On Weaving: New Expanded Edition [New Expanded] 9781400889044

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Anni Albers On Weaving

Anni Albers On Weaving

new expanded edition With an afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber and contributions by Manuel Cirauqui and T’ai Smith

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford in association with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Copyright © 2017 by The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Original edition copyright © 1965, 1993, 2003 by Anni Albers Chapter One, “Weaving, Hand” copyright © 1963 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., reprinted by permission. Brief excerpt from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby; copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp; copyright in the World excluding the U.S. © 1995 by Maria Kodama; by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Published in association with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Frontispiece illustrations: (page ii) Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937; (page vi) detail of plate 119; (page viii) detail of plate 115; (page x) detail of plate 116; and (page xii) detail of plate 113. Jacket illustrations: (front) Anni Albers, Variations on a Theme, 1958. Cotton, linen, and plastic, 34 1/2 µ 30 1/2 in. (87.6 µ 77.5 cm). Private Collection. © 2017 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art; (back) Back-strap loom (diagram) of the type used in Peru. Image #123725. The American Museum of Natural History Library, New York. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Albers, Anni, author. | Weber, Nicholas Fox, 1947– | Cirauqui, Manuel. | Smith, T’ai Lin, 1975– Title: On weaving / Anni Albers ; with an afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber and contributions by Manuel Cirauqui and T’ai Smith. Description: New expanded edition. | Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017020109 | ISBN 9780691177854 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Textile design. | Weaving. | BISAC: ART / Individual Artists / General. | DESIGN / Textile & Costume. | ART / Techniques / General. | ART / History / Contemporary (1945-). Classification: LCC TS1475 .A42 2017 | DDC 677/.028242--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020109 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Designed by Yve Ludwig. This book has been composed in ITC New Baskerville and Whitney. Printed on acid-free paper. Printed in Italy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.

Contents Introductory Note

ix

Preface

xi

one Weaving, Hand

1

two The Loom

4

th ree Draft Notation

20

f our The Fundamental Constructions

23

fiv e Modified and Composite Weaves

29

six Early Techniques of Thread Interlacing

34

seven Interrelation of Fiber and Construction

41

eigh t Tactile Sensibility

44

nine Tapestry t en Designing as Visual Organization Plates

48 53 63

Acknowledgments

202

Afterword Nicholas Fox Weber

207

The Two Faces of Weaving Manuel Cirauqui

214

On Reading On Weaving T’ai Smith

234

Contributors

251

Plate Credits

252

Introductory Note Perhaps I should start out by saying that this book is not a guide for weavers or would-be weavers, nor is it a summary of textile achievement, past or present. It is incomplete in that it does not take up many of the facets that together constitute the enormous field that is weaving. A vast literature has accumulated on this subject, each contribution taking up some of its many aspects. I approached the subject as one concerned with the visual, structural side of weaving rather than that dealing with the problem of warmth, for instance, or such new attributes, developed by chemistry, as being water repellent, creaseresistant, flame-retarding, and so on, that are invisible. My concern here was to comment on some textile principles underlying some evident facts. By taking up textile fundamentals and methods, I hoped to include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems. This book, then, is an effort in that direction. April 1965 — A.A.

ix

Preface I am in the fortunate position of being able to introduce my subject by quoting from the Encyclopædia Britannica without being accused of plagiarism. For the article “Weaving, Hand” in it is written and signed by me. I tried to sum up there the essentials of weaving within the number of words allotted me, and thus the article is as concise as I was able to make it. To rewrite it would mean copying myself. Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still, in exploring them, I feel on new ground. And just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships. Thus tangential subjects come into view. The thoughts, however, can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread.

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Anni Albers On Weaving

c ha pt er o n e

Weaving, Hand One of the most ancient crafts, hand weaving is a method of forming a pliable plane of threads by interlacing them rectangularly. Invented in a preceramic age, it has remained essentially unchanged to this day. Even the final mechanization of the craft through introduction of power machinery has not changed the basic principle of weaving. Other techniques had been devised to the same end: single element techniques —looping, netting, knitting, crocheting— and multiple element techniques — knotting, coiling, twining, braiding. In weaving, in the latter group, one system of threads, the warp, crosses another one, the weft, at right angles, and the manner of intersecting forms the different weaves. Gradually the various phases of manipulating warp and weft were mechanized until the technique of weaving surpassed all others in efficiency. Whereas single-thread methods can be handled with few tools, weaving needs more complicated equipment since the warp has to be given tension. The device giving such tension is the loom. Weaving, then, is the process of passing the weft between taut, alternately raised warps, as in the basic plain weave, or between other combinations of selected warps, and pressing it into place. Earliest weaving was done on the warp-weight loom, where warps were suspended from an upper bar and weighted at bottom. Weaving here progressed downward, unlike other weaving. It was used in ancient Greece, and, more recently, by Indians of the North Pacific American coast. Next came the

1

two-bar loom, with warp stretched from bar to bar, or, for extended length, wound onto the bars. Used either vertically or horizontally, the warp was held taut by a framework or stakes in the ground. Early Egyptian records show weaving on such a loom which, in vertical position, is also the tapestry loom of today. Another loom, allowing for subtly adjustable tension, therefore finer weaving, is the back-strap loom, in which the lower bar is attached to a belt around the waist of the weaver, who, leaning forward or backward can tighten or slacken the warp. This loom made possible the extraordinary textile achievements of pre-Columbian Peru and is still found in remote regions of Asia and parts of Central and South America. The intersecting weft, crossing between raised and lowered warps, was first inserted without tool, the extra length being wound into little bundles, as today in tapestry weaving: i.e., pictorial weaving. Later the weft was wound onto sticks and released as it traversed the warp. Finally, to introduce the weft faster and in greater length, it was wound on bobbins, inserted into boatlike shuttles, and thrust across the opened warp (the shed) in hand as well as in power looms. To beat the weft into place, a weaver’s sword of wood was an early instrument. Later a comblike “reed” was introduced, combining warp spacing with pounding of the weft. Suspended from the loom framework, the reed swings against the woven fabric, pressing successive wefts against it. A first device for speeding up the selection of warps between which the weft passes was the shed-rod, carrying raised warps. To raise the opposite warps, an ingenious device, called a heddle, was introduced. The warps running under the shed-rod were tied with string-loops to a second rod, the heddle-rod, and they now could be raised past those on the shed-rod with one upward motion. Later, series of heddle-rods, replacing the shed-rod, facilitated the production of weaves based on more complex warp operation than that demanded for the plain weave, based on the principle of opposites. In the medieval loom, the heddle-rods, now called shafts or harnesses, were suspended from the framework, similar to the pounding device, and were attached to foot treadles, as they are on hand looms today. They are still found on power looms. Though of incalculable value in saving time, this invention limited the thus far unlimited, primitive warp selection. To regain some of the early freedom, the highly developed draw-loom was devised. Chinese in origin, developed for elaborate pattern weaving, such

2

on weaving

as brocades and damasks, it was later adopted in Europe. It was superseded by a further mechanized warp-selection method, Jacquard weaving, still in use today, though transferred during the past century to power-driven machinery. Among high achievements in hand weaving, Coptic as well as early Peruvian weaving must be recognized, the latter surpassing perhaps in inventiveness of weave structure, formal treatment, and use of color, other great textile periods. In fact, practically all known methods of weaving had been employed in ancient Peru, and also some types now discontinued. Today, hand weaving is practiced mainly on the medieval shaft loom with few harnesses. No longer of consequence as a manufacturing method in an industrial age, it concerns itself chiefly with fabrics for decorative use. Increasingly, though, industry is turning to hand weavers for new design ideas, worked out on hand looms, to be taken over for machine production. Hand weaving is included in the curriculum of many art schools and art departments of colleges and universities, as an art discipline able to convey understanding of the interaction between medium and process that results in form. It has survived through the ages as an art form in tapestry. Hand weaving has also been taken up in the field of occupational therapy, having, though, as its aim there neither an educational nor an artistic end but solely that of rehabilitation. It should be realized that the development of weaving is dependent also upon the development of textile fibers, spinning and dyeing, each a part of the interplay resulting in a fabric. Recent advances in the production of synthetic fibers and new textile finishes are having profound effects upon the weaving of cloth.

weaving, hand

3

c ha p ter two

The Loom Any weaving, even the most elaborate, can be done, given time, with a minimum of equipment. The main incentive, therefore, for perfecting the weaving implements has always been that of saving time. Precision of work, it is true, is greatly aided by adequate instruments, but fabrics of great accuracy have been executed without much mechanical aid. Furthermore, the manipulating of threads does not demand much physical effort, unlike the case where a resistant material has to be forced into shape. Weaving deals with a submissive material. But since it is building a whole out of small parts — a process that is time-consuming by its very nature — the invention of time-saving devices has always been a primary concern, from the earliest weaving frame to the latest power loom. In proportion to time saved, production can increase, of course, but we can suppose that the matter of production capacity was of little interest at a time when the usefulness of cloth was only gradually being established. Today, with this usefulness proved, it has grown to surpass in importance most other considerations, for better or for worse. During the 4,500 years or, in some estimates, even 8,000 years that we believe mankind has been weaving, the process itself has been unaffected by the various devices that contributed to greater speed of execution. We still deal in weaving, as at the time of its beginning, with a rigid set of parallel threads in tension and a mobile one that transverses it at right angles. The main devices, in turn, have not become obsolete, but still form the nucleus of today’s weaving instruments. If we follow the various inventions through the ages, we will

4

not be led on historical detours, interesting per se, but will arrive at the underlying ideas in the mechanism of today’s automatically functioning loom. One of the initial problems calling for a solution in terms of equipment is that of giving tension to the first mentioned group of threads, the warp. We will not consider, at this point, matters of operation, or preparation for it such as warping, for instance, but will concentrate on implements and their development. It is interesting to observe that the answers to some of the technical points at issue are often of startling simplicity, as are truly ingenious inventions. For instance, by attaching one end of the warp threads to a bar and weights to their other end, the desired tension is achieved in a strikingly easy manner. This, then, is the warp-weight loom, an upright loom, as is apparent from the use of weights. It is best known as the Greek loom. It was also used in England during the early Bronze Age and in the Swiss lake dwellings. It is also the loom, with a slight variation, used by the Chilkat Indians of the northwest coast of America. Another method of achieving tension is by stretching the warp threads between or over two bars, the prototypes of warp and cloth beams known to our day. To keep them taut, the bars are attached to a framework in either vertical or horizontal position. Both these ways have been used in various parts of the world: the upright version for tightly packed weaves such as tapestries and rugs; the horizontal one for finer and looser materials. Examples of the vertical type are found over most parts of the earth, from ancient to modern times. It was known in Egypt and Peru, in India and Asia Minor, in the European countries and Africa, for example, and it is still in use, among other places in France, for tapestry work, and in the United States by the Navajo Indians for their rug weaving. The best-known early example of the primitive horizontal type is the Egyptian loom, which is set low to the ground. In the Andean highlands still fairly recently, a similar type has been found. The invention of the back-strap loom added regulative tension to the inventory of early weaving devices. One bar, carrying the spread-out, parallel warp threads, is attached to a pole or a tree; the other is fastened to the waist of the weaver, who can adjust the tension by leaning forward or backward. This makes minute regulation possible and with it a more delicate weaving operation. This back-strap loom occurs mainly in the region of the Pacific Ocean. It was, for instance, in use in Japan and the Malayan islands, and in China, Burma, and Tibet. In Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico, it can still be seen in use, and in some remote regions of Asia.

the loom

5

Plate 3

Plate 2

Plate 1 Plate 4

Plate 5

Next, we can suppose, the heddle evolved. Up to the time of its invention, the warp threads to be interlaced had to be lifted up with the fingers, so that the crossing, mobile threads, the wefts, could be inserted. After each intersection, the warps next to be interwoven had to be selected anew — shifting from odd- to even-numbered threads or vice versa — and raised as before. Only small groups of warp threads can be lifted up in this manner, just as many as a hand can easily hold. This means that, for each passage of a weft thread, as many handfuls of warps had to be picked up as the width of the cloth demanded — a tedious work. By placing a rod into permanent position under the threads to be lifted for the passing of the weft, one part of this work is greatly simplified, since the thickness of the rod causes a separation of the warps to be raised from those to remain lowered. The separation of the warps, or the opening, is called the shed; and the rod, in consequence, the shed-rod. Since the fundamental form of weaving operates on the principle of opposites, the problem of the counteropening is left to be solved. If those warps lying under the shed-rod are attached, by means of a string forming loose loops around each of them, to a second rod lying on top of the warp, the resulting device, the heddle, produces the countershed when raised. By introducing the weft alternately into the shed formed by the shed-rod and that formed by the heddle, the efficiency of the procedure — that is, weaving — is increased tremendously. For, since the shed-rod remains in position throughout the weaving of a cloth, one motion — that of lifting the heddle, not counting that of letting it go — takes care of the previously separate ones of gathering handfuls of threads over and over again. When the heddle is released, the threads raised by it settle back into their prior position, their “natural” position, under the shed-rod. “Natural shed” is an expressive term sometimes used for the first shed formation, in contrast to “artificial shed,” used for the second one, which forces its threads past those maintained in their position over the shed-rod. The type of heddle described here is the one that was destined to outlive others that evolved in the course of exploring the idea. Details such as the various ways of fastening the heddle loops to the rod, diverging with region, race, and period, may be of interest to specialists in the field, but our concern here is to trace the main line of mechanical contributions that finally were to result in today’s weaving machinery. However, mention should be made of a cleverly conceived implement that, though not incorporated in the modern inventory of equipment, is interesting as another attempt at producing

6

on weaving

shed and countershed by the simplest means. This is the free rigid heddle. It is of a hard material, such as wood, bone, or even metal, and has narrow bars, each with a small hole in the middle through which a warp thread runs. Another warp thread is passed through the space between the bars. As the apparatus is raised or lowered, the latter threads slide past those threaded through the holes, thereby forming a shed, alternately above or below those threads. This invention combines the device for forming each of the two opposite sheds in one contrivance. Its disadvantage lies in the limited number of warps that can be used without calling for so large a size of heddle that it becomes unwieldy, and also in the friction that may occur when the threads slide up and down the slots. Also, it must be remembered, only the two basic sheds can be formed, thus making only a plain weave construction possible. Nevertheless, it has proved successful in the weaving of narrow fabrics and was used, for instance, in America, Germany, and Finland. Weaving in the preheddle days could have held no greater promise as a technique of interlocking threads than did others such as twining, looping, and netting. With the simplification that the invention of the heddle brought, weaving was singled out, for millennia to come, to attain a major role in civilization. The earliest evidence of the heddle is found in Egypt where it is estimated to have been in use before 2000 b.c. It probably was invented independently in many places and at various periods. In Peru, it was known as early as several centuries b.c. For some four thousand years, the idea of the heddle has remained intact, and it is easily recognized in the form of the harness in today’s power loom. The shed-rod, in a sense an embryo heddle, has been given up, to be succeeded by a second, full-fledged heddle. The next step, from heddle opposites to multiple heddles, signifies the carrying through of the initial notion. Series of heddles, with warp threads in designated order, raised in accordance with that order, will form structural patterns. To this day, the shaft loom of our industry operates on this very principle. The great technical advance of the heddle prepared the way that eventually was to lead to quantity production of enormous dimensions. But, as Luther Hooper wisely reminds us, in his book Hand-Loom Weaving, “Each step toward the mechanical perfection of the loom, in common with all machinery, in its degree, lessens the freedom of the weaver, and his control of the design in working.” Thus the emergence of the heddle is also actually

the loom

7

a limiting element, for it channels thread construction and composition of a weave into a shedding system that permits within its scheme only limited development. Centuries and even millennia had to pass before some of the lost freedom of earlier shed formations could be regained through more intricate machinery. So far we have taken up matters concerning the warp; we now come to the weft. The first, most elementary, way to introduce the weft thread or threads between the warps was, and still is today in tapestry weaving, by no other means than the fingers. A length of thread is laced over and under the stretched warp threads or inserted into the open shed. With longer wefts, wider weavings, and a speeding-up process came the idea of winding the weft yarn onto a stick that could carry it faster through the shed from side to side of the weaving. Hand in hand with the development of the loom went the development of weft carriers —shuttles. But at the point that we have now reached, a stick, sometimes delicately finished and ornamented, was all that had evolved. More intricate than the matter of inserting the weft was that of pressing it into place, firmly and evenly, all across the width of the fabric. With the changing of the shed, the warps hold the weft when they close over it. Fingers soon will have proved inadequate instruments for this phase of work. Thus a tool had to be fashioned — flat enough to be entered into an opened shed, smooth enough to glide easily along the warp threads, firm enough not to bend under pressure, long enough to reach all across the warp and slightly beyond to permit it to be easily held. Finally, it had to have a bladelike, though blunt, edge along one side of its length for reaching deeply into the angle of the opened shed. Such specified qualities, when taking shape clearly and simply, not only result in a serviceable object, but also convey in its form thoughtfulness and purity — that is, beauty. This beater-in or batten is truly beautiful, even when not considered for its virtues as an artifact. For its swordlike appearance, it is rightly named the weaver’s sword. Once the batten had been developed in answer to a specific need, it was put to a further service which made use of its general, if not its particular characteristics — for any flat, long, smooth piece of wood might have done equally well. This secondary use was that of keeping open or even enlarging the shed once it was raised, by setting the batten in it on edge. Though the weaving equipment worked out thus far is found in essence still in use today as an intrinsic part of our weaving machinery, the batten had to undergo further development and even merge its function with another

8

on weaving

one before finding a place there. Of the two basic components of its present form, we have found one to be a tool for beating the wefts into place. To isolate the other, we have to retrace again early stages of development. We find that the spacing of the warp created a special problem. On short warps it was solved by lacing heading cords along the ends of the warp, generally using heavier thread for this than for the rest of the fabric. Either they were interwoven, and their greater bulk held the warp threads in place, or, in an earlier phase of development, they were twined — that is, two ends of a double cord were twisted in such manner across the width of warp that each single warp thread was caught between the twists — an expedient way of distributing them evenly. These heading cords, in addition to their main function of spacing, also gave a sturdy ending to early fabrics woven on warps that were continuous and not, as in our manner of working, cut. For longer warps, this method of spacing proved insufficient, and lease-rods (or lazerods or cross sticks) were introduced. These are two rods, tied together at the ends, placed near the warp beam and behind heddle and shed-rod, each carrying the warp threads of one of the two basic sheds in the given order: one all the even-numbered threads, the other all the odd-numbered ones. The friction caused by the rods keeps the threads from crossing and helps hold them in position. It also makes it easy to find the allocated place for a broken thread. For this latter function, a lease cord instead of the lease-rods was used on short warps. An actual warp-spacer is known to have existed in Egypt, for instance, and in Borneo, but it seems not to have been widely used. It is an instrument of wood, as long as the warp is wide, with dents of wood or reed fastened to it through which the warp threads are drawn, thus spacing them as desired. Since a warp-spacer as separate instrument does not belong to the general line of development, it is mentioned here only because of the importance it gained when it made its appearance in combination with the batten. To summarize: the present-day batten encompasses two functions, that of pressing the weft into place and that of spacing the warp. It is an apparatus that arrived on the scene when mechanization of the loom had advanced well beyond the early stages discussed before. In order to be manageable, it needed a loom with a framework from which it could be suspended or secured in such manner as to swing freely. Its shape is predominantly that of a warp-spacer. The dents through which the warps pass are of reed or, today, of wire. They are fastened to a

the loom

9

Plate 6

Plates 29, 49, 45, 51, 52, 53, 63, 112, 122

light frame, thus forming what is still called the reed. This reed, in turn, is inserted into another frame which has been given extra weight and sturdiness, so that it holds the reed firmly and can pound the weft effectively into place when swung against it. Combining spacing of the warp and beating of the weft in one motion marked a decided advance in cloth making. No longer was it necessary to insert the batten into the opened shed after every new weft thread that had been entered, for now it was always in place and had only to be pulled lightly to fall by its own weight against the weft, pounding it uniformly across the whole width of the fabric and simultaneously keeping the warp evenly spaced. Greater evenness of the cloth resulted, and wider weavings could be attempted without added effort. And, again, time was saved. Since we have already become aware that a loss of range seems to accompany mechanical progress in weaving, let us consider the reverse side of this advance. The heddle-rod, as we have seen, restricted the weaver in his handling of the warp. The reed, as part of the batten, added to this its own, though minor, limitations. Working without a reed, the weaver was free to manipulate the warp within the scope set by the shedding arrangement he was using. This meant that he could cross warp threads, for instance, and thereby produce a gauze weave — that is, lace effects. With a reed, however, only those warp threads can be crossed that are entered into the same space between dents. Only neighboring threads, usually not more than two, can be used in this manner. Commonly, in weaving, only one warp thread is drawn in between dents, thus eliminating entirely the use of deflected warp threads. The imaginative gauze weaves of early Peru are the product of “heddle-less” and “reed-less” looms! Another consequence of the use of a reed — which cannot be listed on the positive side though it is not an impediment — is the mechanical nature of the spacing of the warp threads. Before the use of the reed, warp and weft adjusted themselves to each other naturally; they slipped together according to their size, their resilience, and their twist. With the warp held apart artificially, a knowledge of such relationships and also advance planning are necessary to arrive at a balanced interconnection. Where this is lacking in a fabric, threads will easily draw apart or pile up, spoiling appearance as much as usefulness. In an economy-minded age, the possibility of an off-balance thread-relationship has been exploited barbarously. By setting the warp threads wider apart than the corresponding weft threads require for a sound

