Anni said that there was one book she read in those years that made everything come together for her. It was Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 Abstraction and Empathy, the same small volume that was so vital to Klee and Kandinsky. Worringer made the drive toward abstraction and away from naturalism easy to grasp. He explained the motives behind the art Anni and the others were so desperate to create in a way that made complete sense to them.
Worringer wrote that “the reason for making art—whether abstract or figurative—was the maximum bestowal of happiness for the humanity that created it.” More specifically, “the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic.”11 Anni’s attraction to that “life-denying inorganic” was perfectly explained by Worringer’s statement that “the simple line and its development in purely geometric regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena.”12
As Anni clearly acknowledged when she was in her seventies, from the time she was a young woman, life itself was fraught for her. She felt that only through art could she find the necessary ballast to survive the vagaries of human existence. Forms of one’s own imagining could, she was convinced, provide respite from illness, inflation, war, social discomfort, and the other realities beyond our control. The more that art enabled one to replace Worringer’s “entanglement of phenomena” with something positive, the happier she was. This meant not only seeking the certainty offered by straight lines and right angles, but avoiding “space which, filled with atmospheric air … gives things their temporal value” and thus exacerbates the troublesome fleetingness of so much in life.13
Anni’s wall hangings made no effort to reflect or solve the problems of the world; rather, they provided refreshment and strength to deal with the world’s woes by offering both their maker and their viewers security, grace, and ease. They were the result of what Worringer calls “the urge—in the face of the bewildering and disquieting mutations of the phenomena of the outer world—to create resting-points, opportunities for repose.”14 Not only her textile work but her later graphics serve that purpose.
BUT EVEN AS she subscribed totally to Worringer’s views, Anni, while guided primarily by her own imagination, was not averse to nature as a source of systematization and clarity. To serve its purpose as a stronghold of emotional uplift, geometric compositions, after all, needed to be possessed of rich systems. Anni deplored the sterile, vacuous abstractions she labeled “decorators’ dreams.” Even as she found the natural world impenetrable and mysterious, and its representation antithetical to her artistic goals, she had profound respect for the beauty and vitality of nature’s structures.
She came to understand botanical organization through Goethe’s Metamorphosis of the Plants. For her, from the time she was a child, Goethe “had a halo around him;” he was more to her taste than his Weimar counterpart, Schiller, whom she found “cold.” But until she was at the Bauhaus, she knew only Goethe’s literary work. Now she was riveted by his analysis of the single unit that, in various stages of transformation, is at the heart of plant life: “Everything is leaf. … None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness; therefore a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed.”15 Goethe analyzed the way that the outer details of flowers always relate in form and structure to the beginning of the plant. He pointed out that in a plant with a triangular striation in the stem, variations of the number three recur in all that follows. Root structure determines the number of petals and of leaves.
Aware that a weaver is a builder, Anni identified textiles with plants. The first few rows, like plant roots, determine what comes afterward; the act of creation is a linear progression. The many parts are irrevocably interdependent—pull a few threads and the structure falls apart—so it is essential to maintain a system. Adhering to the aspect of nature that was dependable, she constructed textiles with a consistent integrity.
Threads are to Anni’s yard materials what cells are to life. The individual units are combined in harmonious configurations. In the bulk of what Anni wove for upholstery and drapery fabrics, thread is not only the essential structural component, but it is the main visual element; whereas for centuries textiles had disguised their materials, using them to re-create pictorial imagery, in Anni’s fabrics, the structure and the materials are the subject. She intended for the viewer to delight in the way in which strands of cotton or jute or hemp are as mutually dependent as parts of plants or organs of the human body. Nothing could be removed without detriment to the whole.
Had she covered the structure with a design, rather than used the structure as the design, this would have been obfuscated rather than celebrated.
WHAT WAS AS VITAL as the structure was the touch with which it was achieved, and the feeling for texture. Anni looped cellophane around wool as if she were making music. When she pulled one color mostly to the back of material, so that it remains a vibrant but subtle accent on the front, she was like a magician performing a sleight of hand. In this way she elevated textiles and the status of woven threads, putting the medium on equal footing with oil on canvas and watercolor on paper. Buckminster Fuller, himself an innovative devotee of design for the larger population, would later say, “Anni Albers, more than any other weaver, has succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structure of fabrics. She has brought the artist’s intuitive sculpturing faculties and the age-long weaver’s arts into a successful marriage.”16