Anni Albers

Both of the pieces titled Vicara Rug are woven in 1959. Anni Albers entrusts her designs to Inge Brouard Brown, who is herself an artist, a weaver and a designer. In an interview, Brown says that she was paid for half the time she spent weaving Albers’ designs and that, for the other half, she received lessons from Albers. Brown considers it an excellent arrangement. She uses wool and cotton for warp and weft, and also vicara, a fibre made from corn protein by Virginia-Carolina Chemical Corporation in Connecticut. It was marketed as being as warm as wool, soft as silk and strong as cotton.

Looked at from a distance, the horizontal and diagonal lines are the first things to catch the eye. They are distributed evenly over a white background, with the horizontal lines being slightly thicker than the diagonals. The lines imply triangular forms, some inverted, that are reminiscent of pyramids or mountains. Drawing closer reveals that the background consists of small white triangles. They rise out of the grey backing fabric and are created using the pile weave technique. This creates the kind of nap commonly seen in carpets. Long black fringes at the top and bottom of the textile create distinct ends. Albers has the following to say about the quality of woven textiles:

“We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental.”

Albers discovers the triangle in architecture and in textile designs from Southern and Central America. In one of the display cases in the exhibition are some fragments of material; among them is a small piece with a design based on alternating dark and light triangles covered with small nodes. In Albers’ Vicara Rugs, the fluffy white threads form nodes in the shape of triangles.

Albers will return to the triangle as a form at the end of the 1960s in her Camino Real and in numerous print pieces.