10

on weaving

construction and by spacing the weft equally sparingly, yarn can be saved and cost thereby reduced. To give the material a semblance of firmness, it is finished with a size — that is, a coating of paste that holds the too-loose threads in place, at least until their first contact with water. This makeshift practice has led, however, to the recent development of new finishes, which, far from being unsound, are adding valid new textile properties to the fabric to which they are applied. Much earlier, another fusion of a batten and a warp-spacer existed. It is still in use today in the form of an implement for tapestry and pile rug weaving — that is, for work done on upright looms where only short sections of the filling have to be compactly beaten into place while at the same time the position of the warp threads is adjusted. This is a comblike instrument with a handle — a beater-in. It is found in many places, among them India, Persia, Africa, Asia Minor, Egypt in Roman times, and America before the Conquest. It is also found today among the Indians of the Southwest. Surely, it was also used in Europe in the weaving of the great medieval tapestries. It is of wood or metal or a combination of both. The dents are pushed between the warp threads and pressed or beaten onto the wefts or the knots of a rug. A batten inserted between the warps would undo the knots. In ancient America, it was a much-needed instrument, in addition to the swordlike batten, for work done on back-strap looms. For, customarily, the weaving was started from both ends and worked toward a meeting point. When this point was approached, the batten had to be discarded, for the warp no longer permitted the entry even of narrow battens. Here the beater-in took over, sometimes in the form of just a comb. With its teeth reaching between the warp threads, however short their exposed section may have become, it could push the wefts into place, even when they had almost closed the gap in the weaving. Here we have arrived at a point where we should take stock of what had been achieved thus far. At this stage, the loom was equipped with warp beam, cloth beam, heddle-rods, shed stick, lease or cross rods, batten or beater-in, and (in the Pacific region) a back strap. Looking back today, we are aware, in awe, that it contained all the essentials of the loom as we know it in our own time. It was the loom of ancient Peru, for instance, on which the great masterworks of the textile art were woven. In Peru it did not have any further development, except for minor variations. But the fabrics made on this loom stand as a testimonial to heights of inventiveness in weaving never reached again anywhere at any time.

the loom

11

This loom is the loom, mainly, of cotton weaving. It is believed that another phase in the mechanization of the loom was initiated with the use of a new fiber, silk, which the Chinese were experimenting with at a time when other parts of the world were in the early stages of working with cotton and flax. The fineness of the threads made special adaptations of the weaving appliances necessary, and thus it is considered likely that we owe to the Far East the improvements that added so importantly to swift and controlled performance in weaving. One of the first of these improvements concerned the shedding mechanism, which had to be made to function smoothly enough not to damage the fragile threads. The shed-rod was discarded and replaced by a second heddle. The heddle itself was changed in some respects. Whereas it previously had been drawn by hand in an upward direction only and therefore had consisted of only one light rod to which the upper end of the string loops, carrying one warp thread each, were attached, it now was equipped with a second rod or lath to which the lower end of the loops were secured, thus making a downward movement possible. With the lower, second lath, the heddle took on a new name, leaving its former one to the loops only, through which the warp threads pass. It now was called a pair of shafts or, if upper and lower laths were connected at their ends by uprights, a frame. In industry it is called a harness. A revolutionary change came with the transfer from hand to foot operation of the frames, together with their now two-directional motion. Since, in Asia, much more use is made of the feet in working than in Europe, for instance, this shift itself has been interpreted as another indication of the part the East played in subsequent developments. What was done was to suspend and also couple the shafts or frames, by means of cords running over a roller, which was placed above the loom proper. Each lower lath was tied to a treadle below the loom. When a treadle was stepped on, one frame was drawn downward, while the other one linked to it automatically rose. Since the frames carried the heddles through which the warp threads were drawn, the countermovement parted them and thereby opened the shed. The hand no longer was needed in this performance and therefore was free swiftly to pass the weft and beat it into place. A primitive loom, used in India among other places, gives us insight into early ways of suspending the roller. The loom was placed under a tree and an overhanging branch was used to hold it. To make the weaver independent, no doubt, of such specific locality and the exposure to weather, a framework

12

on weaving

with upright posts was developed to act as support for the roller-shaft contrivance. Once the idea of suspension had taken hold, it was extended to include also the batten, which had gone through its own phases of transformation, as discussed earlier. Here, then, was the fully developed shaft loom with freeswinging batten. It was the loom that was to take care of the textile needs of many peoples for centuries to come. The introduction of the treadles and the pendent batten, like the earlier invention of the heddle, caused a rise in cloth production that must greatly have broadened the inceptive idea of the usefulness of textiles. For, as need presses toward fulfillment, so does obtainable fulfillment excite need — a generative cycle, spiraling to dimensions of both need and productivity that must seem excessive to any generation earlier than the one participating in it. Though it is believed to have been devised by the Chinese specifically for the weaving of silk, the shaft or treadle loom later came universally into allround use. It is likely that until the third century a.d. its use, together with the art of silk weaving, remained confined to China. Gradually, however, it was taken over by other parts of the East and finally reached the West: first Spain and Italy, and later France, Germany, and England. This loom became the loom of medieval Europe. In all essentials, it is also the loom of our time, though it took further centuries to transform it into the miraculous instrument of precision and speed that it is today. There was, however, no successive development. For hundreds of years it remained in the stage it had reached. Though variations were invented, they all operated within the confines of the fundamental principles on which it was built. We have, in following the development of weaving equipment, taken the viewpoint that saving time was a leading concern. For hundreds of years, however, no inventions were added that markedly increased the speed of weaving. The inventions were, however, significant in another respect: in reconquering some of the lost range that went with the mechanization of operations. Mention should first be made of a shedding device, introduced by the Chinese so it seems, that modified the original countermovement of pairs of shafts by making possible the raising of single shafts. The number of weave constructions that now could be woven was greatly increased, since not only even- but also odd-numbered structural patterns could be undertaken. By interposing levers between treadles and shafts, the direct action upon the shafts was changed into an indirect one. Two different shedding methods

the loom

13

Plate 7

Plate 8

were developed. One made it possible to raise a single shaft or any given combination by pressing on the treadle. The other operated in such a way as to make a single shaft or any combination of shafts form a shed, with the difference that here the selected shafts were raised while simultaneously all others were lowered. The effort of lifting the weight of the shafts was reduced considerably, since the lowering of the others made it unnecessary to lift them as high as would have been required if the regular warp plane had had to be maintained. Another elaboration of the shedding mechanism, apparently also of Chinese origin, was the compound harness, which made it possible to weave small pattern effects into a different background. A second set of shafts was placed behind the regular set in front of the weaver. The regular shafts were now equipped with heddles that had, instead of small eyes, elongated ones. Those selected warp threads that were to be used in forming the pattern were passed through the small eyes of the heddles of the added pattern shafts, as well as through the elongated ones of the regular shafts in front of the weaver. This arrangement permitted the opening of a shed by the commonly used shafts independently of the pattern shafts. The latter ones could be raised when needed, and the warp threads passing through them could affect the shed by reason of the long heddle eyes of the front shafts through which they passed, no matter whether they were raised or not. The limitation of the compound-harness loom lay in the comparatively small number of pattern shafts and corresponding treadles that could be conveniently managed in addition to the regular shafts. The various efforts to recapture a freedom that had been lost with the introduction of mechanical shedding devices led to the invention of the draw-loom, which allowed the weaving of figured designs by mechanical means. This invention, thought to be of Persian origin, was, like the one discussed earlier — a modification of the shedding appliances. It was of far greater consequence, however, for it inaugurated a new era of figure weaving. Instead of shafts performing the shedding motion, there was a return to single warp thread operation, though now, after many centuries, by mechanical means. The place of the shafts in the loom was now occupied by a comber board pierced with holes through which leashes were hung, each with an eye through which a warp thread was drawn and with an elongated weight at its end. These leashes were attached in groups to cords in such manner that those with warp threads that had the same position within a repeat of a design were combined. Thus, if a cord was raised, it would raise with it, for

14

on weaving

instance, all first threads within a repeat of a design. The person in charge of raising the required cords for each shed in the varying combinations of the design was the “drawboy,” who was perched on top of the framework of the loom or, in later models, could select the cords at the side of the loom. The various types of draw-looms are called, according to their specific devices for raising groups of single threads, “button looms” or “simple looms.” The draw-loom operates single warp threads mechanically, and in this respect it has reached the end of possible development. However, it operates single warp threads within a limited range and therefore resorts to repeats across the width of the fabric. This, in combination with the great fineness of threads and the great number that now were manageable, led to the art of elaborate pattern weaving in compound constructions. This loom must have been in use in Persia as early as 520 a.d., a date known because of the tribute then paid to the Emperor Wu. During the sixth and seventh centuries, Alexandria was an important center for elaborate fabrics, and later Constantinople took over this art, passing it on to Sicily in the twelfth century. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Europe produced on this loom the rich fabrics that are the highpoints of her contribution to the art of weaving. The unique improvements, however, that Europe made in the development of weaving lie in another area. It was the mechanization of the loom beyond the point to which it had ingeniously been brought by the Orient. The first practicable technical weaving invention made in Europe was the fly shuttle, devised in 1733 by John Kay, a reed-maker from England. It would be wrong, though, to assume that mechanical improvements of the loom had not until then occupied the inventive minds of Europe, among them Leonardo da Vinci. His plans, however, were never put into practice. In 1586, Anton Möller of Danzig is said to have invented a mechanical ribbon loom, though it supposedly was suppressed and the inventor drowned by weavers who feared competition. Other names connected with the problem of mechanizing the loom were De Gennes, who in 1678 came forward with an invention that, however, was of no practical use, and Josef Mason, who in 1687 patented an idea concerning draw-loom mechanization. The invention of the fly shuttle was of far-reaching significance because it achieved the mechanization of one phase of weaving — the insertion of the weft. Every step toward this mechanization — from the interweaving of loose

the loom

15

Plate 9

threads by hand, to the passing of a stick carrying the weft from side to side of the weaving, to the hand shuttle with a bobbin of thread in it thrown by hand from selvage to selvage, and finally to the fly shuttle — represents a timesaving device. With this last contrivance, the shuttle is propelled through the opened shed by pulling the cord of a driving device and abruptly arresting the motion. When the shuttle reaches the opposite side, it is caught by a similar driver that returns it in the same manner. The shuttle runs along a projecting ridge of the lower part of the batten, differing here from the hand-thrown shuttle, which lightly passes over the lower warp threads of the opened shed. Kay’s invention increased the speed of weaving three or four times and thereby not only affected the quantity of production but, in consequence, also reduced the price of the fabric. Important, too, was the fact that now it was possible for one weaver to do work that previously needed two, in the weaving of fabrics wider than one person could reach. His invention, like that of Möller, aroused the fear and anger of the weavers, and he only barely escaped their fury. His son, Robert Kay, elaborated on the invention and developed the multiple shuttle box for an exchange of shuttles in varying colors or other distinctions of yarns. Significant as was the part the fly shuttle played in hand weaving, it was of still greater consequence later on as part of the operation of automatic looms. A decisive point in the mechanization of the loom was reached when Edmund Cartwright, who patented a power-driven loom in 1783 and an improved model in 1786, set up nineteen such looms. Power was first supplied by an ox harnessed to a capstan and later by steam. Though his life was not threatened, he shared the misfortune of the earlier inventors, for he saw this first weaving mill destroyed by fire. Many contributions from many sides were necessary before the loom was ready to take a vital part in the industrial development that made England for a time the greatest producer of textiles. Only with the beginning of the nineteenth century were power looms introduced in any quantity. The first one to be set up in the United States was in 1813. The effect of the mechanized loom on time saved and thereby on increased productivity is beyond computation. While England concerned itself with the general problem of mechanizing weaving, France took up the particular one of substituting a mechanism for the drawboy in the operation of the complicated shedding system of the pattern loom. Various efforts were made by Basile Bouchon, Jean-Baptiste

16

on weaving

Falcon, and Jacques de Vaucanson, all during the middle of the eighteenth century, but none of the results was practicable. In 1805, however, JosephMarie Jacquard brought out a machine, an improvement on Vaucanson’s, that proved successful. It rendered the draw-loom’s shedding apparatus automatic by retaining the weighted leashes through which the separate warp threads ran and by fastening them to wire hooks that were raised by wire blades or deflected into a position that prevented them from being raised — a selection controlled by a chain of cards perforated in accordance with the pattern. This chain rotated around a cylinder that itself was given quarter turns by a treadle. Besides the enormous simplification that this mechanical invention meant for figure weaving, it had the advantage that designs no longer had to be tied up cord by cord. By an easy exchange of the perforated cards, any design could be woven that was calculated for the number of warps within the particular repeats for which the loom was equipped by its leash and cord setup. Whereas previously, a loom was rigged up cumbersomely for one pattern and was repeatedly used for just the one, a shift from one to another was so easy now that the market became flooded with designs of all kinds. In the struggle for the attention of the buying public, the manufacturers outdid each other with constant changes of design — a situation we are still witnessing today. The modern age of power weaving began in earnest when the Jacquard shedding mechanism was attached to the mechanized loom. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the technical genius of the Western world perfected the loom to the point it has now reached. It operates with the speed and precision that we expect and enjoy in the instruments that serve us. Among the various problems that had to be solved was a self-acting motion to stop the loom should a weft thread break or a new bobbin have to replace one that was used up. Furthermore, ways had to be found to unwind the warp and wind up the woven cloth automatically. An invention was also necessary to provide an instrument that would stretch the warp threads into the exact width — that is, a templet, which would not need adjusting every few inches as is the case in hand weaving. Though it did not take centuries to solve these problems, more than fifty years were needed to develop the necessary contrivances. Further developments concerned themselves with the matter of conserving power in the process of passing the weft from side to side. In the standard loom in use today, it is estimated that at least one-half of the power needed to drive the loom goes into propelling a heavy shuttle, carrying yards and

the loom

17

Plate 118

yards of weft, back and forth with the required speed. In 1844, a John Smith patented a loom that drew the weft thread with needles through the shed. In 1949, a machine was built in the United States based on the same underlying principle of using lightweight weft carriers instead of shuttles. The weft here is not continuous but is just long enough to reach across the fabric and to be turned in at the selvages. The power saved makes it possible to operate this loom two or three times faster than today’s standard looms. This loom has the added advantage of enlarging greatly the range of weft selection beyond the four to six choices ordinarily possible. So far this loom is not in general use, probably due in large part to its high price, and only a few models can be seen at institutes for textile research. Another invention was a loom that operates a selecting system electromagnetically. First experiments with electromagnetic current as a selecting device were made by Eugene Vincenti, who, in 1856, patented a Jacquard selective shedding system governed electromagnetically. Another loom, available today in a narrow width for sample weaving, applies the same principle to a shaft loom — that is, it operates the shaft selection electromagnetically. This loom, too, is at present not in general use, due to its high price, despite its great advantage in regard to the easy change it permits from one weave formation to another. Our machinery has become intricate, our manner of working fast. Yet every age must have felt that way about its achievements, and only looking back does everything that went before seem slow. How slow will we appear some day?

18

on weaving

bibliography Alfred Barlow: The History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and Power. Philadelphia, Henry Carey Baird & Co., 1878. Wendell C. Bennett and Junius B. Bird: Andean Culture History. New York, American Museum of Natural History Handbook Series, 1960. Junius B. Bird: “Before Heddles Were Invented.” Handweaver and Craftsman, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1952. Junius B. Bird and Joy Mahler: “America’s Oldest Cotton Fabrics.” American Fabrics, No. 20, Winter 1951–1952. M.D.C. Crawford: The Conquest of Culture. New York, Greenberg, 1938. M.D.C. Crawford: The Heritage of Cotton. New York and London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924. George T. Emmons: The Chilkat Blanket. (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. III.) New York, The Museum, 1907. Luther Hooper: Hand-Loom Weaving. New York and London, Pitman Publishing Corp., 1920. Luther Hooper: “The Loom and Spindle.” Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report, 1913–1914. “New Textile Machines Are Ahead.” Fortune, February 1949. H. Ling Roth: Studies in Primitive Looms. Halifax, England, Bankfield Museum, 1950. G. Schaefer: “The Principle of the Loom.” Ciba Review, No. 16, 1938. John Watson: The Theory and Practice of the Art of Weaving by Hand and Power. Philadelphia, Henry Carey Baird, 1869. For a comprehensive bibliography on weaving in general and specifically on hand-weaving techniques, see Florence House: Notes on Weaving Techniques.

the loom

19

c ha pt er th ree

Draft Notation

Plates 10, 11, 12

If the construction of a weave consisted of nothing more than the basic weaves, it would be a simple matter to draw the directions for the intersecting of warp and filling in a representational manner, showing the actual interlacing of the threads. It would be possible, also, to indicate by numbers the warp threads alternately raised or lowered, as is frequently done in the case of simple twills. But with the modification and elaboration of weaves, matters get complicated, and a simplified manner of notation is needed. A standard system for drafting weaves has, with slight variations, been generally accepted by industry — in power loom as well as in foot-power loom production. This shorthand of draft notation uses graph paper as a framework. The space between its evenly spaced verticals is understood to indicate the warp threads, that between the horizontals, spaced similarly and intersecting at right angles, the filling threads. The little squares thus formed denote the intersection of warp and weft. A raised warp thread is marked by filling in a square. Thus an empty square means that here the filling is showing. This is all that is needed to give an accurate account of the construction of a weave, although, of course, it does not give a naturalistic representation of it. When the order of the interlacing threads in a weave is made out and recorded, it will be evident of what elements a weave is composed and how many warp and filling threads go into the basic unit of construction. This unit contains all the structural components and is all that is actually required as information about a weave. However, a number of repeats of this unit are

20

usually needed to recognize the scheme of a design. In order to separate the first unit clearly from the repeats, it has to be marked as such. Ordinarily this unit is placed in the lower left-hand corner of the draft and is distinguished either by a different color — red for the unit, blue for the repeat — or, in a black-and-white representation, by a different graphic means. Sometimes the limits of the unit are just marked at the lower left-hand corner on the outside of the draft. The unit should thus be recognizable at first glance and convey immediately the number of warp and filling threads needed for the construction of the weave. With few exceptions, gauze or leno weaves, for example, any weave can be drafted in this manner. Lengthy descriptions of the execution of a weave, giving the threading, the tie-up of the loom, and finally the sequence of weaving operations, can be easily reduced to this simple notation, which gives all the necessary information. The construction of a weave can be understood by reading the draft, instead of having to go through the lengthy process of actual execution. Compared to a laborious realistic portraiture of a weave, showing mainly its appearance, this notation, besides being easier and faster to perform, has the additional advantage of showing clearly those structural elements that do not appear on the surface and can thus be shown naturalistically only by distortion. In historical research work, also, the general adoption of this system of notation, so common in commercial textile work, would mean in many cases a great simplification of recording. It is amazing to see what complicated reporting is often resorted to, instead of transcribing the thread construction into the code of draft writing. If the shorthand of draft notation as discussed here proves to be a useful tool in the construction of weaves, it is equally helpful in the analysis of weaves — that is, in the tracing of a construction already executed. In analyzing a given piece of material, every filling thread or every warp thread is followed through its course of rectangular intersections with the opposite thread system, and every raised warp thread that crosses over a filling thread is marked according to the system of notation. Wherever the piece of cloth that is the subject of analysis can be cut, this process of tracing the course of each thread — usually with the help of a long needle — is greatly simplified. For, by cutting along a filling thread, for instance, the path of the thread can be seen in cross section when looked at from above, and the following filling threads can be lifted out one by one, giving a chance for easier observation of the thread’s intersections than when

draft notation

21

seen on the face of the fabric only. The same holds true when warp threads are traced instead of filling threads. An additional aid in the process of dissecting a cloth is a magnifying glass. Of course, more than the thread construction has to be identified in the analysis of a cloth: the color of each warp and each filling thread has to be marked at the edge of the draft; the twist of the yarn and its color, as well as the material it is made of, have to be indicated; so do the number of warp and filling threads per inch, centimeter, or any given space. When these facts have been established, all the information required for the reproduction of a cloth has been ascertained, for the procedure of weaving is merely a matter of inference.

