Paul Smith races up the stairs of his studio, charging through a corridor crammed with vintage prints, art books, old records, racing bikes and tchotchkes of every conceivable description. Moments later, we’re in a bright, open-plan room where, at 9.15am, young designers are blearily firing up their computers. Smith – hair artfully shaggy, windowpane-check navy suit as dapper as you’d expect – begins rummaging through papers. “Morning!” he bawls to anyone remotely within earshot. “Hiya!”
The focus of his enthusiasm this particular morning is the artist Anni Albers, the subject of a major Tate Modern exhibition opening on 11 October. Inspired by Albers’ Bauhaus textiles, Smith and his team have been working on a limited-edition range of knitwear, and he’s desperate to show me the original reference. Eventually, he locates an image of one of Albers’geometric wall hangings from 1925 – a gorgeous thing in wool, silk and chenille, swathes of sunflower-yellow and oatmeal shot through with shafts of red, blue and green – before embarking on a 10-minute disquisition on colour theory and yarn counts.
In fairness, if anyone deserves such enthusiasm, it’s Anni Albers. One of the leading female artists of her generation, and perhaps the most influential textile designer of the 20th century, Albers, who died in 1994, is nowhere near as celebrated as she ought to be. While her husband, the painter Josef, has long been acclaimed as a pioneering abstractionist, teacher of Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, and a cornerstone of art collections across the globe, Anni has been written out of art history. It’s nearly 20 years since her work was last displayed on any scale in the US, and although her profile is somewhat higher in Europe, she’s not what anyone would call a household name. Working in an art form usually dismissed as “craft” – the kind of thing traditionally done by women in their spare time – seemed to all but guarantee her disappearance. The Tate Modern show, which also marks the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019, will be her first full-scale retrospective in Britain.
Smith first came across Albers’ work in a book on Bauhaus design in the early 70s, when he was alternating odd jobs with an attempt to get his first menswear boutique, in Nottingham, on its feet. “Her designs just jumped out: those slightly clashing colours, ochres, yellows, misty greens, the textures she used.” He laughs. “I carried that book around everywhere, sticking it in my backpack on holiday, poring over it. It completely dropped to bits.”
Smith repaid a creative debt to both the Alberses with a 2015 catwalk collection: sleek suiting enlivened by architectural slabs of colour, partly inspired by research trips the couple made to Mexico in the 30s and 40s. He reaches into a thicket of cycling jerseys flung across a chair – he is as obsessed by the sport as ever – and yanks out a dark woollen men’s suit jacket stippled with off-kilter squares and rectangles. “The ideas they were playing with were so modern – all that lateral thinking.” He shrugs. “The rest of us are still struggling to catch up.”
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Anni Albers’ life was every bit as trailblazing as the textiles she created. Born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin, to a wealthy Jewish family, she was determined not to end up a high-society wife and mother. Instead, she set her heart on joining the radical art, design and architecture school in Weimar known as the Bauhaus, founded by the architect Walter Gropius a few years earlier. She enrolled in spring 1922, having already fallen in love with Josef, who was also studying there. The couple married three years later, soon after the Bauhaus moved to a gleaming, Gropius-designed complex in Dessau.
Anni Albers’ aim was to train as a painter (Paul Klee was a lasting influence), but that plan was dashed when it transpired that the weaving workshop, one of the few open to women, despite the Bauhaus’s ostensibly egalitarian philosophy, was the only class that had space. Although she struggled with a muscular illness, Albers learned to weave by hand at a loom, and realised she had found her metier. “Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over,” she wrote decades later. “I learned to listen to them and to speak their language.”
Even by Bauhaus standards, Albers’ early textiles displayed huge originality. Her diploma piece, awarded in 1930, was a light-reflecting, sound-absorbent wall hanging for an auditorium which incorporated cellophane – a material that had only just been invented. But it was the brilliance of her eye that impressed her tutors. Another wall hanging idea, sketched in 1926 and seemingly a response to one of her husband’s designs for stained glass, is a dazzling grid of red, black and orange blocks; it looks like a Mondrian that has been pulled apart, remixed and reassembled. In her inventiveness with different materials (rough and smooth textures, contrasting thread densities, translucent textures, a reflective thread), Albers rivalled anything being done by the cubists on canvas.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
