Anni Albers

This is one of many works by Anni Albers that evoke the appearance of writing. The title Open Letter makes this connection clear. With it, the artist suggests that visual, abstract works can enter into communication with their viewers. In her book On Weaving, Albers writes about textiles as a means of conveying meaning:

“Along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning. In Peru, where no written language in the generally understood sense had developed even by the time of the Conquest in the sixteenth century, we find – to my mind not in spite of this but because of it – one of the highest textile cultures we have come to know.”

This link between textile culture and the communication of meaning is evident in the tocapu textiles of the Inca. Their use of pictograms and ideograms is particularly fascinating: a multitude of small rectangular or square fields contains different shapes and figures, resulting in a dense and highly varied composition. The textiles resemble complex texts, comparable to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In works such as Open Letter of 1958, shown here, Anni Albers draws on similar compositional principles. Using black and white threads of cotton, bouclé wool and linen, she weaves a complex structure in which no clear pattern can be discerned. Rather, the composition appears freely and spontaneously arranged. Nevertheless, the sequence of light and dark rectangular fields and lines with alternating characters has a rhythmic quality. The structure evokes a mysterious visual language rather than the sentences or paragraphs of a text, as in some of her other works. The materiality is as varied as the composition itself, which ranges from densely woven sections to the fringes at the top and bottom edges.