22

on weaving

c ha pt er fo u r

The Fundamental Constructions The structure of a fabric or its weave — that is, the fastening of its elements of threads to each other — is as much a determining factor in its function as is the choice of the raw material. In fact, the interrelation of the two, the subtle play between them in supporting, impeding, or modifying each other’s characteristics, is the essence of weaving. The fundamental constructions, in common with all fundamental processes, have a universal character and are used today, as they were in our early history, here and everywhere. They show the principle of textile construction clearly. With only a few exceptions, all other constructions are elaborations or combinations of the basic three: the plain weave, the twill, and the satin weave. Of these three, it is the plain weave that embodies the sum total of weaving and therewith reaches back the furthest. All weaving is the interlacing of two distinct groups of threads at right angles. Wherever a fabric is formed in a different manner, we are not dealing with a weaving. Where, for instance, the threads intersect diagonally in relation to the edge of the fabric, or radially from a center, we have a braided material; where only one thread is used to build up the material, we have a knitted or crocheted one; where threads intertwine or loop around each other, we have a lace or a net fabric. The horizontal-vertical intersecting of the two separate systems of thread is of great consequence for the formative side of weaving. The more clearly this original formation is preserved or stressed in the design, the stronger the weaving will be in those characteristics

23

Plates 10, 13

that set it apart from other techniques. Just as a sculpture of stone that contents itself to live within the limits of its stone nature is superior in formal quality to one that transgresses these limits, so also a weaving that exhibits the origin of its rectangular thread-interlacing will be better than one that conceals its structure and tries, for instance, to resemble a painting. Acceptance of limitations, as a framework rather than as a hindrance, is always proof of a productive mind. The threads grouped vertically or lengthwise in the fabric are the warp threads; those running horizontally or crosswise are the filling threads. By collective names they are the warp and the weft, or filling, or woof, or pick. The warp threads are stationary in the process of weaving, while the filling threads are in motion, which indicates that the weaver for the most part deals with the filling threads and which may explain the greater number of terms for them. In the plain weave, this intersecting of warp and weft takes place in the simplest possible manner. A weft thread moves alternately over and under each warp thread it meets on its horizontal course from one side of the warp to the other; returning, it reverses the order and crosses over those threads under which it moved before and under those over which it crossed. This is the quintessence of weaving. The result is a very firm structure that, since it is comparatively unelastic, is strong under tension and also easily preserves its rectangular shape. It has an even, uniform surface, with warp and weft appearing in equal measure and producing the same effect on the front and the back of the fabric. It has a tendency to be stiff and, since the threads here cannot be pushed together very closely, it appears perforated when held against the light. Not more than two warp and two weft threads are necessary for its basic construction, and therefore only the simplest type of equipment is required. It is also a weave that demands less material for its construction and can be produced faster than any other. The usefulness of these characteristics is evident. There is probably no weave produced in more millions of yards the world over, now as in former times, than this plain weave. We recognize it in Egyptian mummy cloth and in our sheets, in unbleached muslin, potato sacks, and sail cloth — in short, wherever strength and a solid surface that does not permit threads to be caught accidentally are required. It is interesting to note that this most practical of all thread constructions is at the same time also the one most conducive to aesthetic elaborations. The fact that warp and weft appear on the surface in equal amounts and

24

on weaving

intersect visibly leads to the use of contrasting materials and colors for them, thereby underlining the original structure of the weave. Emphasizing this structure still further are stripes in either warp or filling and, one step further, checked effects, another of the most typical designs of weaving in a plain weave. But beyond these elemental formative additions, the condensed quality of this weave, its use of only essential components, predisposes it also to be the construction used in work of a pictorial character — that is, in tapestries. Its shortcoming for such a purpose — the necessity of having to deal with a mixture of warp and weft — is overcome by deviating from the balanced proportion of warp and filling and using disproportionately more filling. By spacing the warp so widely that the weft can be beaten together closely, it is possible to cover up the warp entirely; the filling thereby becomes the sole agent of the surface. Gothic tapestries, those of the Renaissance, Aubusson tapestries — all are executed in this simplest of constructions. The old truth applies here again — a process reduced to just the essential allows for the broadest application. Another construction, also fundamental in its simplicity though already one step nearer complexity, is the twill weave. Whereas the plain weave is essentially a balanced weave — that is, warp and weft take an equal part in it and consequently produce the same appearance on the face of the fabric as on the back — the twill can be either a balanced or an unbalanced weave. It is unbalanced when either warp or filling is predominant, and in that case the face and back of the cloth are the reverse of each other. For where the filling covers most of the surface, the back naturally shows for the most part warp, and vice versa. A twill in which the warp prevails on the surface is called accordingly a warp twill, and the one that shows on the face more filling than warp, a filling twill. The principle of construction in a twill is that the successive filling threads move over one warp thread or over a group of warp threads, progressively placing this thread or group of threads one warp thread to the right or left of the preceding one. Thus, in the smallest filling twill, which covers three warp and three filling threads, the first warp thread is raised over the first filling thread, which floats over the second and third warp threads; the second warp thread is raised over the second filling thread, which covers the first and third warp threads; the third warp thread runs over the third filling thread, which now floats over the first and second warp threads. This manner of intersecting warp and weft produces distinct diagonal lines, the characteristic twill

the fundamental constructions

25

Plates 11, 13, 14

lines. In a warp twill of the same size, the proportion of warp and filling on the face of the fabric will be reversed. The first and second warp threads will be raised over the first filling thread, the second and third warp threads over the second filling thread; and finally the first and third warp threads over the third one. The diagonal twill line can, of course, run to either the right or the left. This is of consequence only in regard to the direction of the twist in the yarn used — a slant to the right, for instance, will increase the relief effect of the ridge formed by a left twist warp, while a left slant would decrease it. The angle of the slant varies with the relationship of warp to weft in regard to the size of the threads and the closeness of the setting. If these are equal, the slant will be at an angle of 45 degrees; if the warp is thicker or more closely set than the filling, the incline will be steeper; if it is thinner or more loosely set than the filling, it will be more gradual. Innumerable twills can be designed: either balanced or uneven; either simple, with just one twill line, or compound, with a number of lines. Twills are often written in the form of numbers indicating the warp threads raised or lowered. For instance, 1

3 2

1

would specify an uneven 7-leaf warp twill, in which one warp thread is raised, two are lowered, three are raised, and one is lowered. A balanced twill would read 2

3 2

Plates 12, 15

3

, etc.

Twill weaves, as a result of longer floating threads, are softer and can be woven more closely than plain weaves. They are also more pliable and inclined to give way more easily to diagonal pull, which makes them eminently suited for tailoring and thus for clothing purposes. We know them in the form of denims and other cotton materials for our work clothes and in countless wool tweeds. They were also known in ancient times, and in this hemisphere twills have been unearthed that date back to the Peruvian Mochica period. The satin weave, the third of the fundamental constructions, is believed to have been invented by the Chinese. (Luther Hooper, Hand-Loom Weaving [New York and London, Pitman Publishing Corp., 1920], p. 168.) In some ways it is the opposite of the plain weave. For, if the plain weave is essentially a construction that can only be balanced—that is, can produce only a fabric that is the

26

on weaving

same in front and back—the satin weave can only be unbalanced, can produce only a fabric different on either side, can show only either warp or filling. In contrast also to the plain weave, where the closest intersection of warp and weft is sought, the farthest intersection within a given unit is chosen for a satin weave. The long, floating threads cover the points of intersection of warp and weft and permit the threads to be beaten together closely, so that a uniform, smooth surface is achieved, lacking any obviously visible structural effects. We have found that the plain weave requires two warp and two filling threads for its construction, and the twill weave at least three. The satin weave calls for a minimum of five warp and weft threads. To discover the best position for the points of intersection of warp and filling, technically termed “stitchers,” the unit of threads that is to form the satin is divided into two groups of different size that are larger than one thread, that are not divisible one into the other, and that are not divisible by a common third. A unit of five threads, for example, is divided into one group of two and one of three. After interlacing the first warp thread with the first filling thread, the places for further intersection will be, for every following weft thread, either always two or always three warp threads removed from the preceding intersection. Thus the stitchers for a five-leaf satin will be in the order 1, 3, 5, 2, 4 — that is, the first warp thread intersects with the first weft thread, the third warp thread with the second, and so on. Progressing in the other possible order, the stitchers will be placed in the following arrangement: 1, 4, 2, 5, 3. Every warp thread has to be attached once within the unit to every weft thread, in a position that allows for the widest possible separation of the stitchers. Many satins can be formed by this method. The unit of six threads forms an exception, since it cannot be divided into any groups that comply with the requirements. Advancing in the order 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6 seems possible at first glance, when only the first unit is considered. But the repeat will reveal the defect that the first and the sixth stitchers come to be side by side. By exchanging the last two stitchers, a workable order can be given. Thus, instead of 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6, the progression will now read 1, 3, 5, 2, 6, 4. In larger units, more than two numbers of progression can be found. For instance, the unit of sixteen threads can be divided into groups of three and thirteen, five and eleven, seven and nine, all equally suited to our purpose here. This wide separation between the points of interlacing in the satin weave makes for a very pliable, soft fabric that, in addition, can be highly glossy

the fundamental constructions

27

when executed in a lustrous material because of the homogeneous surface of either warp or weft. The contrast to the plain weave becomes apparent again when we compare the possible functions of the two; for, whereas we considered the plain weave to be the most serviceable construction, the satin weave is a luxurious one. The soft drape, the gloss that usually goes with the weave, and on the negative side, the long floating threads that preclude hard wear predispose it for an extravagant existence. It is a weave made for splendor. We know it in the form of silk satin, used in decorous draperies or, equally decorously, in our clothes of leisure. The innumerable deviations from these three basic weaves show in varying degrees the main characteristics of their lineage, depending on how close or how distant their relationship is.

28

on weaving

c ha pt er fi v e

Modified and Composite Weaves Though elaborations are usually thought to be an advanced stage of work, they are often easy expansions from basic concepts. Intricacy and complexity are not, to my mind, high developments. Simplicity, rather, which is condensation, is the aim and the goal for which we should be heading. Simplicity is not simpleness but clarified vision — the reverse of the popular estimate. If you try to speak or write clearly, you are thought to lack profundity; while the impenetrable verbiage of today’s writing on art, for instance, is respected for the very reason, I suspect, that it is beyond understanding and therefore is believed to be too highly advanced for the unassuming reader’s grasp. All this is to say that what was said about the basic weaves holds in general for the derivatives and the compound weaves, except that the original characteristics may be diluted by some additional ones that might counteract them. Of course, there are also gains somewhat outside the scope of the basic, original weave — for instance, in double weaves based on either the plain weave, the twill, or the satin. Here we have, instead for instance of one plain weave, two, the layers lying one on top of the other. The same holds for twill or satin double weaves, of course. The added feature here, besides doubled strength and warmth, is that a doubled use of color is possible, an interchange from layer to layer, an interpenetration of color areas, which will be discussed later in more detail. It is interesting to note that where the functional aspect of the basic structure is moderated, aesthetic qualities frequently move to the foreground — in fact, they often are the very reason for the structural change.

29

Plates 16, 17

Plate 17

Plates 18, 19, 20, 57

Most of the modified and composite weaves are developments from the three basic weaves. A rib weave is a derivative of the plain weave and is based on the same principle of opposites: the threads that were on top in one shed are down in the next — the essential feature of the plain weave. The rib weave is developed by a shift away from the plain weave’s balanced proportion of warp and weft. By spacing the warp closely and using, for instance, a heavy weft thread, horizontal ribs will be formed, the warp covering the weft. Or the weft may be made to dominate the surface, as in tapestry weaving, but here by having it float successively over several warp threads in regular intervals, thus building up a vertical rib effect. The warp rib or cross rib has ribs in the direction of the weft; the weft rib or long rib has ribs in the warp direction. Numerous elaborations of rib weaves are possible, as are also combinations of warp and weft ribs. Another derivative of the plain weave is the basket weave. It, too, works of course on the principle of opposites. Its characteristic is the use of floating warp and weft threads to form block patterns which, however, lack the firmness of the plain weave. By various combinations of these block patterns, arrangements can be achieved that can even give the optical illusion of space. To give greater firmness to the basket-weave plain weave, thin weft threads can be introduced that will be covered by the heavier pattern wefts of the basket weave. The Colonial American weaves with their innumerable, rich variations, as well as many Swedish and Finnish weaves, are developments of the basket-weave principle. There are a great many elaborations of the twill weaves, with a variety of different names, all sharing the original twill formation of neighboring warp threads tying with successive wefts to the right or left. There are Interlocking Twills, Steep Twills, Reversed Twills, Offset Twills, Herringbone Twills, Undulating Twills, Pointed Twills, Shadow Twills, and a long list of others. The diagonal twill lines are still evident, as is the pliability that is greater here than in plain weave or plain-weave derivations. Also, twills yield to diagonal stretching and therefore are well suited to Occidental ways of tailoring. Notice also that tweeds are twills. Twills can be easily developed once the basic principle is understood, and various methods for such developments have been devised. Though books with hundreds of recipes for them have been published, a twill suited to a specific occasion can be constructed just by the use of some sense. Satin weaves too, of course, have their modifications and elaborations as well as combinations. Again, the original character of the satin construction is

30

on weaving

preserved. Damasks are perhaps the most successful development of the satin weave, though there are also twill damasks. Here, a warp satin is combined with a weft satin or, less strikingly, a warp twill with a weft twill, one forming the ground, the other forming patterns, often of floral design — a favorite for centuries. Since, in satins, the floating warp or weft threads cover either warp or weft more completely than in twill combinations, the pattern appears clearly, and as silk or a fine linen is usually used, a luxurious fabric results. Since, too, larger pattern areas are desirable here than are feasible with the 4-, 8-, 16- , or even 24-harness looms, the Jacquard loom is preferred for damask weaving. Corded weaves belong to another group that is clearly derived from basic constructions, for the raised-rib appearance is the result of a surface weave of plain weave, twill, or satin. In order to produce the corrugated effect, which may be in either warp or weft, threads are left floating at certain intervals and then incorporated again into the weave, allowing an extended surface weave to be pushed tightly to the unwoven section of the resting threads. It is advisable to use two warp beams for these differently engaged threads, which otherwise will easily produce divergent tension. To further increase the three-dimensional effect of the cords, stuffing threads that lie between surface and floats can be added without difficulty. An extension of this type of weave construction is the “Plissé” weave, where a fold in the fabric is achieved by first weaving a section of the chosen weave, then continuing with a section in which part of the warp is floating in back, and then rejoining the first part by pushing the latter section against the already completed part, thus making it hang over instead of merely forming a raised cord in the manner discussed earlier. A group of weaves slightly outside the general line of construction is that of the mock leno weaves. Here the threads of warp as well as weft are grouped in such a manner as to fall together in little bundles, where they act together in one group and are held apart from another group, which acts oppositely. Thus a lacy, open effect results, which may be emphasized by threading the warps in the reed, grouped together in accordance with the draft, where they fall together, and with open spaces left in the reed, where they separate due to the construction. Crepe weaves, too, are developed from the basic weaves, but they differ from the previously discussed constructions by aiming at an appearance that avoids directional patterns or a smooth surface, but rather at one that gives a mottled surface effect. By adding tying points, or stitchers, to an original basic

modified and composite weaves

31

Plate 21

Plates 22, 23, 58

Plate 23

Plate 24

Plate 23

Plate 24

Plates 25, 26

Plates 90, 100

Plates 91, 102

design, a satin or perhaps a twill, or by omitting some stitchers, innumerable crepe weaves can be developed. In fact, it is easy to construct hundreds of them. It is a useful weave suited mainly for clothing. There are innumerable other weave constructions, developed not merely as elaborations of the basic weaves and preserving their original functions, but for further specific functional purposes. There are the back-filling weaves that have as their main intent a heavier, thicker fabric than could be achieved otherwise. As a by-product, such a fabric could have also different weave structures in front and back, as well as, of course, different colors. A backfilling fabric could have a plain-weave face and a twill backing or many other combinations, as long as a balance between the front and back weave is preserved — that is, as long as no problem of different tension between them occurs. One other, less admirable, purpose of the construction is to produce a fabric at less cost by using cheaper yarns in the less-visible back. Another method of producing a heavier fabric than is possible in a single-layered construction is the back-warp weave, which adds warp threads to the back to be interwoven. However, it is a less useful construction than the back-filling one, since the warp threads have to be set very closely and a heavyweight warp thread might cause difficulties in the opening of the shed. Therefore, this weave is usually reserved for medium-weight fabrics. Again, different weaves can be used in front and back, as well as different colors. Double weaves have a special nimbus about them for reasons not clear to me. They are thought to be intricate, hard to grasp, open only to advanced students. To my mind, they are simple to understand and can be handled by anyone with just common sense — which, I admit, sometimes seems rare. Double weaves are fabrics that have two separate layers that can be locked at both sides, at one side, or within the fabric, at any number of places where the design asks for an exchange of top and bottom layers, usually of different colors. There are also triple weaves and quadruple weaves, and multiplelayered fabrics can be constructed, though they are rarely found. In ancient Peru, double weaves in complicated designs were made, and triple weaves have been found, as well as a small quadruple piece. If a highly intelligent people with no written language, no graph paper, and no pencils could manage such inventions, we should be able — easily, I hope — to repeat at least these structures. Double weaves can be woven with as few as four harnesses when both layers are plain weaves: two are designated to operate the warp threads of the

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on weaving

upper layer, two those of the lower one. Usually the first and third threads belong to the upper set, the second and fourth to the lower set. The first weft will cross with the first thread of the upper warp, return as second weft, and cross with the second warp thread — that is, with the first of the lower layer. To do this, warps 1 and 3 of the upper layer have to be lifted out of the way together with number 4, not active now. The third weft now returns to the upper layer and intersects with warp thread 3, thus completing the plainweave unit of the top layer. By returning as weft 4, it crosses under warps 1 and 3 of the upper layer and warp 2 of the lower one and engages now warp 4, thus completing the plain-weave unit of the lower set. This is the complete cycle, forming a double-layered fabric of plain weave closed at both selvages. A three-layered plain-weave material demands six harnesses, a quadruple one eight, two for each layer, while a double weave in a 2/1 twill will need six harnesses, three for each layer. It is easy to devise further possibilities, all of which follow the same reasoning. By changing the sequence of weft operation, a fabric can be made to open at the sides, thus making it possible to weave a fabric that unfolds to twice the width of the warp on the loom, three times the width, or even wider. The procedure here, if it is a plain-weave double weave, is to have the first weft weave the first plain-weave part of the top layer; next, the first part of the lower layer; then complete that layer by weaving the second plain-weave part; and then return to the top layer, completing there the plain-weave unit. Aside from the purpose of producing by this method wide fabrics on narrow looms, weavings of three or more plies are designed in order to enlarge the color exchange of solid color areas in a fabric — a red crossing with a red warp thread, a blue with a blue — instead of having mixed areas where, for instance in plain weave, red crosses blue. One type of weaving not yet discussed is brocade. Brocade weaves are not derived from any basic construction but have surface threads added to a basic weave to enrich the appearance of the fabric. There are warp brocades and weft brocades, both having in common design effects due to floating, additional threads. A similar effect can be produced by embroidery, where threads are also added to a foundation weave. In a brocaded fabric, however, these added threads do not cross from area to area but run strictly parallel to the weft in weft brocade or, in warp brocade, to the warp.

modified and composite weaves

33

Plates 25, 26

c ha pter six

Early Techniques of Thread Interlacing Beginnings are usually more interesting than elaborations and endings. Beginning means exploration, selection, development, a potent vitality not yet limited, not circumscribed by the tried and traditional. For those of us concerned in our work with the adventure of search, going back to beginnings is seeing ourselves mirrored in others’ work, not in the result but in the process. Therefore, I find it intriguing to look at early attempts in history, not for the sake of historical interest, that is, of looking back, but for the sake of looking forward from a point way back in time in order to experience vicariously the exhilaration of accomplishment reached step by step. This is learning. And I try to take my students also on this journey back into early time, to the beginnings of textiles. How did it all begin? There is more than one theory, and, since we do not really know, we may as well speculate. Hides of animals are probably the closest prototype to fabrics. They are flat and pliable and therefore useful in quite specific ways. We can cover ourselves with them, and this second layer of skin gives us protection from cold, sun, and wind. They can shelter us as roofs and walls. They are useful implements for carrying things. When not in use they can be folded — that is, reduced in size — and are miraculous in that respect when contrasted with stone or wood. Perhaps the idea of fabricating a stuff of such extraordinary nature started the work in that direction; perhaps, on the other hand, it all began

34

not imitatively but by someone adding one bit of a soft strip of bark, sinew, vine, or whatever, fastening them together in various ways, experimentally, not aiming for any immediate application. The manner of such fastening leads, of course, to very different results. Here we are right in the midst of techniques, and it may be worthwhile taking them up one by one. Some of the earliest mummy wrappings, reported to be five thousand years old, were excavated recently by Frédéric Engel in Paracas, Peru. (See Journal de la Societé des Américainistes, Vol. 49, 1960, pp. 7–36.) They are of rushes tied together in the manner of twining — that is, stiff materials were connected by means of a softer one to form a mat pliable in one direction, stiff in another. They are closer perhaps to basketry than to fabrics as we usually understand them. In fact, baskets made in a similar method were found in the same burial. Twining we will encounter again as a technique evolving into weaving, so it appears. Here, then, we have one of the origins of textile techniques, though we are not yet dealing with fabrics per se. Basketry is thought by some to be a direct ancestor of weaving. Our conjectures can lead us, however, in another direction also, perhaps closer to the main line of textile development. We may assume that only short ends of soft, pliable longitudinal materials were available, and that thus a process that attached short bits of it to each other to form a flat expanse surely must have come early in the history of fabric construction. The result will of necessity be an open, netlike fabric with characteristics far removed from those of hides, for instance, which are in contrast compact, solid, heavy, and opaque. With the usefulness of such a lightweight and pliable fabric established for fishing, carrying, and covering the hair (early examples of hairnets have been found in Peru), a desire for lengthening the elements of construction must have arisen, which eventually led to the spinning of fibers. With long, flexible ends to work with, further methods of construction evolved. There was looping in its various forms, netting, twining, all accomplishing, with variations, the same end: a flat, quasi-two-dimensional, pliable expanse of material. So basic was this newly fabricated structure that “material” still today is the name for it, as is “fabric.” Already early in our history it added to nature’s objects something we may think of as a new species in the realm of things. Knotting, netting, and looping — all interrelated techniques — require hardly any tools except, perhaps, a stick as a bobbin to carry the now practically endless spun element of construction, the yarn, and perhaps another

early techniques of thread interlacing

35

Plates 27, 35, 46, 51

Plate 48

Plates 28, 33, 47

stick as a gauge to assure uniformity in working. Each of these techniques produces open fabrics. (For more details see Raoul d’Harcourt, Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1962.) Looping and also, later, crocheting and knitting add elasticity to a fabric and are single-element techniques using only the one continuous length of yarn for construction. Crocheting and knitting are believed to have been invented by the Arabs. The oldest specimens were found in Egyptian graves of the Arab period and are not earlier than the seventh or eighth century a.d. (See Kristin Bühler, “Classification of Basic Techniques,” Ciba Review, No. 63, 1948.) These fabrics are highly pliable and light in weight because comparatively little material goes into their making. They can be given any shape, and their size is not held to any limits except those of reasonable usefulness. When experimenting with such basic methods of construction today, we come to realize the essential qualities of textiles and begin to see present-day procedures, with their emphasis on time-saving devices, in one long perspective. Also, we may find ourselves examining loose ends of developments and occasionally adjusting them to today’s purposes, sometimes by nothing more than a change of proportions, using perhaps cord instead of thread. Compared to hides — always limited in size and always of unpractical shape — these textile inventions opened vast new horizons. They now made possible long lengths of regularly shaped material. Density of construction must soon have arisen as a new aim, combining the newly won traits with the desirable ones given by nature. A drastic departure from single-element techniques came with the introduction of two separate thread systems, one stationary, the other mobile. An early form of working with these was twining. The vertical threads were brought into tension — actually, this is the main function of any loom — by suspending them from an upper bar and attaching weights to them at the bottom, or by stretching them over a second, lower bar. A doubled weft thread then crossed at right angles these threads — we now can call them warps — from side to side, locking between twists of its two strands one or more warp threads. Fabrics of this kind, excavated by Junius Bird on the northern coast of Peru and dating back as far as 2500 b.c., show knots at the selvages after each crossing due, I believe, to the still short length of yarn then available. These knots occur also in pieces from the same site that are already actually woven. (See Junius Bird and Joy Mahler, “America’s

