Anni Albers Pictorial Weavings

Anni Albers approached weaving as a form of pictorial invention in which structure, texture, and line emerge through the interlacing of threads. Her pictorial weavings concentrated this investigation in works made for sustained visual attention. Drawing on the experimental approach to materials she developed at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, she gave thread an expressive role, allowing density, interval, and the movement of a line to establish the image. In the statement associated with this exhibition, she described her purpose as “to let threads be articulate again.” These works brought the intelligence of textile construction into an investigation of abstraction, giving the woven surface the autonomy of a work of art.

Published for the exhibition that opened at MIT’s New Gallery in May 1959 and subsequently traveled to institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery, this first-edition catalogue records a significant moment in the presentation of Albers’s textiles. Its black-and-white photographs bring the structure and surface of the weavings into focus, accompanied by an artist’s statement and chronology. Norman Ives’s design gives the publication a graphic identity of its own: a looping white line passes across the gray cover, intersecting the compact horizontal typography. The present copy retains a supplementary exhibition slip listing four additional works, preserving an element of the catalogue’s use during the exhibition’s history.