3
Disrupting the Grid

With its strict adherence to the vertical-horizontal of warp and weft, weaving and its limitations provided a “kind of railing” to Anni Albers. “That was a tremendous help to me, as I think it probably can be to any-body, as long as you, at the same time, are concerned with breaking through it.” Albers subverted the grid through her novel use of techniques, materials, and colour in pictorial weavings such as In Orbit (1957), in which lozenge shapes curve and bubble out from the surface.

In weaving, diagonals are intrinsically stepped where weft meets warp. The two trial proofs for With Verticals (1983) are based on Albers’s 1946 weaving of the same name. While the vertical bars form a rhythmic pattern akin to the musical score for a piano player, the true stars of the design are the diagonals. In these prints, Albers was able to make the smooth, straight diagonal lines that were impossible in weaving.

Albers said that her turn to printmaking was, after decades of weaving, “a great relief, because it freed you from the horizontal, vertical, which is always weaving.” Detached from the loom, Albers delved into new geometries, disrupting the grid through compositions of triangles, diamonds, squares, and parallelograms, creating new asymmetrical, non-orientable compositions and labyrinthine patterns. She said, “Art tries in its organization of forms to give an assurance that is understandable to us. ... Again and again, straight lines, right angles, geometric forms are the signatures of man.”