36

on weaving

Oldest Fabrics,” American Fabrics, No. 20, Winter 1951–52; see also Junius Bird, Andean Culture History, New York, American Museum of Natural History Handbook Series No. 15, 1960.) At even such an early stage, actually a preceramic age, intricate twined structures were developed by transposition of selected warps, thereby attaining subtle, spatial effects. These fabrics are warp faced, the twined wefts widely spaced, holding the closely set warp firmly in place. It is an efficient technique, though it was eventually overtaken by that of weaving, which, as later became evident, proved to be still more effectual, more open to the time-saving devices that were eventually to lead to its mechanization. Still earlier than these ancient American fabrics, in fact the earliest fabrics found to date, are those excavated as recently as 1961 by Hans Helback at Catal Huyuk in ancient Anatolia. According to the C-14 dating method, they date back as far as 6500 b.c. (See Archaeology, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1963, pp. 39–45.) The photographs show knotting and also, according to the author, twining, though this is barely discernible. These fabrics are far less developed than those discussed earlier. Twining, working as we have seen with a double weft thread, produces a fabric somewhat stiff and heavy. It has, however, an additional feature, that of spacing the warp evenly between the weft twists. By using heavier or finer yarn, this spacing can be adjusted, due to the resultant bulkier or smaller twists separating the warp threads. In fact it is a technique at home on all continents, according to Dr. Bühler-Oppenheim. (See Ciba Review, October 1947.) Twining is also the technique used in the Chilkat ceremonial blankets of the northern Pacific coast of the North American continent. But here the weft covers the warp completely and carries all the design elements. Once work had begun on a vertical thread system intersected rectangularly by another one, the simplified interlacing of a single weft that picks up alternate warp threads and reverses the selection with every further crossing was, it seems, a natural next step. It was an important next step, for this, now, is weaving. The advantage over twining is obvious: only half the amount of yarn is needed for each passage from side to side, and the result is a lighter fabric. Also, the process is far quicker. Saving time and labor, then as surely as now, is a proof of intelligence and a crucial factor in productivity. (There are those who believe that so-called primitive societies had no sense of the pressure of time as we experience it today. However, I have only to look into my icebox to realize what a present of time it makes me continuously by keeping me from struggling for food every day for endless days.)

early techniques of thread interlacing

37

Plate 71

Plate 30, 36

At first the interlacing, now established as weaving, seems to have been timid, used only after a row or more of twining or between rows of twining. At its beginning, a work had thus been given an even spacing, and this was reestablished as the work progressed. This twined beginning is found in many of even the elaborately woven pieces of later periods. It is a technique used today mainly with stiff fibers, for window shades, mats, etc. — that is, it is no longer in the main stream of textile development. In fact, it ceased to be a very long time ago. Nevertheless, it is, I believe, worthwhile to experiment with it for specified uses that may come up, or just for the sake of strengthening an understanding of structural textile processes. The advantage of weaving becomes clear now. The weft, here a single thread, can be packed closely, resulting in a comparatively tight yet light fabric. On the other hand, it confines the resultant material to rectangularity; the width limited by the reach of the weaver’s hands in inserting the weft, the length limited only by the amount of warp material that can be carried on the warp beam and of cloth that can be held by the cloth beam. This type of interlacing proved suited to devices such as the heddle, later the treadle, which gradually made possible ever-increasing speed and with it an unimagined abundance of fabrics, both in regard to sheer quantity and also in regard to variety. Weaving outstripped all other textile techniques for thousands of years, but today we may begin to wonder whether it in turn may not be overtaken by other methods moving to the foreground, such as knitting, perhaps, or a process of pouring resembling paper-making. Plaiting, or braiding, is another early technique, the term “braiding” referring usually to narrow bands of fabric. It is still with us today, used in the fabrication of floor-mats for instance, or braids of course. It is a multipleelement technique, though not of the warp-weft system kind, for here warp turns into weft and becomes warp again in a continuous exchange as the threads interlace themselves. In Peru, braids of amazingly intricate planning and great beauty have been excavated, which testify to the specific textile involvement of that culture. (For a detailed analysis of braiding technique see Raoul d’Harcourt, Ciba Review, Vol. 12, No. 136, February 1960; and, by the same author, Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques.) Pile fabrics also had an early beginning. They reached a high point with the weaving of rugs — that is, of heavyweight materials — in the East, mainly of course in Persia. The simplicity of the technique allows for greatest freedom of design, a freedom far beyond that of other weaving techniques. The

38

on weaving

Persian and Turkish knots of which the rugs are made are short ends of wool looped around two adjacent warp threads and pulled between them to the front. After a row of knots has been inserted across the whole width, one or two wefts in plain weave are introduced. The knots and also the wefts are beaten sectionally into place with a heavy, forklike tool. After several rows have been completed, the surface is sheared. Since each single knot can be of a different color, the design possibilities of pile fabrics are practically unlimited. A pointillist design would perhaps come closest to the technical potential, though it would of course be very time-consuming. Largely as a result of this consideration, today’s handknotted rugs are based on designs that include large flat areas and thus make only a limited use of this ingeniously simple invention. Velvets, of course, are also pile fabrics, though here the warp forms the pile. They are a late, highly sophisticated development, and they can be made only on specially equipped looms. Since steps toward mechanization often seem to bring limitations as well as advantages, we should look back at the regularly shaped fabric brought about by weaving to see if anything has been lost on the way. Early practices, as well as practices still in use in the hand-weaving areas of regions not yet affected by Western industrialization or Western concepts, include the shaping of weavings. There are ancient pre-Columbian shirts that are, by adding or dropping warp threads, woven wider at the shoulders than at the waist (the pre-Conquest version of our padded-shoulder look). There are shirts from present-day Guatemala that are woven with wider-spaced wefts at the waist, to make them fold more easily under a belt. And there are the shaped shoulder-scarfs called quechquemitl, a pre-Conquest type of garment, from the states of Puebla and Hidalgo, Mexico. In the process of construction, these are given a three-dimensional form by an intricate manner of weaving around a corner. (See Bodil Christensen, “Otomi Looms and Quechquemitls from San Pablito, State of Puebla, and from Santa Ana Hueytlalpan, State of Hidalgo, Mexico,” Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Division of Historical Research, No. 78, January 20, 1947.) Today this problem of shaping, usually linked to clothing, is effectively solved by the process of knitting, which is moving more and more to the foreground. Our nylons, our underwear, even furlike fabrics are now produced by that process. Besides the advantage of shaping, the time-consuming

early techniques of thread interlacing

39

Plates 31, 99

Plate 34

Plate 32

warp preparation of weaving is here eliminated, and the elasticity of the product suits our present-day needs better in many cases than the stable fabrics resulting from the horizontal-vertical construction of woven materials. These usually demand laborious tailoring or complicated draping to give them shape. Furthermore, our new synthetic materials can now be molded in some cases and are moving us further toward fabrics shaped in the process of production rather than afterward. Thus, with a long glance backward we can discern the rise of the technique of weaving, and with a long glance forward we may see it perhaps dimming in its dominance.

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on weaving

c ha pt er sev en

Interrelation of Fiber and Construction Every fabric is mainly the result of two elements: the character of the fibers used in the thread construction — that is, the building material — and the construction, or weave, itself. The intermediate step of spinning the fibers into thread also plays a part in determining the product, as does the “finishing” of the fabric, which is gaining increasing importance today. But the dominant conditioning factors are, perhaps not for so very much longer, the character of the raw material and that of the weave. The fibers, which are the raw material, may be soft and spun into a soft thread and still may be turned into a stiff material as a result of the weave. Or the weave may make for pliability despite a nonpliant fiber or a hard-spun thread, to give some examples of counteraction. The important fact implied is the influence of one upon the other, the modulation each undergoes through the agency of the other, the tuning up or down of some inherent qualities, or their alteration. For instance, the traits of linen, a somewhat hard and very sturdy fiber, will be underlined in a plain weave, which tends to produce a somewhat stiff and very firm fabric. In fact, the two correspond so well that the plain weave is also called the linen weave. Cotton, more common than linen and used in manifold ways, becomes in a plain weave one of the most useful and versatile materials we have. Less outspoken in character than linen, softer, fuzzier, less moisture-absorbent, more dust-catching — to name a few of its qualities — cotton is, like any less clear-cut character, all the more adaptable. Wool in a plain weave loses some of its distinction. The main advantages

41

of wool, its virtues as a good insulator and thus sought for warmth, are not supported in a construction that does not allow for a sufficient number of threads in a given space to form a thick material. In the plain weave, wool also becomes harder than it is by nature. On the other hand, it will wear well in this somewhat open weave, since all threads are closely tied in and are prevented from being caught accidentally. Out of the interaction between silk, the softest of fibers, and a plain weave, the stiffest of the basic constructions, comes taffeta —a silk become stiff. In the combination of linen and the plain weave, we had the mutual supporting of common traits; in the combination of silk and the plain weave, we have a clash of traits producing a material with new and distinctive characteristics. So striking is this new combination that the plain weave acquires still another name when used with silk: the taffeta weave. Every weave has, of course, a material that seems best suited to its special features, or, the other way around, every fiber has a weave in which its specialty seems to be exhibited most advantageously. Wool, for instance, which suffers to some degree when used in a plain weave, profits from a twill weave. The twill strikes us as most suitable for clothing purposes, and so does wool. A twill forms a much more pliable material than does the plain weave, and thus the softness of the wool will be accentuated. Also, the more widely spaced intersections of warp and weft allow the threads to be set more closely, as we noted earlier, and thus make for a heavier material, increasing the wool’s capacity to preserve warmth. One reason for not using a satin weave with wool — a combination that would also make for a soft, pliable, and closely packed material — is that here the threads float over too many threads of either warp or weft to sustain hard wear; they may easily be snagged and form ungainly loops on the surface. The twill weave strikes just the right balance of pliability and practicality for wear. Wool in a twill weave is the classical combination we know as tweeds. Twills in cotton form the washable materials of our work clothes — of our overalls for instance — the firmly packed fabrics embodying the typical characteristics of both the cotton and the twill. It is no striking combination, but it is suitable enough for many purposes. Twill woven in silk is another case of hybrid traits. It results in a material that takes advantage neither of the special quality of silk nor of that of the twill weave. The outcome, however, is a most useful fabric, though one we do not boast about: silk linings for coats, suits, etc. It is softer than taffeta, not as impractical as satin, and smoother than a twill woven in any other material. Again we see the twill appearing in our clothing material.

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on weaving

Other fibers, other constructions, and their various combinations enlarge the series of these examples to the seemingly endless range of our fabrics. With the development of modern chemistry, a group of completely new fibers has been added to the few that have been in use for hundreds and even thousands of years. These new synthetic fibers introduce new combinations of properties and thus are drastically changing our materials as we have known them. One important aspect of this new development is that, since the preliminary stage of producing a raw material having the desired qualities of the final product already partially specifies the fabric, the manner of weaving this raw material is growing less important. Chemistry is affecting our materials in still another important way. While the creation of new fibers determines a fabric in large part before it is ever woven, the creation of new finishes influences our fabrics equally after they are woven. These after-treatments and coatings bring about changes as radical as those brought about by the new fibers, and they, too, reduce the weight of the influence of the thread construction. Up to now, the unique characteristics of a fabric have been determined by the interaction of fiber and weave, each of more or less equal importance, but today we see an increasing shift toward having the ultimate characteristics determined by the nature of the fibers themselves or by modifications brought about through the finishing process, either before or after the fabric is woven. The tendency to pay less and less attention to thread constructions did not set in, however, with the influence of chemistry on the development of textiles. With the coming of mass production, which is synonymous with quick production, simple constructions naturally took over the field, since they are best suited to a manufacture that aims mainly at quantity, speed, and reduction of cost. The reason that surface effects in textiles today are produced so preponderantly by the effect of the yarns themselves rather than by structural means, in machine-woven as well as in hand-woven textiles, most likely has a source in this development. The general decline in the inventive use of elements of construction so commonly found today as compared to other periods is thus explained easily enough. There is no reason, however, why new contributions to textile development should not come from this side too. Developments seem to come about inharmoniously; we grow a bit here, and then a bit there — so why be impatient?

interrelation of fiber and construction

43

c ha pt er eight

Tactile Sensibility All progress, so it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere. We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation — the reading and writing public of today is enormous. But we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense. No wonder a faculty that is so largely unemployed in our daily plodding and bustling is degenerating. Our materials come to us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread. No need to get our hands into the dough. No need — alas, also little chance — to handle materials, to test their consistency, their density, their lightness, their smoothness. No need for us, either, to make our implements, to shape our pots or fashion our knives. Unless we are specialized producers, our contact with materials is rarely more than a contact with the finished product. We remove a cellophane wrapping, and there it is — the bacon, or the razor blade, or the pair of nylons. Modern industry saves us endless labor and drudgery; but, Janus-faced, it also bars us from taking part in the forming of material and leaves idle our sense of touch and with it those formative faculties that are stimulated by it. We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided. We are apt today to overcharge our gray matter

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with words and pictures — that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, preformulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch off our creative impulse, such as unformed material, material “in the rough.” Concrete substances and also colors per se, words, tones, volume, space, motion — these constitute raw material; and here we still have to add that to which our sense of touch responds — the surface quality of matter and its consistency and structure. The very fact that terms for these tactile experiences are missing is significant. For too long, we have made too little use of the medium of tactility. Matière is the word now usually understood to mean the surface appearance of material, such as grain, roughness or smoothness, dullness or gloss, etc., qualities of appearance that can be observed by touch and are consequently not concerned with lightness or darkness. There seems to be no common word for the tactile perception of such properties of material, related to inner structure, as pliability, sponginess, brittleness, porousness, etc. Surface quality of material — that is, matière — being mainly a quality of appearance, is an aesthetic quality and therefore a medium of the artist; while quality of inner structure is, above all, a matter of function and therefore the concern of the scientist and the engineer. Sometimes material surface together with material structure are the main components of a work — in textile works, for instance, specifically in weavings or, on another scale, in works of architecture. Parallel to this overlapping of outer and inner characteristics in a work is the overlapping of artistic, scientific, and technological interests on the part of the weaver or the architect. The pendulum of their work swings, from art to industrial science. Structure, as related to function, needs our intellect to construct it or, analytically, to decipher it. Matière, on the other hand, is mainly nonfunctional, nonutilitarian, and in that respect, like color, it cannot be experienced intellectually. It has to be approached, just like color, nonanalytically, receptively. It asks to be enjoyed and valued for no other reason than its intriguing performance of a play of surfaces. But it takes sensibility to respond to matière, as it does to respond to color. Just as only a trained eye and a receptive mind are able to discover meaning in the language of colors, so it takes these and in addition an acute sensitivity to tactile articulation to discover meaning in that of matière. Thus the task today is to train this sensitivity in order to regain a faculty that once was so naturally ours.

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Plates 37–40

Plate 43

If we want to concentrate, then, on this segment of our work — that is, tactility — it is better to put on blinders and exclude what might distract us: considerations of color and inner structure. We will try to approach material with just this in mind: to discover its inherent surface quality or the one we might be able to give to it directly by working it or indirectly by influencing it, for instance, through contrast with neighboring materials. We will look around us and pick up this bit of moss, this piece of bark or paper, these stems of flowers, or these shavings of wood or metal. We will group them, cut them, curl them, mix them, finally perhaps paste them, to fix a certain order. We will make a smooth piece of paper appear fibrous by scratching its surface, perforating it, tearing it, twisting it, or we will try to achieve the appearance of fluffy wool by using feathery seeds. What we are doing can be as absorbing as painting, for instance, and the result can be, like a painting, an active play of areas of different complexion. We are here revitalizing our tactile sense and are not dealing with real weaving. Now, since our interest is textile form and not the freer form of the painter, we will have to be aware of those conditions that will make of our surfaces textile surfaces. If we try to have a rhythm in them of horizontals, of verticals, of horizontals and verticals, or of staggered diagonals, we will arrive at results that resemble actual textiles, for the dominant textile elements are present: the straight lines of the directions and the surface activity. Color enters in at this point only as a by-product — since of course nothing is colorless — not as a focal point. Any color effect is, for the moment, incidental, not intentional. We will learn to use grain and gloss, smoothness, roughness, the reliefquality of combined heavy and fine material — those elements of form that belong to the aesthetic side of tactile experience — and will find them equally as important as areal divisions and color. Our concentration in this direction will serve two purposes: first, the important activating of our latent perceptivity of matière; second, the gaining of a medium suited to demonstrate, in advance of any actual execution, how a proposed design will look in its tactile properties, which are difficult to show by drawing or painting: a tactile blueprint. We will have learned to think of surface characteristics as means fully as expressive as line and color. We will also have become conscious of this medium as a distinctive textile trait. If a sculptor deals mainly with volume, an architect with space, a painter with color, then a weaver deals primarily with tactile effects. But, as was said earlier,

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qualities of the inner structure are as much part of a textile as are effects of outer tactile surface. The structure of a weaving, as well as the fibers chosen for the work, can bring about an interesting surface. There is an intricate interplay between the two. A knowledge of textile construction is thus essential for matière effects, as it is for the organization of a weaving as a whole. Our experiments in surface effects are therefore to be understood only as exercises to increase our awareness of surface activities, since the actual work of weaving is only in part concerned with the epidermis of the cloth. The inner structure together with its effects on the outside are the main considerations. Embroidery, on the other hand, is a working of just the surface, since it does not demand that we give thought to the engineering task of building up a fabric. For this very reason, however, it is in danger of losing itself in decorativeness; for the discipline of constructing is a helpful corrective for the temptation to mere decoration. Our experience of gaining a representational means through the use of different surface qualities leads us to the use of illusions of such qualities graphically produced, though not by the means of representational graphic —that is, the modulated line. Drawing or print that shows hatching or stippling, rippled or curled lines, etc., and thus has a structural appearance, can be used to produce, if not actual tactile surfaces, the illusion of them. The tactile-textile illusions produced on the typewriter may illustrate this point. These varied experiments in articulation are to be understood not as an end in themselves but merely as a help to us in gaining new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language.

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Plates 41, 42

c ha pter nine

Tapestry Tapestry weaving is a form of weaving that reaches back to the earliest beginnings of thread interlacing, is still with us today, and may have a future noteworthy in its promise. Taken in its widest meaning, the term encompasses the various techniques that can be used to mark off different areas of color and surface treatment from each other in the woven plane. In a narrower sense, the term refers to a technique of weaving, or variation of it, where a weft thread, covering the warp completely, passes only over the surface of those sections of the weaving that are to be built of it. The thread then interlocks at the borderlines, either with neighboring weft threads that meet it or with a warp thread, before turning back, after a change of shed, into its own field. It is a form of weaving that is pictorial in character, in contrast to pattern weaving, which deals with repeats of contrasting areas. It works with forms meaningful both in themselves and through their relatedness within the pictorial organization. The variform elements and their free replacement within the limits of a given design demand the greatest possible freedom of the structural scheme; in fact, they demand such independence from mechanization of the weaving process that hardly any of the time-saving inventions of the past hundreds of thousands of years of textile history can be utilized in this work. It is artwork, and, as in other plastic arts, it demands the most direct — that is, the least impeded — response of material and technique to the hand of the maker, the one who here transforms matter into meaning.

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If we think of a tapestry as an articulation in terms of forms made of threads, examples of such work go back to the earliest experiments in cloth construction. In fact, it seems as if the emerging awareness of a fabric’s usefulness, when linked with the increased ease of its fabrication, tended to dilute its magic potentiality as an art medium. Throughout the centuries, the use of threads in the language of form has given way more and more to their use in service of the practical. The utilitarian side of a fabric’s character so powerfully dominates our estimates of it today that we easily appraise even a tapestry — that is, a woven picture — in terms of its possible practical advantages before recognizing its merit as a formulation in pictorial terms — that is, as a work dealing with form per se. Since we know already that only the most versatile principle of fabric construction can be used to build varied forms in varied placements in varied colors and surface treatments, we must look for the most basic technique. For, with every time-saving device that helped toward faster, and therefore increased, production, the necessary mechanization of a specific operation limited the range of the process in general. The most fundamental thread construction, of course, is the plain weave: the alternate interlacing of warp and weft threads. But whereas this construction is based on a balanced distribution of warp and weft and serves today to produce our basic utilitarian fabric — namely, our millions of yards of muslin — tapestry weaving is based on an off-balance distribution — that is, a widely spaced warp covered by the weft. As noted earlier, it has the added distinction that the weft does not travel from selvage to selvage but moves only within the specific areas of color or surface treatment to which it belongs. It is the manner of the interlocking of the wefts at the turning points or at their turn around a warp thread that differentiates the various tapestry techniques from each other and thereby affects the formal structure of the design. One of the earliest pictorial works made of threads is a weaving in which floating warp threads set in a plain-weave field form the design. It was excavated in 1946 by Junius Bird, Curator of Archaeology of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, at a site in northern Peru where he found textiles dating back to 2500 b.c. It shows a bird that is thought out in regard to form and structure with superior intelligence. We easily forget the amazing discipline of thinking that man had already achieved four thousand years ago. Wherever meaning has to be conveyed by means of form alone, where, for instance, no written language exists to impart descriptively

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Plates 64–68

Plate 69

Plate 70 Plates 78, 79, 80

Plate 101

such meaning, we find a vigor in this direct, formative communication often surpassing that of cultures that have other, additional methods of transmitting information. Today, words generally carry by far the greatest load of our expressive manifestations. Along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning. In Peru, where no written language in the generally understood sense had developed even by the time of the Conquest in the sixteenth century, we find — to my mind not in spite of this but because of it — one of the highest textile cultures we have come to know. Other periods in other parts of the world have achieved highly developed textiles, perhaps even technically more intricate ones, but none has preserved the expressive directness throughout its own history by this specific means. In this light, we may reevaluate what we have been made to think of as the high points of the art of weaving: the famous great tapestries of the Gothic, the Renaissance, the Baroque; the precious brocades and damasks from the Far East; the Renaissance fabrics. Tremendous achievements in textile art that they are, they play first of all the role of monumental illustrations or have decorative supporting parts to play. They are responsible, I think, for textiles being relegated to the place of a minor art. But regardless of scale, small fragment or wall-size piece, a fabric can be great art if it retains directness of communication in its specific medium. This directness of communication presupposes the closest interaction of medium and design. A painted face obeys other laws of formation than a woven face, and the more clearly the process relates to the form, the stronger the resultant impact will be. Much of the potency of textile art has been lost during centuries of efforts to produce woven versions of paintings, often based on cartoons of the great painters of the past — on Raphael’s, for instance. But trespassing into another art form, however great that form may be, does not necessarily bring forth great art works. On the contrary, the original concept as well as the transposition suffers by the very fact of indirectness. This does not mean that no great tapestries have been created in the Gothic or later periods. The Unicorn Tapestries surely are great works of art, and they are truly weaverly in their components. But many of the large wall-size hangings in our museums are not as great as their size or their placement may encourage us to believe. And a number of present-day efforts on the part of those trying to revive a declining tradition are misdirected because, again, they turn to those outside the field to excite new vitality where work has grown dull.

