Anni Albers

Six Prayers is one of Anni Albers’s final woven works. In 1965, the Jewish Museum in New York invites the artist to create a piece commemorating the six million Holocaust victims of the Second World War. Intended as a memorial, it stands apart from her works for synagogues and other sacred spaces. Albers herself is of Jewish descent. She speaks of “Six Prayers” with great modesty:

“Six Prayers is not monumental in scale, but rather, intimate in its conception and detail. It is my hope, however, that the effect of the whole will lead to an impression suited to the dignity of the subject.”

Anni Albers creates a work composed of six tall fabric panels, which she weaves over the course of seven months. In her choice of colour, she remains restrained, using threads in beige, black, white and silver. The threads are made of cotton, linen and bast, or raffia, as well as silver metallic yarn that shimmers with the changing light. The tone varies across all six panels. Using white and black threads, she overlays the surfaces with dense, undulating, meandering lines. These lines resemble text, yet remain unreadable – perhaps a reference to the speechlessness provoked by an event such as the Holocaust.

Albers sees abstract weavings, viewed in the context of the weaving traditions of the Andean regions, as mediators of meaning – in other words, as a kind of language. Yet the individually meandering lines also serve as a reminder of the six million individual fates. The art historian Maurice Berger describes the work as follows:

“Poised within the restrained quiet of abstraction, [its] ambling filaments are texts that spread across the scroll-like tapestries, transcending the limited utterances of verbal language for a more universal elegy.”

In 1967, Six Prayers is exhibited for the first time in the foyer of the Jewish Museum in New York.