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Learning from the Ancient World

Reviewing her own collection of pre-Columbian Mexican miniatures in 1969, Anni Albers wrote: “I remember vividly having seen and admired examples of pre-Columbian art in a Berlin Museum many years earlier.” The Museum was Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Textile examples from its collections, now housed in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, can be seen in this room, alongside pre-Columbian objects from Albers’s personal collections.

Inspired by these objects, Albers acknowledged the inspiration of the ancient world in Ancient Writing (1936). In this dramatic and intricate weaving, Albers paid homage to her understanding that, because Andean weavers had no written language, their history, ideas and knowledge were transmitted through a symbolic language woven into their textiles. Within Ancient Writing’s central black panel are scattered sixteen “texts” of beige and gold threads evoking the “writing” of the ancients and the richness of their compositions.

Reminiscing about her and her husband Josef’s earliest visits to ­Mexico in 1935 and 1936, Albers wrote: “We visited pyramids, enormous ones and small ones, that left us in awe of the great concepts of [Mexican] architecture.”

For Anni Albers this art and architecture had “a restorative power” that persisted across epochs and geographies. She marvelled how, in ­Mexican and Andean societies, humble materials could be made into the complex and compelling images of ancient Mexican and Andean art.