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Examples are the work of the famous French tapestry workshops that today are producing technically expert pieces that are often, however, of mainly decorative value. Only in exceptional cases, for instance, in the examples illustrated here, where artists worked mainly with flat areas, are they works of art. Works of art, to my mind, are the ancient Peruvian pieces, preserved by an arid climate and excavated after hundreds and even thousands of years. There are those, large or small, of the Tiahuanaco period, for instance — tapestries in the pictorial as well as the technical sense — showing the deities of their Pantheon, or works from other periods, full of the life of their world. There are also the highly intelligent and often intricate inventions of lines or interlocking forms. Their personages, animals, plants, step-forms, zigzags, whatever it is they show, are all conceived within the weaver’s idiom. Where clear outlines are wanted, the threads are maneuvered into position to do this, sometimes in surprising and ingenious ways varying in inventiveness from piece to piece. A unique method, for instance, is that of interlocking not only the weft but the warp itself. Where relief effects are believed to strengthen the presentation, they are added and worked out imaginatively and skillfully, as are other desirable supports. Of infinite phantasy within the world of threads, conveying strength or playfulness, mystery or the reality of their surroundings, endlessly varied in presentation and construction, even though bound to a code of basic concepts, these textiles set a standard of achievement that is unsurpassed. Coptic weavings, of course, also belong among inspired works in textiles, and by some they are considered to head the list. They are developed from the basic weaving structures, and thus the figures preserve the essential weaving formation. There is often in them a truly textile juxtaposition of flat and fuzzy areas. However highly developed they are, though, their more limited scope becomes apparent when they are compared with the more adventurous use of threads in the ancient American pieces. A technique that has been used in the Near East and Far East is Soumak. By wrapping a weft thread around one or two warp threads, possibly changing colors as it crosses from selvage to selvage and reversing the direction of wrapping on the return trip, a flat, ribbed, close, heavy fabric can be produced, suited for pictorial textiles. There are, of course, many high points in the art of weaving, in many periods and many places, that could be cited as examples of the successful interaction of medium and form. I will be accused of crass one-sidedness in

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Plates 105, 107, 108, 109 Plates 85–98, 102

Plate 68

Plates 75–83

Plates 31, 72

Plate 103

my feeling of awe for the textile products of Peru, which I advance as the most outstanding examples of textile art. But it is here, I believe, that we can learn most. It is here we can learn that playful invention can be coupled with the inherent discipline of a craft. Our playfulness today often loses its sense of direction and becomes no more than a bid for attention, rather than a convincing innovation. Limitlessness leads to nothing but formlessness, a melting into nowhere. But it is form — whatever form it may be — that is, I feel, our salvation. At present we are still groping. The efforts of weavers in the direction of pictorial work have only in isolated instances reached the point necessary to hold our interest in the persuasive manner of art. Experimental — that is, searching for new ways of conveying meaning — these attempts to conquer new territory even trespass at times into that of sculpture. In our time, though, and for some time to come, threads can, I believe, serve as an expressive medium. And the practical aspect of the nomadic character of things made of threads supports that belief. We move more often and always faster from place to place, and we will turn to those things that will least hinder us in moving. Just as our clothes are getting lighter and are increasingly geared to movement, so also will it be with other things that are to accompany us. And if these include a work of art that is to sustain our spirits, it may be that we will take along a woven picture as a portable mural, something that can be rolled up for transport. The Far East, of course, had this idea already long ago in the form of scrolls. Perhaps we can find for it our own form.

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c ha pt er t en

Designing as Visual Organization It is safe, I suppose, to assume that today most if not all of us have had the experience of looking down from an airplane onto this earth. What we see is a free flow of forms intersected here and there by straight lines, rectangles, circles, and evenly drawn curves — that is, by shapes of great regularity. Here we have, then, natural and man-made forms in contradistinction. And here before us we can recognize the essence of designing, a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature’s secretive and complex working. Or on a beach, we may find a button, a bottle, a plank of wood, immediately recognizable as “our” doing, belonging to our world of forms and not to that which made the shells, the seaweed, and the undulated tracings of waves on sand. Also we can observe the counterplay of the forming forces: the sea slowly grinding an evenly walled piece of glass, foreign to it in shape and substance, into a multiform body suitable for adoption into its own orbit of figuration. On the other hand, we see the waves controlled, where dams and dikes draw a rigid line between land and water. To turn from “looking at” to action: we grow cabbages in straight rows and are not tempted by nature’s fanciful way of planting to scatter them freely about. We may argue that sometimes we follow her method and plant a bush here and another there, but even then we “clear” the ground. Always, though sometimes in a way that is roundabout and apparent only as an underlying scheme of composition, it is clarity that we seek. But when the matter of

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Plate 44

usefulness is involved, we plainly and without qualification use our characteristics: forms that, however far they may deviate in their final development, are intrinsically geometric. If, then, it appears that our stamp is or should be an immediate or implicit lucidity, a considered position, a reduction to the comprehensible by reason or intuition in whatever we touch (confusion always gets a negative rating), we have established a basis for designing — designing in any field. From city planning to the planning of a house or a road, from the composing of music to the formulation of a law, the weaving of a fabric, or the painting of a picture — behind the endless list of things shaped is a work of clarification, of controlled formulation. By using the term “designing” for all these varied ways of pre-establishing form, we are, of course, doing some violence to the word. Designing usually means “giving shape to a useful object.” We do not speak of designing a picture or a concerto, but of designing a house, a city, a bowl, a fabric. But surely these can all be, like a painting or music, works of art. Usefulness does not prevent a thing, anything, from being art. We must conclude, then, that it is the thoughtfulness and care and sensitivity in regard to form that makes a house turn into art, and that it is this degree of thoughtfulness, care, and sensitivity that we should try to attain. Culture, surely, is measured by art, which sets the standard of quality toward which broad production slowly moves or should move. For we certainly realize that there are no exclusive materials reserved for art, though we are often told otherwise. Neither preciousness nor durability of material are prerequisites. A work of art, we know, can be made of sand or sound, of feathers or flowers, as much as of marble or gold. Any material, any working procedure, and any method of production, manual or industrial, can serve an end that may be art. It is interesting to see how today’s artists, for example our sculptors, are exploring new media and are thereby fundamentally changing the sculptural process from the traditional method of cutting away to one of joining. They are giving us, instead of massive contour, exposed structure; instead of opaqueness, transmission of light. Obviously, then, regardless of the material and the method of working it, designing is or should be methodical planning — whether of simple or intricately organized forms — and if done imaginatively and sensitively, designing can become art. Let us pursue this matter of designing a little further, now that we have established in our mind where its beginning lies and where its ultimate goal.

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Since our concern here is to explore the process of designing and not to analyze the design done, we should try to put ourselves in the position of the “doer,” the one who is making a thing new in form. It may appear as though I am addressing myself now only to professionals. But though I know that designing takes practical knowledge of the work involved, still I am much aware that the dividing line between the trained and the untrained becomes blurred when both are facing the new. For anyone who is making something that previously did not exist in this form is, at that point, of necessity an amateur. How can he know how this thing is done that never has been done before? Every designer, every artist, every inventor or discoverer of something new is in that sense an amateur. And to explore the untried, he must be an adventurer. For he finds himself alone on new ground. He is left to his own devices and must have imagination and daring. All decisions here are his own, and only he is responsible. But though it is he who is in charge, he feels himself to be only an intermediary who is trying to help the not-yet-existent turn into reality. Standing between the actual and that which may be, the conscientious designer, as I see it, seeks to forego his own identity in order to be able more impartially to interpret the potential. For the less he himself, his subjectivity, stands in the way of the object that is to take form, the more it will have “objective” qualities and thereby will also take on a more lasting character than it otherwise could. And just as concern with material and method of treatment engages his conscious mind and frees the formative energies that we recognize when crystallized as ideas, so also, and to the same end, does the tête-à-tête with the still-amorphous absorb his self-awareness. Let me illustrate my point with a specific design project, a textile problem in our case. To be more easily understood, it will be one of modest scope. Nevertheless, I hope it will be possible to trace the various steps involved in its realization and thereby to have a look at some of the facets of this phenomenon that is designing. Let us assume that the task is to design a wall-covering material, quite specifically one suited for museum walls — that is, a material for a specific practical use. As conscientious designers in our passive role, we will let the fabric-to-be specify its own future characteristics, such as perhaps being dustrepellent, nonfading, woven sufficiently closely to cover up any irregularities of the wall, and, for the same purpose, having a certain amount of bulk. Furthermore, it should neither stretch nor sag, and it should be possible to

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clean it by brushing or wiping. Also, any small nail holes driven into it should close easily after removal of the nail. It should, in all probability, be light in color, perhaps even light-reflecting, possibly flame-retarding, and certainly mothproof if not mildewproof. In regard to general complexion: it should be quiet enough so as not to compete with any artwork put on it or placed before it — that is, it should be subservient, not dominating. Taking these suggestions, we will be led to a definite choice of raw material, of weave construction, and of color, all interactive, as will be apparent. Also, these suggestions will be decisive in the question of formal treatment — whether to choose checks or stripes, elaborate patterns or a uniform surface. An extension into the field of pictorial invention is ruled out here because of the supporting and not independent character the fabric is to have. To go into further detail: what in particular are the proposals that have come to us from the object-to-be since its inception? It has circumscribed the range of the raw material that might be suitable. Wool, for instance, will have to be excluded as neither dust-repellent nor mothproof without special chemical treatment, while any fiber with a somewhat coated surface, such as linen or raffia or a strawlike synthetic fiber, might fit the requirements. Such a raw material also would have a certain stiffness and bulk that would prevent sagging and would help the fabric keep its shape. However, without additional processing it would not be flame-retarding, should that be required, as it sometimes is in public buildings. As to weave construction: all specifications point to a plain weave, the simplest construction existent, which makes a somewhat stiff material, in contrast to a satin or a twill weave, which would result in a more pliable fabric not desired here. The plain weave also produces, in a balanced relationship of warp and weft, a more or less porous material specifically suited to take care of the nail-hole problem. In addition, its use is a safeguard against the fabric’s sagging or stretching out of shape, aided in this by the suggested raw materials, which also are inelastic in character. It also is an economical weave using less yarn than most others, a consideration that is often vital. Continuing in our attitude of attentive passiveness, we will also be guided in our choice of color, though here only in part. For our response to color is spontaneous, passionate, and personal, and only in some respects subject to reasoning. We may choose a color hue — that is, its character as red or blue, for instance — quite autocratically. However, in regard to color value — that is,

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its degree of lightness or darkness — and also in regard to color intensity — that is, its vividness — we can be led by considerations other than exclusively by our feeling. As an example: our museum walls will demand light and have a color attitude that is non-aggressive, no matter what the color hue, and whether there is an overall color or a play of colors. However, one factor may influence even our impulsive choice of color, and that is the practical question of colorfastness to light and, where this is necessary, to washing. Different colors vary of course in this respect. The coloring matter in textiles is a dye that penetrates the fibers of the material, unlike color pigment or paint, which is applied to the surface only. The action, therefore, of the dye on different fibers has to be taken into account and will affect, in turn, the choice of the raw material. Also, the dye process itself has to be considered. In piece dyeing, for instance, the whole finished fabric is immersed in the dye bath to give it a uniform color, while in yarn dyeing, as the name suggests, the yarn is dyed before it is woven, thereby allowing a fabric to be built of different color units. Only the latter, as we should be aware, allows for the full realization of the means within the weaver’s sphere. We have again reached a point where we can think in general terms, for the issue of the specific formal domain within which a craft operates has wide implications. Architecture, for instance, is concerned with space: with enclosing space, with extending into space, and with gravity and tension. Though sculptural elements (arrangement of masses), painterly elements (light, shadow, color), and textural elements (inherent structure of material and marks of working it) are also present, these should speak only quietly, not dominantly. Similarly, we can delineate the weaver’s province. The meaning of the word “textural” covers that quality which is the essence of weaving. It is the result, apparent on the surface, of the manner in which interdependent thread units are connected to form a cohesive and flexible whole. This surface play, of structural origin, can be accentuated or subdued through the choice of yarn and its characteristics — glossiness, dullness, knobbiness, etc.— and of color. It becomes obvious now, I believe, why the previously mentioned piecedyeing process diminishes rather than enhances the quintessence of weaving, for it bridges over and thereby obscures with one color the separate functions of the structural elements. If, in regard to visual articulation, texture, produced through the interlocking of threads, is the focal point in weaving, those peripheral components

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that can variegate it come only second in the order of importance. Properties such as warmth — of paramount importance in textiles used for clothing — do not belong to the vocabulary of form. There, then, is the quality of the yarn that is to make the fabric, whether it is rough or smooth, lustrous, shaggy, downy, uneven, etc. — qualities that are able to underline the structural appearance of the fabric or to restrain it. Today, with the rediscovery of textural interest, this secondary element of composition, yarn character, is often used as a substitute for the primary one, which is structural in nature. As a result, we find an exaggerated emphasis on fancy yarns to make up for a thread construction that is dull. In fact, this shift from structural effects to predominantly yarn effects today holds back a textile development that should center on construction as the original focal point. Color comes only third in importance among the elements of composition within the weaver’s dimensions. By giving different colors to the differently functioning threads, the structural character of the weaving will be intensified. In addition, color, more acutely than texture, conveys emotional values, but, if it is introduced as too independent an agent, it may carry the weaving outside of its own territory into the painterly province. When color in weaving moves into a first place, suppressing the main textile ingredients, we find a regression of the art of weaving. Examples, historical and contemporary, may be found in some of the pictorial tapestries woven from painters’ designs — Raphael’s, Picasso’s, Rouault’s, etc. Many of these works, lacking in textural and structural interest, have moved to the very edge of the weaver’s realm, and, though perhaps impressive as pictorial compositions, they are often of little consequence as pictures or as weavings. We are ready, I believe, to resume work on our particular task. We have found ourselves limited to a definite range of raw material and of color and have been led to a suitable thread construction, the plain weave. Now that we have become aware of the interplay of fiber, color, and weave, let us see where another step in the act of condensation will take us. In regard to fiber, we found linen, raffia, and a strawlike synthetic fiber acceptable. Of these, linen is best suited as warp material here. It recommends itself for the purpose at hand by its relatively inelastic character, which lessens the chance that the fabric may stretch out of shape or sag. In addition, linen has a natural color that is a grayish tan. It has this to say for itself: it will not fade even when exposed to light for a long period; it has an easy color relationship to any woodwork — floors, for instance — and its color will show

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dust less readily than most; it is mothproof though not mildewproof. The slight stiffness of the linen fiber will increase that of the plain weave construction and also will add to the porousness that has been found desirable. When intersected by a weft of strawlike synthetic yarn, white and glossy in its original state, the dull natural linen will take on life by contrast, and a subtle play in natural-to-white tones could be developed, as well as a play on the scale from dull to sparkling, even light-reflecting. Again, this original white will stay white under exposure to light, and the hard surface of the fiber will retain only a small amount of dust. Since, where large areas are involved, the problem of fading is unavoidable, a solution that circumvents dyeing altogether can only be welcomed. The synthetic fiber is mothproof and mildew-proof and, intersecting the linen, it will reduce by the percentage of its use the mildew problem, unsolved in the case of linen. Here, now, we have a fabric that largely answers the outlined requirements. It formed itself, actually, and what remains to be determined is mainly the formal organization of the elements. We now have arrived at that stage of designing that demands our finest “ear,” for we must try to discern the formal currents of our period in history that are on the verge of crystallizing and that may become part of our language of form, or may again become part of it. Texture — the word I tried to use only in its exact meaning and avoided in its fashionable, loose sense — is, for instance, one of the formal elements that has been of little or no interest for a long time but has again become one of today’s stylistic components. We must learn to sense those elements of form that respond to our formal needs. We like things today that are light — light as the opposite of heavy and light as the opposite of dark. We must learn to detect, in particular occasions, manifestations of general developments — that is, we must learn to foresee. And to foresee we need a contemplative state of mind. To return to our wall-covering project: with the matter of formal composition, the general air that the fabric is to have becomes the center of our concern. We have in our hands powerful means of articulation — directional elements such as verticals, horizontals, diagonals, squares, as basic examples, or, in the weaver’s terms, warp or weft stripes, twills, checks, etc. We are able to convey impressions of height, of width, of boldness, of reticence, of gaiety or somberness, of monumentality or caprice, all within, though modified by, the thus-far established framework. For the subservient character we have sought for the fabric from the start directs our decisions and precludes loud instrumentation.

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Again, we are here led away from pronounced lineation and contours toward a surface active only through the slight optical vibration of intersecting raised and lowered threads — shiny and dull, lighter and darker, tan and white. This material will be quiet yet alive, responsive to lighting, compliant in its relationship to objects more demonstrative than itself in color and shape; a background for a flower, a face, a painting, a sculpture. From here we can move on to a wider point of view. We may contend that the world around us puts us under great strain and that we need calm and quietness wherever we can get them. Today, we should try to counteract habits that only rarely leave us time to collect ourselves. Every hour on the hour, we seem to need the latest and, as it turns out, usually the most unsettling and gloomy report, often, when seen in retrospect, of nonessentials. Yesterday’s paper is waste paper. Wisdom and insight hardly make headlines. Nevertheless, we are seldom found — on train or plane, on bus or boat, or in any given moment of imposed restraint of action — without a bundle of distractions in our hand in the form of papers or magazines. And though it may appear that we are straying from our line of thought, it is on the contrary here on the ground of philosophy and morals that attitudes and convictions, the starting points of our actions, are formed. Two matters may here be of special concern to the conscientious designer and may make him stop and think or, perhaps, think and stop. The first is that with his help another object will be added to the many that are already taking our attention and our care, another object to distract us. (Our households contain hundreds of objects.) The second is that by trying to give this object its best possible shape, by trying to make it as timeless as possible — that is, not dictated by short-lived fashion — and by finding for it a form as anonymous as possible — that is, a form unburdened by dominantly individual traits of the planner — the designer finds himself in direct conflict with the economic pattern of our time. For the economy of today is built largely upon change, and the “successful” designer, a term I have not used before, will have to consider the matter of “calculated obsolescence.” We are urged today to want more and more things, and we are subjected to a vigorous campaigning for always newer things, things that are not necessarily newer in performance. We are asked to shift from red to blue or from this bit of trimming to that for the questionable reason or unreason of fashion. It is evident, I think, that the designer who takes the longer view is by no means identical with the “successful” designer.

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We have watched the coming into being of our object and have seen how medium and method of work present themselves to us and thereby limit our range of choice. Among other components to be considered, contributing to such limitation, is that of price. This, above others, is often felt as a restriction on the freedom of the designer. I have shown, I think, that I do not believe in the sovereignty of the designer, and I cannot concur with the view that such a limitation must mean frustration. Rather, to my mind, limitations may act as directives and may be as suggestive as were both the material itself and anticipated performance. Great freedom can be a hindrance because of the bewildering choices it leaves to us, while limitations, when approached open-mindedly, can spur the imagination to make the best use of them and possibly even to overcome them. As much a limiting factor as price, for instance, is the matter of production. Whether production is by craft or by industrial method, this many-sided problem can be as stimulating as the others discussed earlier. Any one of them can serve as starting point in the process of crystallization that we have followed. It is interesting to note here that mechanized production, however advanced, always means a reduction in the range of possibilities, though usually it also means an increase in exactitude, speed, and quantity of output, when compared to anything done with the ancient instrument that is our hand. As to our immediate concern, the material for the wall: it constitutes no problem for machine or hand. The construction is of the simplest kind, demanding nothing but the simplest type of loom, and the choice between industrial or manual production is dependent solely on the quantity of material involved. Today such matters as, for instance, that the finished object be photogenic, can influence designing. In a time that depends greatly for success upon photographic reproduction, a consideration of this sort — in itself surely beside the point — can become a factor that may have to be taken into account. So, too, may the powerful figures of the client and, in textiles, the buyer, who often bring to the project preconceived viewpoints that may be right but, alas, can be wrong. As you will have noticed, I have made no distinction between the craftsman designer, the industrial designer, and the artist — because the fundamental, if not the specific, considerations are the same, I believe, for those who work with the conscience and apperception of the artist. With surprise and reassurance, I recently came across a statement by the painter Lyonel Feininger, who speaks of one of his pictures as having “painted itself.”

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At the beginning, we spoke here of the comprehensible orderliness that underlies all our doing and whose ultimate form is also that of art. Material form becomes meaningful form through design—that is, through considered relationships. And this meaningful form can become the carrier of a meaning that takes us beyond what we think of as immediate reality. But an orderliness that is too obvious cannot become meaningful in this superior sense that is art. The organization of forms, their relatedness, their proportions, must have that quality of mystery that we know in nature. Nature, however, shows herself to us only in part. The whole of nature, though we always seek it, remains hidden from us. To reassure us, art tries, I believe, to show us a wholeness that we can comprehend.

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Plates

The Loom

Plate 1. Earliest known representation of a loom. Predynastic Egyptian decorated pottery dish, ca. 3700 b.c. Plate 2. Loom from Bougainville Island. Plate 3. Greek warp-weight loom, attributed to the Amasis Painter, detail from an Athenian Lekythos (oil flask), ca. 550– 530 b.c.

Plate 3. Greek warp-weight loom, attributed to the Amasis Painter, detail from an Athenian Lekythos (oil flask), ca. 550– 530 b.c.

Plate 4. Peruvian weavers at work on back-strap looms. Detail of vessel (with rattle) made of pottery. Moche, Trujillo, 600–1000 a.d.

a. Loom bars. b. Shed-rod. c. Heddle-rod. d. Batten or sword. e. Bobbin. f. Back strap. g. Warp lashing. h. Heading string. i. Lease cord. j. Leach cord. k. Warp. l. Weft.

Plate 5. Back-strap loom (diagram) of the type used in Peru. Plate 6. Okinawa loom, Japan.

Plate 7. A medieval loom. From the Ypres Book of Trades, ca. 1310.

Plate 8. A Chinese draw-loom.

Plate 9. A modern weaving room. One man (in center of photograph) is supervising the weaving of the looms shown here—in some cases as many as one hundred looms.

Draft Notation

Plate 10. Diagram showing method of draft notation. Plain weave.

Plate 11. Diagram showing method of draft notation. Warp twill

2

1

/

Plate 12. Diagram showing method of draft notation. Weft satin 5-leaf.

The Fundamental Constructions

Plain weave.

Balanced twill

Weft twill

1

2

3

/ Warp twill

Plate 13. The fundamental constructions.

2

1

/

3

/

Balanced twill

2

2

/

Warp twill

2

1

3

2

/

Warp and weft twill combination.

Weft twill

1

3

3

2

/

Plate 14. The fundamental constructions.

Weft satin 5-leaf.

Warp satin 12-leaf.

Plate 15. The fundamental constructions.

Warp satin 5-leaf.

Modified and Composite Weaves

Warp or cross ribs.

A

Weft or long ribs.

B

Figured ribs, developed by placing a rib unit A in a twill formation B.

Plate 16. Modified and composite weaves.

A

B

Combination ribs, developed by combining A and B.

Basket weave.

Basket weave.

Plate 17. Modified and composite weaves.

A.

3

2

B.

2

1

Interlocking twill, developed from A and B.

Steep twill.

Plate 18. Modified and composite weaves.

Reversed twill.

Offset twill.

Undulating twill.

Plate 19. Modified and composite weaves.

Herringbone or pointed twill.

Twill pointed in warp and filling.

Twill developed by reversing order of section at left.

Twill shade, achieved by adding typing points to original unit.

Plate 20. Modified and composite weaves.

Checkerboard damask: combination of warp and weft twill.

Combination warp and weft satin.

Plate 21. Modified and composite weaves.

Combination weave: weft satin, warp twill, weft twill, warp satin.

Warp cord in plain weave.

Warp cord in

2

2

twill.

Plate 22. Modified and composite weaves.

Weft cord in plain weave.

Plissé weave in plain weave.

Crepe weave.

Crepe weave.

Plate 23. Modified and composite weaves.

Mock leno weaves: A, B, C.

B

A

C

Back filling fabrics: A, B, C.

A. Front plain weave, back

3

1

twill.

Plate 24. Modified and composite weaves.

B. Front twill

7

1

, back twill

2

2

.

C. Back warp fabric: front 3 1 twill, back 1

3

twill.

Double weave, plain weave closed on both sides forming a tube, or tubular weave.

Double weave, plain weave open on one side; can be unfolded for double width.

Color effect: plain weave with alternating two colors in warp and weft.

Plate 25. Modified and composite weaves.

3-layered plain weave; can open to triple width.

Plain weave: cross section and draft.

Tubular weave: cross section and draft.

Cross section of double cloth in contrasting colors, interlocked for pattern effect.

Double cloth closed on one side only, to open to double width: cross section and draft.

Plate 26. Modified and composite weaves.

Early Techniques of Thread Interlacing

2. Looping, knotless net, Neolithic Switzerland.

1. Knotted net, pre-Columbian (after Junius Bird). This is also the so-called Lake-dwelling knot, Neolithic, Robenhausen, Switzerland.

3. Looping, developed from knotless net.

Plate 27. Early techniques of thread interlacing.

Twining. 

Twining. 

Plate 28.  Early techniques of thread interlacing. 

Gauze or leno weave.

Gauze or leno weave.

Plate 29. Early techniques of thread interlacing.

Braid of the early Nazca period (after Lila M. O’Neale).

Plate 30. Early techniques of thread interlacing.

Soumak.

Persian rug knot.

Turkish rug knot.

Plate 31. Early techniques of thread interlacing.

Plate 32. Loom, Santa Ana Hueytlalpan (after Bodil Christensen).

Plate 33. Twining, Admiralty Islands.

Plate 34. Shaped shirt, ancient North Chile. Plate 35. Netting, Egypt, 5th century.

Tactile Sensibility

Plate 36. Braid, Nazca culture, Peru, 500–650 a.d.

Plate 37. Study made with grass. Plate 38. Study made with metal shavings.

Plate 39. Study made with twisted paper. Plate 40. Study made with corn kernels.

Plate 41. Study made on the typewriter.

Plate 42. Studies made on the typewriter.

Plate 43. Studies made by puncturing paper. Plate 44. Arrangement made by nature as contrast to arrangement made by design. Charles Eames.

Plate 45. Lace, ancient Peru. Plate 46. Detail of ancient looped bag, Salta, northern Argentina.

Plate 47. Study in twining. Nina Pattek, 1965.

Plate 48. Detail of screen in looping technique. Dorothy Cavalier Yanik, 1962.

Plate 49. Tarascan lace, Mexico.

Plate 50. Chiapas inlaid technique, Mexico.

Plate 51. Detail of Plate 52. Puebla lace, Mexico.

Plate 52. Puebla lace, Mexico.

Plate 53. Casement material, plain weave, leno reinforced, Jason. Jack Lenor Larsen. Plate 54. Casement material, widely spaced leno bands, Bahia Blind. Jack Lenor Larsen.

Plate 55. Detail of partition material. Anni Albers, ca. 1949.

Plate 56. Detail of partition material. Anni Albers, ca. 1949.

Plate 57. Detail of drapery material, offset twill. Anni Albers, 1946.

Plate 58. Detail of upholstery material, corded weave. Anni Albers, 1949.

Plate 59. Stripes in satin weave, fragment, Middle East, 13th century. Plate 60. Detail of skirt fragment, United States, late 18th–early 19th century.

Plate 61. Striped twill weave, Norway, ca. 1940. Plate 62. Sound-absorbing wall material, with diagram indicating light reflection. Anni Albers, Bauhaus period, 1929.

Plate 63. Leno weave, drapery material. Anni Albers, 1927.

Tapestry

Slit tapestry or Kelim technique.

Avoiding slits by avoiding verticals.

Plate 64. Tapestry constructions.

A method of avoiding slits: plain weave alternating with design threads. Also called inlaid technique.

Sectional wefts turned around the same warp thread.

Plate 65. Tapestry constructions.

Interlocking wefts.

Interlocking wefts around two threads.

Plate 66. Tapestry constructions.

Groups of sectional wefts turning around the same warp thread. Also called brick-interlocking. (Peru.)

Diagonal outline of design. (Peru.)

Plate 67. Tapestry constructions.

Slit tapestry with wrapped warp to outline design. (Peru.)

Interlocking warp and weft. (Peru.)

Plate 68. Tapestry constructions.

Plate 69. Diagram of warp position in a fabric of ca. 1600 b.c., showing double image of a bird with upraised head and neck. Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru.

Plate 70. Peruvian painted textile, Chancay, central coast, 1100–1300 a.d.

Plate 71. Ceremonial robe (Chilkat blanket), twining technique, Tlingit, 19th–20th century.

Plate 72. Soumak technique, work of Ainu, Japan. Plate 73. Mexican serape, tapestry technique, Querétaro.

Plate 74. Woman’s loin cloth with embroidered “pile” of the Bushongo, Congo.

Plate 75. Tapestry fragment, possibly Egypt, 300–900 a.d.

Plate 76. Fragment of a tapestry-woven band with animals and plants, set in looped cloth. Coptic, 5th–6th century.

Plate 77. Coptic weaving. Plate 78. Looped weaving, Head, Coptic.

Plate 79. Tapestry, Fragment of a Head, Coptic, Egyptian School.

Plate 80. Wool slit tapestry, Fragment of a Head, Coptic, Egypt, 5th–7th century.

Plate 81. Looped weaving, Fragment with Figural Decoration, Coptic, 4th–5th century. Plate 82. Band Fragment with Figural and Botanical Decoration, Coptic, 8th century.

Plate 83. Tapestry, Fragment of a Woman’s Head, Coptic, Egyptian School, 2nd–5th century.

Plate 84. Tapestry fragment, possibly Granada, Spain, 13th century.

Plate 85. Peruvian sampler, Chimú, Peru.

Plate 86. Peruvian sampler.

Plate 87. Tapestry weave, shirt, Chimú, Peru.

Plate 88. Tapestry, a deity, Tiahuanaco, Peru.

Plate 89. Tapestry detail, Middle Ica, Peru. Plate 90. Tapestry, detail of Miniature Tunic, Wari, 500–800 a.d.

Plate 91. Tapestry fragment, inlaid technique, Peru, 1100–1300 a.d.

Plate 92. Tapestry, Pachacamac, Peru.

Plate 93. Tapestry, Chimú, Peru. Plate 94. Wool tapestry with discontinuous warps, interlocked, mantle fragment, Peru, 400–100 b.c.

Plate 95. Double cloth, Pachacamac, Peru.

Plate 96. Triple cloth, Peru.

Plate 97. Tapestry, Chimú, Peru.

Plate 98. Tapestry fragment with discontinuous and interlocking warps and wefts, Peru, ca. 600 a.d.

Plate 99. Detail of carpet fragment depicting angels, early 16th century.

Plate 100. Tapestry, Norwegian, 17th century. Plate 101. Tapestry, South Netherlandish, 1450–1455.

Plate 102. Lace headcloth, Peru, 1400–1550 a.d.

Plate 103. Wall hanging, Dark River (complete work and detail). Lenore Tawney, 1961.

Plate 104. Tapestry, Une Mesure d’un Conte de Fée. Sophie Täuber-Arp, 1926.

Plate 105. Tapestry, Ramure. Hans Arp, 1963. Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson.

Plate 106. Tapestry, La Férule. Michel Seuphor, 1960.

Plate 107. Tapestry, Composition vertical-horizontale (Composition Aubette). After a watercolor by Sophie Täuber-Arp, 1927. Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson, 1961.

Plate 108. Tapestry, Nue au Cercle Rouge. Auguste Herbin, 1963. Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson.

Plate 109. Tapestry, Cassiopée. Victor Vasarely, 1963. Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson.

Anni Albers Wall Hangings and Pictorial Weavings

Plate 110. Wall hanging, Jacquard weaving. Anni Albers, 1925.

Plate 111. Wall hanging, three-ply weave. Anni Albers, 1926.

Plate 112. Wall hanging, double weave. Anni Albers, 1927/1964.

Plate 113. Wall hanging, With Verticals. Anni Albers, 1946.

Plate 114. Tapestry, Two. Anni Albers, 1952.

Plate 115. Tapestry with leno weave. Anni Albers, 1950.

Plate 116. Pictorial weaving, Development in Rose II. Anni Albers, 1952.

Plate 117. Pictorial weaving, Pictographic. Anni Albers, 1953.

Plate 118. Pictorial weaving, Variations on a Theme. Anni Albers, 1958. Plate 119. Pictorial weaving, Pasture. Anni Albers, 1958.

Plate 120. Tapestry, La Luz II. Anni Albers, 1958.

Plate 121. Vicara Rug I. Anni Albers, 1959. Plate 122. Pictorial weaving, Dotted. Anni Albers, 1959.

Plate 123. Pictorial weaving, North Westerly. Anni Albers, 1957.

Plate 124. Pictorial weaving, Under Way. Anni Albers, 1963. Plate 125. Detail of Under Way.

Plate 126. Ark Panels for Temple B’nai Israel, Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Anni Albers, 1962.

Acknowledgments My thanks are manifold, for I am indebted to those who permitted me to use photographs of their own work; to various collectors, institutions, galleries, and publications for use of their photographs and in some cases diagrams; to those whose photographs are in themselves imaginative statements and to those who photographically recorded existent work. I was helped by those who added a professional hand to my line drawings. And my special thanks go to my husband, who advised me on visual matters when doubts made me turn to him. Thus I am glad to thank Mr. and Mrs. Jean Arp; Dorothy Cavalier Yanik; Jack Lenor Larsen; Nina Pattek; Michel Seuphor; and Lenore Tawney for permission to show their works. To Charles Eames, I owe his discerning photograph of a piece of nature; to Junius Bird, the unequaled diagram of the earliest work shown in this book as well as his comments on it; to Crimilda Pontes and Sybil Wilson, I owe help on my drawings. To the publishers of the Encyclopædia Britannica, I am grateful for permission to quote myself from a signed article I wrote for them; and to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, for the use of Bodil Christensen’s diagram showing a unique method of shaping a weaving. My thanks for photographs from their files go to the American Museum of Natural History; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University; the Chicago Natural History Museum; the Cone Mills Corporation; the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration;

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the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Galerie Denise René, Paris; Meiji-Shobo Ltd., Kanda, Tokyo; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel; the Peabody Museum, Harvard University; the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunke, Leiden, Netherlands; the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania; and the Yale University Art Gallery. To the Ciba Review, I owe special thanks for permitting me to reproduce some of their photographs. And here I should also name my husband, whom I mentioned gratefully earlier: Josef Albers. — A.A.

acknowledgments

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Essays

n i c ho la s fox web er

Afterword I am starting with the personal not because of anything it tells you about me, but because of what it tells you about her. Anni told me that occasionally she gave talks about weaving at the Museum of Modern Art. She did not say “classes” or “lectures,” for in effect they were workshops: a chance for people interested in making textiles to learn technique, to increase their mastery of the materials, and to experiment — experimentation being the essence of both Anni and Josef Albers’s methods of art-making. Some of the attendees were novices, others more advanced. Anni clearly enjoyed remembering the events, because they were not about imparting knowledge, but about encouraging invention and having people delve into the essentials of life — and inhabit the territory where she was so often in her thoughts. “I would ask them,” Anni told me, in that soft voice, with her slight and very elegant upper-class Berlin accent, a speaking manner that the actor/film director Maximilian Schell likened to that of the renowned European stage actress Elisabeth Bergner, “to imagine that it was the tenth century, and they were on the coast of Peru.” I would like you to have heard the way that Anni said Peru. It was a sort of “Peh-roo.” Anni inflected those two syllables with a paradisiacal quality, since the name of the country where Inca civilization achieved its mind-boggling summits was always associated in her mind with so much that she loved utterly. She did not say the names of other countries with the same emphasis, or raise her eyebrows as she did only for it and Mexico.

Anni Albers, 1965.

207

And I would say to these people, some of them Park Avenue ladies, some of them schoolteachers from Queens, whoever they were, “There you are, on the coast line, with absolutely nothing there except for what nature has put there. The sea is rolling in, and there are many types of seaweed, and dead branches and sand, and possibly even the skeletons of fish, and shells. And it is not just the life of the ocean; there can be animal hides from creatures that have wandered from the jungle or forest.” I would tell these people who wanted to learn about weaving that they should consider whatever possibility they wanted of how to construct a loom, and what materials they might use. I proposed that they imagine how they might make threads, of all sorts of colors and differing levels of strength, in the widths they wanted, maybe cut with a sharp stone. I did not specify; I just encouraged them to come up with their own ideas of how, starting with nothing they could buy, nothing that had been made for them in advance, only all this bounty given to them, they could make textiles. And to think about how they would use these textiles—to construct bags, or clothing, or whatever they needed. It could not have been more rudimentary, or richer. I already knew the essence of Anni’s aesthetic: that textiles are beautiful when they reveal rather than disguise their structure. She designed and executed her work according to the belief that fibers and their interlocking should be appreciated in their raw state. She told me that the materials of her childhood, in her family’s elaborate large apartment on Meinekestrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm — the flower-patterned damasks and the chintz with its motifs of ornate curlicues and the silks with figurative designs embroidered on them — belonged to a world of artifice, of cover-ups rather than candor, the milieu in which “style” rather than truthfulness ruled. Anni had not just left all of that behind; she had brazenly rejected it. She had been brought up with the understanding that the residents of a household never went into the kitchen, which was only for servants; that she was to marry and have children and certainly not work, which was unfitting for a lady of their class. Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann did not know how to sew; the dressmaker who came to the house to clothe her mother and sister and her was the person who handled a needle, not any of them. She adored her father, Siegfried Fleischmann, a successful furniture manufacturer with a large Art Nouveau–style showroom on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, but when, at age twenty-two, she told him about the Bauhaus, the pioneering art

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school that had opened two years earlier, in 1919, and explained its premise, he replied, “What do you mean, a new style? There are no new styles. We have had the Renaissance; we have had the Baroque. That is all there is.” Yet she prevailed upon him, and when, the following spring, of 1922, shortly before her twenty-third birthday on June 12, she went to Weimar to try for admissions, the devoted Herr Fleischmann supported the proposition, enabling her to rent a modest room on the outskirts of town, which suited her even though she was allowed to take a bath down the hall only once a week. Anni was emotionally drawn to the new simplicity and necessity with which she now lived. There was something she preferred about them to the grand carriage rides and her maternal uncles’ mansions (her mother’s brothers, with the last name of Ullstein, ran the publishing empire that was then the largest in Europe, with its own airplanes to deliver magazines and newspapers) and all the fluff of a society that was both hidebound and elitist. Independent, alone but accustomed to her loneliness, Annelise tried to be admitted to the school Walter Gropius had founded where all the arts were valued equally, and where the goal was for the advances in textiles, metalwork, wallpaper design, glass-making, woodworking, ceramics, as well as the art of painting, to spread all over the world, to change the designs of everyday objects for people of all financial situations, and put candor of design and functionalism and aesthetic simplicity at the forefront. It was all a struggle, however. The tall, almost lanky, Sephardic-looking Annelise, with her thick dark hair, was turned down when, after six weeks, she applied for admission to the Bauhaus. She had, however, met “a lean, half-starved Westphalian” — the description was hers to me, in 1973, when Josef, whom I knew well, was painting Homages to the Square in his basement studio in their Connecticut house, while Anni and I talked in her simple workroom above. By then, I had asked her if I could write a book about her, and she had agreed. “He had irresistible blond bangs,” she continued, as if she was unconsciously determined that girl-boy stuff, and flirting, and a man’s dashing appearance, mattered more, and were more fun, than anything else. Anni had a keen sense of fun. Josef was from another world. He was eleven years older than she, and from Bottrop, in the industrial Ruhr region; he told me that the coal smoke was so thick that “even your spit was black” there. His family had little money; he had depended on the regional school system, for which he worked, back in Westphalia, to pay his Bauhaus tuition fees and living expenses. He was

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devoutly Catholic, while Annelise was, “in the Hitler sense, Jewish” — her words again — although she had been baptized and confirmed in a Protestant church, and the Ullsteins had had, at the end of the nineteenth century, a mass family baptism, all to assimilate. Annelise and Josef instantly took to each other — with their shared candor, humor, and abiding love for beauty and artistic skill and the arts as a carrier of morality. Josef helped her prepare for a second attempt at admissions, where she would be tested on draftsmanship and an understanding of form. This time, she made it. The only workshop she could consider, however, was the one for textiles. She told me that she would have preferred wall-painting, but knew that she could not because of her own physical handicaps. Anni never specified what they were, although it was clear that she had stovepipe-thin legs and unusually formed feet (she wore handmade shoes to accommodate her malformed arches) and needed a cane. I would learn much later that she suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neuromuscular disorder that causes distal muscle weakness and atrophy beginning in the legs, although Anni never referred to it by name. In any case, if today people want to say that it was entirely because she was a woman that Anni went into textiles, against her will, this is not what she told me; she said the choice was imposed on her by the limitations of her own body, only that. “And then I heard Paul Klee speak, and he said to take a line for a walk, and I thought, ‘I will take thread everywhere I can.’ ” The first time I had seen Anni’s work, I had not previously heard of her, but I was flabbergasted by what she had achieved with thread. This was on a day when I saw two of her masterpieces of “pictorial weaving.” Anni invented this term, inadequate in my eyes, to distinguish a single textile, which she wanted to be read as a work of art the way a watercolor or oil painting is. What troubles me is the misnomer “pictorial,” because these are abstract works, but I can understand what it was that drove Anni to come up with the category in order to make clear that a weaving should be considered for all the formal qualities one would apply to a Klee or a Mondrian. These two pictorial weavings, sewn to neutral backgrounds, mounted on strong board, framed in exactly the rounded aluminum-covered wooden strips that Josef used for his Homages to the Square, and under glass, were named Red Meander and City. My initial viewing of these pieces was in 1968, but they stagger me to this day. Red Meander uses thread to reinvent the wandering, rhythmic meander

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motif, marching in its sequence of right angles, its horizontals going this way and that. Because it is composed of interwoven thread, the simple theme has layers upon layers, echoes and shuffles and movement and flow in and out of space that would have not been possible in any other medium. City uses black and white thread to create the excitement of a metropolis. You see neighborhoods; you hear populations; you sense traffic rushing along. But it is nonspecific, and not really so pictorial as suggestive and atmospheric, and it, too, makes thread the vehicle of intersection and relationships and a fantastic physical energy. I came upon these works by the unknown “Anni” — by then, at age twenty, I knew who Josef Albers was — via a route that is perfect evidence of a maxim I would hear Anni utter from time to time, years later when we became such close friends, which was “You can go anywhere from anywhere.” I was an undergraduate at Columbia College, thrilling to medieval as well as modern art with Meyer Schapiro and several other brilliant enthusiasts of visual beauty. In the summers, I was a camp counselor in the mountains of New Hampshire, at a place called Tamarack Tennis Camp, and a friend invited me to her parents’ house, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a house of large, airy, and very pure spaces. The walls were mostly white, although in my memory the library, where one of Anni’s weavings was, may have had a darker raw silk wall covering. What art there was hung with ample space around it, and the furniture, mostly classics from Knoll, made the perfect neutral setting so that each painting, or wooden relief, or pictorial weaving was an object of focus, its voice clearly audible, with nothing that would distract you from its salubrious presence. There were fantastic paintings by Josef Albers, among them colorful Homages and two gems from his Variant series, one in the colors of a Mexican piñata, the other all blacks and grays; a subtle Morandi still life, its tonality mainly white and beige and gray; and a small Jackson Pollock, a superb splash of silver and black paint on a rough burlap-like background. The relief was by Ben Nicholson, a splendidly subtle abstraction of rectangles with several circles on top. And then there were those two works by Anni. In that company, hung among these other great works, they were positioned exactly as she dreamed they would be. From the time she had started at the Bauhaus, with her first very minimal wall hanging, this was a vital side of Anni’s textile art: the individual pieces that were to be on their own, serving the function only of art we look at. But at the same time, in Weimar and then in Dessau and later in America,

