London: Thames and Hudson, 1984.

–––. "Weaving at the Bauhaus." In Bauhaus: 1918-1928. Edited by Herbert Bayer, Walter
Gropius, and Ise Gropius, 141-142. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938.

–––. "Work with Material." Black Mountain College Bulletin 5 (1938): unpaginated.

87
–––. "Art–A Constant." In Anni Albers: On Designing, Anni Albers, 42-48. New Haven, CT:
Pellango Press, 1959. Originally written in November 1939.

–––. "Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College." The Weaver 6, no. 1 (Jan-
Feb 1941): 3-7.

–––. "On Jewelry." Typescript of a talk given at Black Mountain College, Mar. 25, 1942. The
Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, III. B, 28:20. Printed in Anni Albers:
Selected Writings on Design, Anni Albers, 22-24. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2000.

–––. "Designing." Craft Horizons 2, no. 2 (May 1943): 7-9.

–––. Untitled statement for Black Mountain College Bulletin 2, no. 3 (Dec 1943). Typescript,
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, III. B, 28.7.

–––. "We Need the Crafts for Their Contact with Materials." Design 46, no. 4 (Dec 12, 1944):
21-22. Reprinted and retitled "One Aspect of Art Work" in Anni Albers: On Designing.

–––. "Constructing Textiles." Design 47, no. 8 (April 1946): 22-23.

–––. "Design: Anonymous and Timeless." Magazine of Art 40, no. 2 (Feb 1947): 51-53.

–––. "Fabrics." Arts and Architecture 65 (March 1948): 33.

–––. "Weavings." Arts and Architecture 66 (Feb 1949): 24.

–––. "Review of Ben Nicholson's Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings." Magazine of Art 43 (Jan 1950):
36-37.

–––. "A Structural Process in Weaving." In Anni Albers: On Designing, Anni Albers, 66-78.
New Haven, CT: Pellango Press, 1959. Originally written in May 1952 as a final paper for a
class at Yale University.

–––. "The Pliable Picture Plane: Textiles in Architecture." Perspecta: The Yale Architectural
Journal 4 (1957): 36-41.

–––. Statement for the First Annual Conference of American Craftsmen, Asilomar, CA, June
1957. Titled "Refractive?" and published in Anni Albers: On Designing, Anni Albers, 26-28.
New Haven, CT: Pellango Press, 1959.

–––. "More Serving, Less Expressing." Craft Horizons 21 (July-Aug 1961): 52-53. Published
text from a lecture series at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, February 1961. Retitled
and reprinted as "Conversations with Artists," the name of the Philadelphia lecture series, in a
later edition of Anni Albers: On Designing, Anni Albers, 62-64. New Haven, CT: Pellango Press,
1979.

88
–––. "On Walter Gropius." Craft Horizons 29, no. 5 (Sept-Oct 1969, originally written in 1947):
4. Retitled and reprinted as "A Start" in a later edition of Anni Albers: On Designing, Anni
Albers, 36. New Haven, CT: Pellango Press, 1979.

–––. "Things Are Changing so Extraordinar[il]y Fast Today." Lecture typescript, New Haven,
Oct 1963. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Archive. Anni Albers, III. C, 28.21.

–––. "Weaving, Hand." Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963. Reprinted in Anni Albers: On Weaving,
Anni Albers, 19-21. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965.

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 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Christina Glover received her A.A. in studio art from Pensacola State College in 2007
and her B.A. in art history from the University of West Florida in 2010. Her research interests
focus on twentieth-century American art. This thesis is part of the degree requirement for her
M.A. in art history at The Florida State University.

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