5
In the Direction of Art
After leaving Black Mountain College in May 1949, the success of her one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that same year, and her move to a new home in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950, Anni Albers’s professional life changed. No longer connected to an institution, she continued to teach a small number of private students and readjusted her working life.
While commissions from architects continued to grow, in her own work Albers began to focus on smaller, freer and highly experimental individual weavings, taking her cues from her materials. “A thread comes my way which I enjoy” she observed, “there is a certain stimulation from material. ... A thread is suggestive to somebody attuned to weaving.” She explained to an interviewer how, intrigued by a sudden movement of the thread, the surface, or perhaps the colour of a yarn or “qualities like fuzziness or lustre that are specifically textile” she might be drawn to the loom. “Something of your own flows into it, a kind of subtlety of choice.”
In these works of the 1950s and 1960s Albers created some of her most highly varied, innovative and unique works. Intended to be viewed and contemplated as individual works of art, weavings like La Luz, Open Letter, and Epitaph are in Albers’s words “not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at … I try to get my beliefs, feelings, and ideas into that other area, which is in the direction of art, pictorial weavings. Here I’m concerned with form, line, colour, proportions, and surface per se.”