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she made upholstery materials, and draperies, and wall-coverings, and room dividers — textiles with a functional purpose. Yet whatever the use and intention, what Anni wove is totally consistent in nature. It brings you back to zero and takes you to infinity; it extols the wonder of fiber and knotting; it celebrates process and technique. It is — and I felt this on that day when I saw what were my first two works by Anni Albers — modest in tone, yet totally confident. Anni’s weaving is, and we imbibe this whenever we look at anything she created, achieved with competence and dexterity, but it wears its athletic prowess without showing off. It incorporates those brilliant moves and sideways slides and buoyant dance steps only to celebrate life itself, the possibilities of doing so much with so little, the wonder of connections — among people, within our bodies, wherever there are overlaps and this affecting that. And all that skill and imagination and immersion in the task she was doing is about you, and life, and material, while never about Anni herself. It was a few years between my seeing City and Red Meander and my meeting their creator. The first time we met, Josef dominated the scene, interrogating me while she looked on. The way she was studying the scene—his brusquely figuring out who I was, what I did, what my values were, and whether he liked me —she made me feel I had an approving ally. For the Alberses, a lot was apparent from the word go, and I suppose that my choice of words, my tone of voice, my clothing that was neat and nice but not trendy or even modish, and my insistent pleasure at looking at art laid the groundwork for what was to become a life-altering relationship. It was not long before I was at their Connecticut raised-ranch house, that very simple dwelling that was their laboratory for living and creating with as few distractions as possible, that I allowed to Anni that I knew nothing whatsoever about weaving, and could not even sew a button, but that I loved her art in much the way that I liked Paul Klee’s. I told her I wanted to write a book about her, but how could I since I did not know how a loom worked? “It is better that way,” she said. “You are not one of those craft people. I will tell you how weaving works.” The next time I visited, she said, “I have made a loom for you.” I could not imagine what was coming next. We walked into Anni’s workroom, and I saw that she had prepared, carefully, a construction inside the lid of a small white box from Lord & Taylor department store. Anni had cut short slits in the lid on the two shorter sides, and suspended string between them. In this open line-up of parallel strings, she had suspended clean balsa sticks, either

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old-fashioned tongue depressors or the type used in ice-cream bars. (In retrospect, I have no idea why she had them; maybe she had bought tongue depressors at a pharmacy.) The lightweight balsa sticks were held in place by the way they went over and under the string. And then she patiently told me what warp and weft were. And how it worked. I did not know at the time that Anni was the wizard of the twelve-harness loom, that she developed techniques that to this day have experts baffled by their inventiveness. But I really understood what it was to start at zero. And, because she so well understood the beauty of the simple, because she had such a capacity to take slim pickings and limited possibilities and go to the sky with them, because she had such a will to impart pleasure and to lend charm to the rudimentary, because her mind worked like no one else’s, the exquisite woman who wrote the essays in this fantastic book initially published in 1965 — among them the Encyclœpedia Britannica’s “Hand Weaving” entry, in which it was her voice that defined and explained her art for all the world — took the art of textiles into realms that are glorious guideposts for all people for all time.

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ma n u el cirauqui

The Two Faces of Weaving The most beautiful pictures I have seen are certain rugs from Persia. — eugène delacroix

I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. — jorge luis borges

“Modern industry saves us endless labor and drudgery,” writes Anni Albers in the pages of On Weaving, “but, Janus-faced, it also bars us from taking part in the forming material and leaves idle our sense of touch, and with it those formative faculties that are stimulated by it.”1 Albers’s work is also Janus-faced, oscillating like a pendulum (for she also used that metaphor) between the terms of various polarities — craft and art, handwork and industrialized production, ancient and modern, pictorial and tactile, theoretical and immediately empirical. Whether those dichotomies have to remain unresolved — the apparently opposed terms coexist, even help each other, in the various chapters of her books as well as in the various periods of her oeuvre, textile and graphic — is the question I will try to address in the following pages. Although Albers’s artistic personality and focus were defined by her experience at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1930, particularly under Walter Gropius’s directorship and Paul Klee’s mentoring, the limitations imposed by industrial production on the work of the individual artist were always present in her thinking. The ten chapters of On Weaving, her definitive treatise, include

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notes of what has been considered a “tempered Luddite” agenda.2 But Albers’s writing also insistently invokes all the possibilities the modern world makes available for the practitioner of the ancient art of weaving. At a lecture given in New Haven a few years before the book’s release, Albers concluded her presentation with a succinct introduction to her work in the following terms: I am working mainly in two areas: useful fabrics for interiors, and attempts in the direction of art, pictorial in character, tapestries, that is, though they are not tapestries in the technical sense. The technical things: I try to make them as useful as possible, concentrating on their serving quality. . . . The tapestries are woven by me, are one of a kind, completely useless in any practical sense. If they make sense at all, it lies in the direction of those unchanging things that are our concern when we are alone.3 While the useful is defined by its context (the modern interior), the useless defines its own function transcendentally (existential solitude). What, then, is Albers’s understanding of that transcendence and that solitude, necessary for aesthetic contemplation, and what makes useful and technical so irreversibly connected? Earlier in the same lecture, she had presented her distinction of two forms of weaving work in somewhat quantitative terms: “With our fingers we can make infinite variables, with machinery only limited variance.”4 Arguably, this claim could be traced back to the origins of industrialization, and it seems that no one would be better placed to make it than a weaver.

design and form- production More or less around the time when the young Anni Albers, then still Annelise Fleischmann, was intent on becoming a painter in Berlin, a young scholar named Ernst Bloch wrote in the first chapter of The Spirit of Utopia: All around us it looks as though no one had ever known a craft and been capable of passing it down. . . . We could not say where the alleviation was in the humming of the modern loom, in the night shift, in the terrible coercion of its invariant rotations per minute, in the prevention of a human being’s pleasure in work who has only pieces to work on and never at any point experiences the joy of seeing the whole, finished product.5

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It was 1918 and World War I was ending. Marxist and Expressionist inclinations were a given among cultural circles in Berlin at the time. Annelise Fleischmann had just been turned down by the painter Oskar Kokoschka in her attempt to enter his studio as an apprentice.6 Her next move, a successful one for sure, brought her to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1922. Gropius’s memorandum that year set the tone for the school’s new agenda: “All of us are fully aware that the old attitude of l’art pour l’art is obsolete, and that things that concern us today cannot exist in isolation, but [must] be rooted in our developing attitudes. Thus the basis upon which work is built cannot be broad enough. Today this basis is too small rather than too large.”7 Months later, Annelise reluctantly entered the weaving workshop — one of the few available spaces for a young female student — but Gropius’s encouragement to new students was inspiring enough for her to make significant progress in short time.8 Gropius’s speech conveyed a meaning, “a distant, stable objective,” in fact so distant and stable that it would remain a touchstone in Anni’s thinking for decades to come. Defending his school program against accusations of contempt toward traditional craftsmanship, and promoting “a new unity of art and technique,” Gropius had maintained that “handwork within the school should concentrate on the development of prototypes for industry,” and he proposed to establish “norms” that could be adopted in mass-production.9 The key to this discussion can be located, precisely, in the nature of those “prototypes” as well as the conceptual space necessary for their inception.10 It is significant that the leading teachers and forerunners of Gropius’s program were, perhaps paradoxically, two painters whose propositions for a transcendental, nonnaturalistic art practice had a great impact on the school’s students. Both Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were attentive readers of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, a doctoral dissertation published in 1908 that would also inform a great deal of Anni Albers’s thinking.11 Multiple aspects of their work can be taken as implicit comments on Worringer’s ideas as well as those of his mentor, the philosopher Theodor Lipps. Particularly, Klee’s notion of “abstraction” as an operation of “detachment from life,” based on the search for an essential (metaphysical) experience of the world, can be directly traced back to his readings of Abstraction and Empathy. “We leave the immanent world and build into a transcendent one that can be all affirmation. Abstraction. The cool romanticism of this style without pathos is astonishing. The more horrible the world is (as today) the more abstract art

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will be, whereas a happy world produces realistic art.”12 Against the confusion of phenomena, the function of a work of art is the activation of the eye “by the most intense development of pictorial energy.” What form communicates is nothing but form, and the process of “form-production” for Klee is summarized in the idea of Gestaltung, in which process (path to form) is emphasized above the resulting product. Needless to say, this process is not restricted to the practice of painting, but is rather situated at the core of the Bauhaus’s doctrine of form in the school’s crucial years. As it is well known, the English word most generally used to translate Gestaltung is design, so as to collapse the connotations of “form-giving” and “engineering” present in the German term.13 Writing about these concepts in the final chapter of On Weaving, Anni Albers reconsidered this question in the following terms: By using the term “designing” for all these varied ways of preestablishing form, we are, of course, doing some violence to the word. Designing usually means “giving shape to a useful object.” We do not speak of designing a picture or a concerto, but of designing a house, a city, a bowl, a fabric. But surely these all can be, like a painting or music, works of art. We must conclude, then, that it is . . . the thoughtfulness and care and sensitivity in regard to form that we should try to attain.14 There is, as we see, a continuity between the terms of this binary. Rather than a separate category of things, “art” appears to be a level of completion in the process of design as form-production, where a projecting vision demarcates the signifying qualities of, or de-signs, a new object.15 Far from being ideal, in Albers’s case that vision occurs through the work with material. Contradiction and opposition play, in this process, a key role. Duality, said Klee, is to be treated as unity: “A concept is not thinkable without its opposite. . . . There is no such thing as a concept in itself; generally speaking, there are only pairs of concepts. What does ‘above’ mean without ‘below’?”16 Concomitantly, we may consider the interdependence of front and back of a surface — a key aspect in the structural understanding of a weaving, where it relates to the dialectic of warp and weft. Anni Albers’s capabilities to exploit this opposition, to articulate its conceptual richness, became manifest in her experimental fabric for the auditorium of the ADGB Trade Union School (Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes) in Bernau in 1930. Her design used a combination of fibers (including the recently invented cellophane) to improve the sound-absorbing capacities of

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ordinary velvet, adding a light-reflective surface that, on the front side of the fabric, allowed the latter to preserve a clean appearance in spite of fingerprints and other signs of wear. With this solution, Albers not only earned her Bauhaus diploma but also proved her technical mastery of the dualism inherent to weaving technique. In this case, as in many of the plain weavings she designed in this period, conceptualization of a function prevailed over specific pictorial concerns, though it did not preclude them—even less did it prevent them from attaining the “thoughtfulness” of art. Experimental textile samples, along with textiles used for interior space distribution (such as “room dividers”), coexisted in her Bauhaus production with modern tapestries normally typified as “wall hangings,” in which rhythmical, orthogonal relations of color were the predominant motif. Rhythm, in that case, was also dependent on the weaver’s mastery of a dialectic of layers and chromatic “voices”—an orchestration of threads in weaves that could be double, triple, even quadruple. Historically, the functional side of a weaving appears to be related to architecture, as a primitive form of it and, later, to the organization of the interior. Its visual side, however, invokes the tradition of painting through the archetype of the tapestry. In both instances, weaving bears a relation of subordination to the dominant field. However, already in the 1860s the architect and historian Gottfried Semper had demonstrated the determining historical precedence of the technical or applied arts over later, higher types, as well as the primacy of textile work over all of them: Textiles should undoubtedly take precedence . . . as the primeval art form from which all other arts borrowed their types and symbols, whereas it itself seems quite independent in this respect. Textile types evolved within the art itself or were borrowed directly from nature. . . . All [textile] forms arising from these purposes approximate either linear or planimetric form. Linear forms are better suited to stringing or binding or to representing the idea symbolically. Planimetric forms are necessary to cover, protect, or enclose; they have also become self-evident symbols for the concepts of protecting, covering, and enclosing in art.17 Textiles were, before architecture, the original space dividers.18 With them came the first human understanding of the organization of space, visually and physically, but they also provided surfaces, artificial walls, for the development of symbolic, graphic language. Thus textiles, in their history as techne, invoke the eye (vision, the picture) as much as they invoke the body

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(skin, the dweller’s body surrounded by fabric). “The most important general factors affecting the style of covers are the attributes of the surface: that is, its extension in breadth and length, the absence of the third dimension as an active element, the boundary lines . . . together with the general purpose of the cover, as something uniformly inclusive. From this follows that the envelope or cover should manifest itself as a surface.”19 The duality of the weaving relies, then, not only in its front-back and weft-warp relationships, but also in the visual-tactile purposes that determine their qualities. From space division by means of artificial, portable, pliable, sign-bearing, or plain covers emerges the primeval conception of geometrical planes. When perceived between spaces, these thin planar objects appear as dividing lines. “The active part, the line,” wrote Klee, “can accomplish two things by its impetus: It may divide the form in two parts, or it may go still further and give rise to a displacement.”20 What his understanding of the line lets us see (and probably Anni Albers saw it too) is that in addition to the line-plane relationship on one face of the work, there is a deeper relationship between them inside and throughout the fabric. A fabric, we may say, is a three-dimensional object with nothing between its two opposed surfaces. They twine in the inside, and to look inside a weaving is very much to look through it. In many cases, both surfaces can be read as front surfaces. A weaving is, again, Janus-faced.

weaving, pictorial The line-plane relationship originally materializes in the relationship between thread and fabric. The “line on a walk, moving freely” that Klee evokes in his teaching,21 can then be carried back to Albers’s “event of a thread” in her opening of On Weaving. Reflecting on her art as a weaver — decades after her departure from the Bauhaus, with the maturity obtained after fifteen pioneering years as a teacher and an artist at Black Mountain College, and fifteen more in Connecticut — Albers considers the graceful collaboration of contraries in her work. Speaking about the weaver’s “medium,” she looks at the matière, the “textural,” as the elementary aspect of weaving, its “essence.”22 The greater the variance in the textile’s fibers, the richer the matière. However, she affirms elsewhere, If we think of a tapestry as an articulation in terms of forms made of threads. . . . It seems as if the emerging awareness of a fabric’s usefulness,

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when linked with the increased ease of its fabrication, tended to dilute its magic potentiality as an art medium. . . . The utilitarian side of a fabric’s character so powerfully dominates our estimate of it today that we easily appraise even a tapestry—that is, a woven picture—in terms of practical advantages before recognizing its merit as a formulation in pictorial terms—that is, as a work dealing with form per se.23 In other words, coverage need not take precedence over picture-bearing in our understanding of the dual function of a weaving. The latter presupposes different relationships with the human body — multiple uses that appear incompatible only in an era of extreme division of labor, so we seem to have trouble considering them simultaneously and nonhierarchically. Albers’s experience at the Bauhaus had given her full understanding of the technicalities, but also the inherent conceptual problematic, of weaving as design and technical discourse. Her relocation and subsequent work in the United States allowed her to further investigate weaving’s pictorial dimension and to inquire into the remote past of textile practices, on the loom as well as in her travels through the Americas. Considering the archetype of tapestry on the one hand, and the functional typologies (such as wall hangings and room dividers) cultivated at the Bauhaus, she developed the “pictorial weaving” between the 1930s and 1960s as her signature formulation of the “woven picture.” But what kind of picture, to be precise? One could venture that the difference between a pictorial weaving and a traditional tapestry is a matter of mere emphasis on the visual aspect, or even that it relies on a greater independence from painted models — but both hypotheses prove inconsistent against certain key examples. Works such as Monte Albán (1936; figure 1), or even La Luz II (1958; see plate 110), present the picture’s motifs only insofar as they manifest as texture, matière, an interlacing of threads that could be aptly compared to contrapuntal patterns in a musical score. Meanwhile, one can say that Monte Albán presents more similarities to a written script or score than Ancient Writing (1936; figure 2), despite the figurative orientation imposed by their titles. If there is abstraction, it is not only that of a pictorial motif but rather of the pictorial function itself. In weaving, the pictorial returns to ancient soil. Simultaneously, such references to writing are to be considered in light of later works such as Haiku (1961) and Code (1962), and most importantly, the devotional “scrolls” of Six Prayers (1966– 67; figure 3) and Epitaph (1968; figure 4). Written scripts, in these works, are

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Figure 1. Anni Albers, Monte Albán, 1936.

Figure 2. Anni Albers, Ancient Writing, 1936.

not mere objects of allegory, but an archaic presence within the weave. As it is well known, weaving also takes etymological precedence over writing, if we look at the relationship between text and textile. Moreover, the intimate connection of weaving and architecture, as well as other tectonic arts (such as carpentry, tekton) is present in the common root tek-.24 Writing, its semblance, is obtained in these weavings by the succession of meandering lines that come in and out of the surface, passing from back to front of the weave in different lengths, sometimes in the form of dots. They run in parallel horizontal lines, but they also move down with a curve — that is, like meanders on a map rather than lines of text; they read discontinuously and diagonally; some parts of them could be landscapes. In fact, their construction is purely rhythmical, and only as a totality — a Gestaltung, a design — does it signify or, rather, read itself. The zigzagging forms of Albers’s weaving script are most clearly formulated in such works as Two (1952; see plate 105) and, especially, Red Meander (1954; figure 5). Their graphic matrix, the meander, is an ancient decorative pattern traditionally employed to mark the limits of objects, mostly weavings and ceramics. The meander was a common object of interest for both Anni and Josef Albers, and we may see in it the junction of their understanding of pictorial matters. “The meander,” writes Josef in Search versus Re-Search, “is considered of Greek origin . . . but nowhere has it been cultivated more through all periods than by the Amerindians from the most northern Tlingits to the most southern Araucanians.” For him, The meander deserves our special attention because it teaches us both basic drawing and basic design. As design it presents a linear organization at the same time very intricate and very simple. Intricate because of its figure-ground relatedness in which figure and ground are simultaneously and alternately theme and accompaniment, thus guiding and following each other. Simple, when we discover that the underlying unit measures an alternating decrease and increase in the extension of the lines. . . . Virtually one line is done; but the adjacent ground, accompanying its movement, transforms its one voice into two, three, and more voices and echoes.25 Thus a most basic and universal ornament appears, under this light, as a key to understanding one of the preconditions of modernist painting: the upsetting and ultimate dissolution of the figure-ground opposition — without which, to use Yve-Alain Bois’s formulation, “no perception could establish

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Figure 3. Anni Albers, Six Prayers, 1966–1967.

Figure 4. Anni Albers, Epitaph, 1968.

itself in imaging synthesis,” making abstraction and its artistic agenda properly inconceivable.26 Nevertheless, the Alberses considered this pattern as a compositional matrix already at work in ancient art forms that, in Anni’s work, functioned as visual and material prototypes. “Art does not begin with naturalistic constructs,” said Worringer, “but with ornamental-abstract ones.”27 Now, for such a cancellation of the figure-ground opposition (which Josef read in musical terms, as a theme-accompaniment relationship) to take effect, the meander has to move from the margins to the totality of the picture. When this happens, the meander naturally becomes a maze. Anni Albers explores this principle in a number of variations through her graphic and printed work from the late-1960s onward (figure 6). She represents the maze as a synthesis of the weaving’s weave, or as a thread in search for its loom, or an infinite form that the picture frame cannot contain or comprehend.28 Her design doesn’t necessarily oppose, at times, a semblance to children’s play. Meanwhile, this operation effects another alteration that is key in the modernist debate. A form, traditionally used as decorative motif or ornament, takes a leading position in the picture in an attempt to abolish the very regime of the ornamental. Again, this transformation of the visual order is a condition for abstraction in painting (as much as the absorption of the pedestal, for example, by Brancusi, would be a condition for abstraction in sculpture). But again, abstraction dominates ancient art forms — fundamental models that crucially contribute to the critique of “progress” in modernist art. If the ultimate realization of modernist painting is the monochrome (what Worringer would have characterized as the final denial of space), the plain weave appears as the arché of painting. In ancient time, the evolution of weaving as a technique of “material execution,” to use Pierre Francastel’s words, ran parallel to its evolution as a “technique of figuration,” what in terms of an emancipated or independent skill we simply call art.29 It would not be preposterous to say that Anni Albers’s pictorial weavings stand, on a general level, as paradigmatic representations of the pictorial itself and its origins. They are oblique figurations of painting — woven de-pictions. It is also plausible to think that the symbolic languages of ancient art forms, especially weaving as a matrix of the graphic arts, evolved precisely and only through the gradual unfolding of abstract forms, disentangling the orthogonal meander, toward the free line. And yet, there is a fundamental difference in the way the pictorial manifests in weaving and in painting, and how abstraction is channeled through each. That difference is based on weaving’s dualism as an applied

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Figure 5. Anni Albers, Red Meander, 1954.

Figure 6. Anni Albers, Blue Meander, 1970.

Figure 7. Cover of Anni Albers’s book Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures, 1970.

and an independent art form. As Anni Albers demonstrates in her writing and practice, dualism is weaving’s greatest strength and weakness.

coda: the mexican janus Back in 1918, in what can be taken as an ambitious commentary of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Ernst Bloch saw the utopian aspiration of all the arts as a synthesis of the useful and the transcendental in the continuity of an abstract weaving: A third element thus lives between chair and statue, perhaps even above the statue: a higher-order “applied art” in which, instead of a comfortable, as it were stagnant carpet, assembled from moments of stabilization, a purely luxurious carpet for use, a true carpet extends, pointing beyond[;] a carpet of pure, abstract form. . . . Ornament appears as prelude, meaning precisely: as true carpet and pure form, as the more easily accomplished but thereby exemplary corrective to the transcendent form, to the seal, to the erupted, multidimensional, transcending ornament of recent painting, sculpture, and architecture.30 It would not be too daring to finally affirm that Anni Albers offered, knowingly or not, a compelling image of Bloch’s utopian carpet in her art. However, there may be good reasons to believe in the importance of maintaining the dialectic of art and design, useful and useless, high and low, at a point not of arrest but of perpetual dynamism, evading any hasty resolution — as On Weaving admirably shows. Opposition is a requirement for play; tension, a necessity of the loom. Perhaps Janus, the figure that gazes toward the past with one face and toward the future with the other, can be replaced by a figure that looks simultaneously in two directions and one. This tutelary figure can be found staring at us, on the cover of Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures, the catalogue Anni Albers put together in 1970 to present the collection of figurines she had gathered with Josef in their numerous travels far south of the border (figure 7). The figurine confronts us with two separate faces that share one eye. Her three gazes behold world, harvest, sky, the dead, and those yet to be born. We learn, from the conflicting interpretations, that this little icon (among “the most ancient representations of the human figure in the western hemisphere”31) is nameless, but it conjures the authority of Ometeotl, mother-father of the universe and supreme god of everything that is.

