Red Meander I (1969) returns to a design Anni Albers had first woven in linen and cotton in 1954, and to a motif with a far longer history. The meander, a continuous band that turns back on itself at right angles, is among the oldest of ornaments. It is known in the West as the Greek key, and stepped versions of it run through the ancient Andean textiles Albers studied throughout her life. She dedicated On Weaving (1965) “to my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.” The print is one of five Meander screenprints of 1969–71. By then printmaking, which she had taken up at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1963, was becoming her main work. In the Meanders she pursued on paper a question she had long worked on at the loom: how a few simple elements, repeated, can build a structure, and how color can open depth in a flat surface.

Broad vermilion bands turn through a field of salmon pink. The pink is itself printed, a solid ground that stops short of the edges of the sheet in a crisp rectangle. The bands keep a constant width, and their right-angle turns produce an irregular sequence of narrow corridors, rectangular openings and sudden reversals. There is no center. The eye follows one passage, doubles back and picks up another. What it sees first is the vermilion. What it notices next is the edges. Each band is shadowed by paler, displaced copies of the same pattern, so that its borders break into small steps of rose and brighter orange. Where the copies overlap, the color deepens, and spaces that seemed empty turn out to hold fragments of the pattern in fainter color.

The effect comes straight from the printing. Working with George “Scotti” Lawther at Sirocco Screenprints in Connecticut, Albers used a single patterned screen several times on each sheet. According to the Albers Foundation, it was printed first in one direction, then twice more in the same ink in other directions, and finally in a stronger, related color. The small displacements between these impressions produce the stepped edges, and their overlaps produce the darker passages. Repetition works within the image before it works across the edition. The same screen returns to the sheet in a new position, and each return changes how the previous impression looks. Screenprinting is usually a way of repeating an image exactly. Albers used the repetition to make one image differ from itself. In front of the sheet, the eye follows the meander through several overlapping versions at once and has to keep deciding which one it is on.

The 1954 weaving shows how differently the same design behaves in another medium. In linen and cotton the meander is built from the crossing of warp and weft, with the porous, tactile surface of cloth. In the print the edges are hard, the color is more intense, and the pattern is built from layers of ink. In On Weaving Albers argued that the character of a textile comes from its construction, and she treated the limits of a material as the starting point of design. The screenprint applies the same discipline to a new set of limits: one screen, one motif and a few related colors. Nicholas Fox Weber, who knew her well, wrote that “nothing thrilled Anni more than to learn from process and technique, to absorb and take direction rather than impose.”

The print entered museum collections almost at once: Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, acquired an impression in 1970, the year after it was made. Other impressions are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia; and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut.