Casting shadows

In August 1936 Anni and Josef Albers visited Mexico for the second time. They were returning less than six months after their first trip, keen to continue their encounters with the vibrant artistic life of the country. Anni wrote to friends Nina and Wassily Kandinsky:

Anni Albers (1899-1994) had long admired the art and culture of Central and South America, studying examples of pre-Columbian art at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin during her time at the Bauhaus school^.2 In 1933, following the closure of the Bauhaus, Anni and Josef accepted a fortuitous offer to emigrate to the United States and teach at the newly established experimental Black Mountain College. The couple now found themselves tantilisingly close to the region and it took only two years before they ventured south of the border to experience both the ancient and contemporary art of Mexico firsthand.

Following their second trip in the summer of 1936 Anni produced Monte Albán, a weaving inspired by her travels.³ For the first time, Albers incorporated diagonal lines into her weaving, a move away from the gridded compositions of her Bauhaus wallhangings and a direct response to the pyramidal and stepped motifs of the Meso-American Zapotec architecture. These new forms were delicately woven into the warp of her loom with a thicker thread that, on occasion, broke from the structure of the weave to connect two wefts of differing lengths on a loose diagonal. This supplementary weft technique was employed by Albers in a seemingly arbitrary fashion across the plane of the textile, allowing diagonal lines and triangular forms to emerge from the mottled black and white ground weave—forms distinguished so subtly by the differing thickness and texture of the threads used. This new technical and visual experiment emphasised the sculptural, three-dimensional properties of weaving and ignited a new field of thread-based exploration for Albers that would evolve and expand in many different directions over the next three decades.

Albers brought the same experimental flair to her printmaking, which she commenced in earnest in 1963. Working first with lithography, then screenprinting, etching and later photo-offset, Albers transposed the key concerns of weaving into this medium through the new graphic possibilities of each technique. This included layering surface and colour and exploring various textile processes, such as knotting, which emphasise the three-dimensionality of weaving. In her suite of screenprints made with Sirocco Screenprinters in Connecticut between 1969 and 1971, Albers challenged herself to apply principles around an economy of material and labour that she had acquired at the Bauhaus into her printmaking. Using only a single stencil and two inks, Albers built up an image that appears to be made from four of each. An incredible sense of depth is achieved in the Meander series by printing one stencil in the same ink three times atop a flat coloured background, rotating or offsetting the stencil for each subsequent run. Albers builds up of a tangle of maze-like lines that appear to run over and under each other as the ink’s opacity is turned up or down dependent on the lines point of intersection across each printing. While this depth remains illusionistic, figuratively and technically it very clearly alludes to the structural concerns of weaving.

However, Albers’ most rigorous investigation into the spatial possibilities of printmaking was undertaken with Kenneth Tyler’s workshops in 1970 and 1978. Her reverence for materiality and process was born in the workshops of the Bauhaus. Through intensive study of the fundamental properties of materials encouraged by the compulsory preliminary course, from organic materials such as feathers and wool to novel inorganic commercial materials such as cellophane, Anni was trained to approach an artwork with a designer’s eye—marrying material, process, form and function. In 1970, Albers came to work with Tyler for the first time. She had expressed an interest in working with the master printer a year earlier over the phone as she and Tyler chatted while Josef made his way to the phone.⁴ Her husband had worked with Tyler since 1963 and had come to trust Tyler with the inherent challenges of reinscribing his meticulous colour experiments into the printed medium. Anni had been working with Sirocco Screenprinters on prints with syncopated arrangements of triangles in high contrast colour combinations. The vibrancy of these prints was remarkable, but their resolution in the screenprinting process possibly lacked the meticulous precision for which the arrangements yearned. As Anni said to Tyler over the phone, ‘I have been working on things because I prefer you would take over something for me…you know, of mine.’⁵

This first project completed with Tyler at Gemini GEL in Los Angeles was titled Triadic. It comprised two colour lithographs, more muted in tone than Albers’ Sirocco screenprints, but meticulous in the execution of triangles that met with the lightest of touch at their pointed extremities. The triangles were printed in two shades that grew like a bloom across a green and a red background. The third work in the series took a decidedly different approach to the resolution of this shifting geometric motif. Instead of using colour to shape and distinguish each triangle, Anni focused on the properties of the paper itself to express their form. Using the process of embossing, Albers impressed the sprawling arrangement of equilateral triangles into the fabric of the paper using a zinc plate. The resulting extrusions became present as light fell on different planes of the gold metallic ground printed using a silkscreen. Shimmering, glitzy yet elemental, this print was a decisive move away from the vibrant Sirocco screenprints, more closely mimicking her exploration of light reflective materials such as cellophane in her commercial textiles; almost impossible to ignore too the connection between her use of gold and the precious metal’s ubiquity across central and south America.⁶

Returning to this process in 1978 after Tyler had opened Tyler Graphics Ltd in Bedford, New York, Albers took yet another approach that rationalised material and process to create wonder from limited means. Josef had documented their travels to Mexico with a camera, capturing unexpected angles of the sites and scenes they encountered in a most Bauhausler fashion, bringing the scale and beauty to life. These photographs were arranged on sheets as photo collages. One such undated collage is titled Bergfahrt Tamazuchale, Jacala, Mexico (Mountain Journey, Tamazunchale, Jacala, Mexico) and charts Anni and Josef’s car trip along fairly treacherous cliffside roads in central Mexico.⁷ The impacted dirt road cuts through the rocky mountain side in the gridded arrangement of photos on the lower half of the page, its presence made obvious by the way the sunlight reflects off the different surface and the flattened angle of its incline. Along the top left of the page, a cluster of five photographs capture the travellers stopped on the side of the road under a rather impressive rock formation. The strata of the rock appears as if sliced off in sheer, stepped cuts, captured by the lens through the differing levels of light bouncing off the rock’s surface and imprinted onto the photographic paper by a highly saturated exposure.

The forms of the steep, rocky mountain and the winding journey along its ridgeline are captured by Josef’s camera due to frequency at which light bounces off the angular cuts at different rates and intensities. Albers’ use of embossing thus becomes most appropriate in her Mountainous series, completely abandoning the use of colour and relying solely on the impression of the plate’s raised areas on the page when pressure is applied to define the forms of her geometric pattern. Albers also takes the chance to expand on her triangular arrangement, joining individual triads with linear passages that echo the roads and cliff faces encountered on their journey through the mountains. Tyler was the perfect printer to approach for this project, which demanded a crisp and decisive embossing. An innovator in papermaking as well as printing, the thick paper was handmade to support the deep indentations necessary to achieve a convincing shadow cast across the page. This play of light was also found in the architecture of the region, such as the stepped Zapotec sites of Monte Albán and Tenayuca, also photographed by Josef. Relying merely on the manipulation of the paper’s surface, much in the same way as Albers gently manipulated the surface of her weavings through an acute sense for materiality, Anni conjured both the natural and the built geography of Mexico. Shadows thus become revelatory in these works of incredible simplicity and refinement, born from Albers’ ever experimental, ever perfecting mind.

Anni and Josef Albers runs until 22 September 2024.