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notes The author wants to thank Karis Medina, Samuel McCune, and Maria Shevelkina for their precious help throughout the writing of this essay, as well as Nicholas Fox Weber and Brenda Danilowitz for their inspiring conversations about the work of Anni Albers. 1. “Tactile Sensibility,” chapter 8 of this volume. 2. T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 157, 163. 3. Anni Albers, Untitled lecture, New Haven, CT, 1963. Unpublished manuscript, conserved at the archives of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 10–11. 6. See Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi’s chronology in Anni Albers, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1999), 154. 7. Cited by Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed (London: Herbert Press, 1985), 83. 8. See, for instance, “A Start,” in On Designing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 36. 9. G. Naylor, ibid., 103. 10. The emphasis on prototype design would be radicalized by Mies van der Rohe when he assumed the leadership of the Bauhaus in 1930. See Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus (Berlin: Bauhaus Archiv/Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1998), 204–7. 11. Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 371–72. 12. Paul Klee, Notebooks, Vol. 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), 463. 13. Ibid., p. 17. See also Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933 : Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 282. 14. “Designing as Visual Organization,” chapter 10. 15. Yves Zimmermann, Del diseño (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1998), 105–12 and 164–67. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 113. 18. H. F. Mallgrave’s introduction, ibid., 13. 19. Ibid., 123. 20. Paul Klee, ibid., 7. 21. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 18. 22. “Designing as Visual Organization,” chapter 10. 23. “Tapestry,” chapter 9. 24. For another approach of the writing theme in Albers’s work, see T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory , 141–51. 25. Josef Albers, Search versus Re-Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 27–28. 26. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Muse (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990), 249. 27. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 55. 28. “The textile origin of architecture,” points out Asier Mendizabal, recurrently appears as “fossilized” forms in “frets, meanders, chains, braids, and arabesques.” “With the evolution of the construction and plastic techniques, [warp and weft] translate to

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other materials and techniques, replicating forms that would no longer be the result of the [weaving] process itself, but a symbolic remainder of past processes.” See A. Mendizabal, “Clay Vases: Geodesy and Craniometry,” in Problemas de estilo y vasijas de barro, exh. cat. (Quito: Zarigüeya/Alabado Contemporáneo, 2016), 41. 29. Pierre Francastel, Arte y técnica en los siglos XIX y XX (Madrid: Debate, 1990), 219. 30. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 17. 31. Gordon Bendersky, “Tlatilco Sculptures, Diprosopus, and the Emergence of Medical Illustrations.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 4 (2000): 477–501. The author wants to thank Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye for providing key information to understanding this figure.

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t’ai sm ith

On Reading On Weaving Traversing two linked paths, this essay first aims to think through the structure and form of Anni Albers’s On Weaving — or rather, the process through which the ideas unfold, how this artifact creates relationships between images and text, how it moves from topic to topic, how it follows “the event of a thread” (p. xi).1 It proposes, in other words, to read On Weaving as a particular object or medium: a book. Second, it seeks to consider the writing, designing, and initial publication of this book in 1965 as an event — one that emerged within a field of related statements but also generated new thought on this craft, and one that also participated, either by coincidence or perhaps causally, in a change of course within Anni Albers’s career. Not long after publishing On Weaving in 1965, the former-Bauhäusler gave up work at the loom altogether and focused her attention on another practice, printing, for the remainder of her life. Between these two methods, perhaps we can begin to imagine how, or why, Albers generated this text — that is, what this work, published forty-three years after she entered the Bauhaus as a student in 1922, may have implied for her as an artist, a designer, a weaver, and a writer. We might do well to begin describing what a book, as a medium or cultural technique, generally comprises and what it does. First, materially and technically, a book is bound by a flexible spine that stitches or glues together front and back covers with leaves of paper. Its printed pages are linked in a

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particular sequence, joining paragraphs with paragraphs, chapters with chapters, to generate connections between and among various strings of ideas. Importantly, these materials and binding techniques (paper, ink, stitched threads, and/or glue) together mediate the reader’s navigation (the method of page turning) and comprehension of the content. The book, as Bernhard Siegert might say of this cultural technique, entails a network of materials, operations, and gestures — at once visual and haptic — that together encode and mediate his or her processing of this symbolic system.2 In the case of On Weaving, for instance, the sequence of topics and the relationship between text, diagrams, and photographic images present the reader with a particular way to understand this category of textile practice. The book allows certain weaving methods and structures to be understood, but only because these elements have been mediated — they have become something else: configurations of bound threads, rendered as diagrams, seen in photographs, or described through words, have been rendered as a topic of investigation and analysis. Plates or plate references punctuate the stream of textual representations of textiles. At times, we focus on the text; at others, we jump back and forth between linguistic and visual modes. Once in a while, we remain absorbed in the images, thumbing through pages, grasping the story they tell (with the use of captions) on their own. On the one hand, words, images, and threads are bound in the space and temporality of the book — they are followed in parallel and simultaneously. Hence, we (the readers) feel as though we are traveling with Albers on a journey, we are following what she describes in her preface as “the event of a thread.” On the other, the book inserts a layer of distance: we read about or on the practice of weaving through a tool (the book), though we are not, in the process, actually weaving (on a loom). We are always aware, somehow, of this simultaneous overlap and disjunction. Indeed, Albers understood and seemingly sought to draw our attention to this fact — that these two cultural techniques provide similar, but also distinct, methods of articulating the world.3 Albers’s book thus both engages us in thought about weaving and underscores its mediation; in reading this device, we are at once absorbed by and distanced from the content, entangled and disentangled, simultaneously.4 But On Weaving was also an event in a historical sense — one that transpired with its publication in America in 1965, and that provided, at a certain moment, a certain statement about the “visual, structural side of” textiles (p. ix). On Weaving was, as Foucault would say, a “statement . . . an event that

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neither the language nor the meaning [could] quite exhaust.”5 It offered to weavers and designers — especially those who found themselves “in conflict with the economic pattern of [their] time” — an opportunity, as she said, “to stop and think, or, perhaps, think and stop” (p. 60). Albers’s resolutely medium-focused and at times technical intervention was important in some sense because it stood against the work of many artists in the 1960s who were pursuing anti-disciplinary models, like happenings or minimalism. At the same time, the field of textile design was increasingly oriented to experiments in chemistry. Kevlar, a para-aramid synthetic fiber later used for car tires and bulletproof vests, for example, was developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont the same year that On Weaving was printed. Nevertheless, if this book was concerned with the empirical dimensions of the textile medium, it also suggested possibilities — new ways of linking visual and structural work in thread, or art and design. Perhaps it even provided a kind of blueprint for a series of three exhibition catalogues authored by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen between 1969 and 1981, ones that sought to frame and inspire practitioners who would consolidate under the fiber art movement.6 Whether consciously aware of Albers’s book, or not — or just the wall hangings by Sophie Täuber-Arp and Lenore Tawney that were found as reproductions among its pages — artists, like Eva Hesse or the painter-cum-fiber artist Sheila Hicks, began about this time to experiment with threads and thread-like techniques as alternative methods of sculptural fabrication. Further, we might say that Albers’s book emerged out of a field of tangential statements and events. We could take note of just a few, though the list would never be exhaustive: her discussions about education with colleagues (like Ted Dreier) and other weavers (like Trude Guermonprez) at Black Mountain College between 1933 and 1948; the course on Mesoamerican art led by art historian George Kubler that she attended at Yale in 1952; or the correspondence and visits she had with Junius Bird at the American Museum of Natural History in New York about Andean weaving techniques. Seemingly further afield, we could note the publication in 1961, also with Wesleyan University Press, of Silence by her friend from Black Mountain, John Cage; or the fact that, after immigrating to America, she began reading the work of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose understanding of the “event” — and those object-ingredients that exist only as they can “be again” — surely impacted her thought.7 And closer to home, the publication of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color in 1963, the purposeful design of which

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Anni greatly admired (and whose co-designer, Norman Ives, she originally wanted to hire for On Weaving).8 Or, we could focus on the details of the multiyear process of historical and practical research on her craft, the process of writing (and rewriting) the text since the mid-1950s, or the three-year process in which Albers corresponded, via post or in person, with her editors over various “concerns” — like the use and number of images, the warm tone of the paper, or the typography. The publication of On Weaving, indeed, was a uniquely important project within Albers’s longer career, precisely because it overlapped and was contiguous with other events.9 Either way, if the specific techniques and impacts of and on this book are to be situated in the passage of Albers’s career, it must be understood that weaving and writing were intimately linked for much of her life. Beginning at the Bauhaus as a student in the weaving workshop and continuing into her time teaching at Black Mountain College, and while designing fabrics for Knoll or making what she called “pictorial weavings,” Albers was also absorbed in the practice of crafting arguments through words: in lectures, essays, articles, and books. Her first essay, “Bauhaus Weaving,” was published as a magazine article in 1924, while her last was a lecture, “Material as Metaphor,” given on a panel at the College Art Association annual conference in 1982. In 1963, however — in the midst of negotiations with the publisher over the use of particular images or whether she would have final say over any edits — she turned her attention to yet another practice: printing. Four decades after she had begun weaving at the Bauhaus, Albers made what she would later call a “great breakaway” from the rigidity of the loom. Her introduction to lithography allowed her to leave the rectilinear frame of the loom and the perpendicular joining of threads to initiate a new adventure in visual, material ideas. What she discovered during her time in Los Angeles at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was a new way of thinking about the relationship between material and figurative things. If language had offered Albers a way to navigate weaving practice through words, printing allowed her to figure, in visual form, the dynamism of threads. Executed in the short time of her first visit, her initial prints include a set of two, titled Enmeshed I and II (1963), which reproduce the same motif — knotted threads — on an acid-dappled and then a flat, gray ground (figure 1). The following summer, by invitation from the workshop’s head, June Wayne, Albers worked with a team of printers to create a series of six unique images titled Line Involvements (1964). As meditations on the possibilities of a new (but also

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her old) medium, lines were inscribed as threads onto a stone; a tangle is at once embedded into and appears to float within the ground. Because the layers of Line Involvement I, for instance, were printed slightly off register, a kind of white highlight appears to mediate the outline of the threads and the space around it.10 The figure hovers like a ghost — not quite present — at once before- and afterthoughts (figure 2). I want to suggest that these prints are important not just because they were produced in the run up to the publication of On Weaving but also because they express Albers’s distinct concerns while discussing the design of her book with the publishers. As another device for thinking on weaving, the lithographs allowed Albers to contemplate the ways any medium or language both can and cannot translate any other. As with the book’s use of text and images, the dimensional-temporal nature of threads and weaving processes could never emerge from the flat bed of the print. With this rubric in mind, in what follows I will trace how Albers’s book unfolds along four paths. Though these paths are not undertaken in a fully linear fashion (she returns to certain themes at different moments), it is possible to identify them in the grouping of the chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the basics of weaving and the loom, aiming to build a kind of apparatus for reading this book. Chapters 3 through 7, in turn, explore the development of various techniques for constructing, interlacing, and diagramming threads — building, for instance, from “fundamental” to “modified” and “composite” weaves. Chapter 8 homes in on the value of a tactile sensibility in a world otherwise dominated by the practices of reading and seeing. Finally, in chapters 9 and 10, Albers meditates on the synthetic relationship between the material, techniques, and the objective of “visual organization.” Stitched together, the chapters and the images give us insight into her interest in two distinct-yet-related methods: writing or reading words; binding or weaving threads. They also suggest the passage of her own thought — her move from a practice grounded in the craft on the loom to a broader approach to designing as a visual mode of organization.

weaving (the loom and language) Partly motivated to detail an empirical analysis of the medium and its techniques, but also to provide a feeling for the complexity and depth of her topic,

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Figure 1. Anni Albers, Enmeshed II, 1963.

Albers’s book begins by considering the interconnection among weavingrelated things. A reprint of a previously published encyclopedia entry, the first chapter functions as a brief overview of the “basic principle” of this “method of forming a pliable plane of threads by interlacing them rectangularly” (p. 1). The focus, we understand right away, is on the development of process, the method, rather than categorizing distinctions. “Weaving,” she might say, comprises histories, materials, techniques, and concepts that can never be fully separated. From the first paragraph, her text luxuriates in the complexity of its primary topic — how “one of the most ancient crafts” continues, in the present, “essentially unchanged” — but also the practice through which it is doing the luxuriating: writing. The pace of her prose is slow and meditative; it is attentive and purposeful. Not prone to grandiloquence or posturing, the sentences are rarely “exciting,” but nor are they purely technical or descriptive. Instead, they work over the topic, massaging its threads, once in a while providing glimmers of subtle insight. One can hear the rhythmic breath of passing weft through warp — the consistency of the pattern makes the consistency of the texture; we sense the repetitive yet contemplative nature of the weaving practice when performed “by hand” on a loom. Albers indeed relished the correspondences between weaving and writing: different, yet also similar, practices or operations: binding threads, stringing together words into texts. Both are techniques that connect certain materials, processes, and patterns of thought into a texture—a material yet also conceptual rhythm. Writing creates links among words in a lineal sequence, moving from page to page, a set of thoughts building over time: the arrangement of words into a sentence develop into the structure of the paragraph, into the essay or book. Weaving, similarly, constructs a fabric or “pliable plane” by joining and building up threads, layer after layer through a “process of passing the weft between taut, alternately raised warps, as in the basic plain weave, or between other combinations of selected warps, and pressing it into place” (p. 1). As Nicholas Fox Weber recalls about her practice of writing, in an effort to maintain the flow or connection of thought, when she reached the end of a page on her typewriter, Albers pasted the short end of the paper to another sheet, thereby creating a continuous scroll or fabric of ideas.11 Her manuscripts thus bound handwritten or typed words in order to provide a temporal space for meditation on a particular topic; similarly, her woven fabrics bound threads of various thicknesses and properties (shiny or dull) in various structures (plain, twill, or satin) in order to create a pliable plane.

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Figure 2. Anni Albers, Line Involvement I, 1964.

Also like writing, weaving is subject to differences generated within historical developments. Hence, the chapter on “The Loom” follows next. Before entering into the moment of weaving or binding threads (which really, insofar as this term really references the weft, is only one moment in the process), before doing this practice of shuttling or binding threads, but also even before the moment of tying up (or warping) the loom, one must “start from the ground of particular observation” — that is, the limitations imposed by the structure of this apparatus. As Albers suggests in her flight across its history, the loom’s structure is not evolutionary but rather marked by different systems of value — with economic drivers, or modes of equivalence, becoming a motivation for the development of modern machines. Without observing the specificity of this device, “the loom” — which is, in fact, plural (marked by many different types) and historically complex — the reader can go nowhere. The “story of the loom,” told in eight images, further details the ancient-intomodern spread of this craft. This pairing of the first and second chapter is important for establishing a kind of guiding principle, a foundational condition that helps to explain the texture of the book’s scheme. Weaving is a particular method, like writing, that binds or connects historical movement.

constructing (threads and diagrams) If On Weaving starts with a general meditation on the practice and then turns to the complex history of the apparatus, it is quickly followed by several chapters (3 through 7) on the methods of binding threads. Mediated by a plethora of referenced diagrams, the focus here is on the practice and techniques of constructing a pliable network or surface. We might also say, then, that these chapters are interested in difference, or the ways in which an apparently unified medium always, at the same time, creates distinctions among its structures and conceptual things. Further, implicit in these chapters is the complex relationship between the diagram or method of “draft notation” and the practice of weaving threads. A particular kind of sign, a diagram, according to American philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, provides a “skeleton-like sketch of its object in terms of relations between its parts”; it essentially details a procedure of thought.12 Referencing the point of intersection between warp and weft, the weave draft allows the weaver to code and decode (or record and read) the process of manufacture — how to tie up the loom, the sequence in which to shuttle the weft, how to bind a particular structure.

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Indeed, as both a weaver and a writer, Albers was attentive to the analogies but also the differences between their operations. She understood that the code embedded in weaving is not verbal; it is a different way of articulating space, thought, and communication.

reading (tactile sensibility) The codes found in textile structures, Albers might have said, are more mathematical-structural or diagrammatic than properly linguistic. But they are also haptic on two levels — both within the structure or texture of the woven fabric (the object) and in the method of manufacture (the process). Hence, in her chapter on “Tapestry,” she notes that, “[a]long with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning” (p. 50). Pictorial weavings encoded ideas through images embedded in the structure of the cloth, but also through the physical makeup of the material. And these could on some level be “read.” Yet, as is evident in her chapter on “Tactile Sensibility,” the experiences of seeing, listening, and touching were equally paramount to this practice. If one needs to listen more closely to the material or “activat[e] . . . our latent perceptivity of matière,” in order to discover “the epidermis of the cloth,” Albers argued, it is precisely because it is silent (p. 47). Textiles are not texts involving words — discrete graphical inscriptions on a page, or what Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called “sound images” — but rather haptic and structural processes-cum-textures. Threads and fabrics communicate through stitched connections and tactile experience; “reading” a textile entails an entanglement of different sensory modes. Indeed, just as writing was foundational to her practice, so too was reading (or listening). It is apparent from several in-text citations and a bibliography at the end of her chapter on the loom that Albers had absorbed the texts and ideas of numerous anthropologists and historians of textiles, including Junius Bird, Luther Hooper, and M.D.C. Crawford. But it is also possible to detect her reading of Cage’s work on the value of silence, or the philosopher Whitehead, whom she cited in two earlier texts found in On Designing, and whose book, The Function of Reason (1929), she excitedly sent to Ted Dreier for his birthday in May 1948.13 Neither name is present as a printed name in the book, yet her reading of Whitehead’s guiding concept of “the event,” and Cage’s articulation of those chance events that transpire within

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the performance (another event) are seemingly used to frame the writing and reading of the book. In some combination, the event (of reading and feeling) propels Albers’s book forward and backward — from the “realization of everextending relationships” to those thoughts that can “be traced back to the event of a thread”—and then forward, again, to the imagined reader (p. xi). Any act of reading can be performed only from the standpoint of the reader — a layer of mediation that acts upon the “ideas” apparently contained within a text. And Whitehead, in particular, was read through the network of experiences she brought to his books. His “cosmology” surely appealed to her interest in elaborating the interwoven nature of her process — the general reality of “the flux of things”14 But her reading was still weighted by the network of ideas that she carried from the Bauhaus (making things that “function,” for instance) or from Black Mountain (a field of artists and scholars who saw education as performance). Indeed, if Whitehead’s words had sparked her thought on the process of threads, his cosmological “event” was surely subject to a degree of misprision (which is perhaps why she knew enough not to cite him). Nevertheless, these parallel approaches to the event are central to the book. We might even say that On Weaving provides a meditation on the experiences of reading and listening — that is, those engagements with the ideas and materials of others, as she writes in the introductory note. If her book’s audience — or the future reader she “hope[s] to include” — is “not only weavers but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems” (p. ix), then we might also imagine she was engaged in a (silent) dialogue with artists, composers, and philosophers beyond the domain of textiles proper.

figures (from fabric to print) Chapter 10, “Designing as Visual Organization” concludes by addressing the ethics of designing a fabric — using the example of a “submissive wall covering” for a gallery wall. Here, Albers recaps her argument that design practice requires attending, simultaneously, to the technical, tactile, and visual dimensions of textured weaves. Going further, she argues that any fabric ultimately “formed itself,” to which a designer could work only through “attentive passiveness” (p. 59, 56). If cultural techniques like weaving, books, or doors, as Siegert explains, “inevitably comprise a more or less complex actor-network that includes technical objects and chains of operations (including gestures)

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in equal measure,” then the “ ‘human touch,’ the power of agency typically ascribed to humans, is not a given but is constituted by and dependent on cultural techniques. In this sense, [they] allow the actors involved to be both human and nonhuman; they reveal the extent to which the human actor has always already been decentered by the technical object.”15 For Albers, who was concerned with developing an “anonymous” design practice, she indeed understood that “the power of agency” resided elsewhere, in the network of materials and processes — the loom, the threads, their movements. But the final chapter also hints at another aspect of the book: the image plates that lend much to the book’s visual organization. These plates are not just meaningful to the main, textual story being told; they also present another mode of communication, a different or parallel way of unfolding the story of weaving in print. Illustrations of looms are followed by diagrams — from drafts of basic weaves to figures of various methods for binding thread; these are then followed by photographic close-ups of textures, or tactile-structures; after which come ancient through modern tapestry samples. Indeed, the question of “design as visual organization” is made material only after all the layers of history, technique, and texture have been exhausted. At this point, we understand, fabric becomes an image to print. A few typed notes from a discussion between Albers and Willard A. Lockwood, the director of Wesleyan University Press, on February 13, 1963, describe several areas being considered: “Contents,” “Drawings and diagrams,” “Photographs,” “Format and production.”16 There were, at this point, projected to be more than fifty-five photographs, approximately thirty-five diagrams, and eleven chapters, the order of which was “not decided; indeed it need not be decided until we’re in galleys.” (As it turns out, only ten chapters were published and ultimately 112 black-and-white and 9 color plates were included.) What this suggested, first, was that each of the “papers” were linked by the theme, but were not yet determined by a definite sequence, a linear trajectory. This is not to say that Albers was relaxed or laissez-faire about the process — quite the contrary. Many of the letters that comprise the correspondence with the publisher concern the matter of content (whether or not to include an index), the layout of the table of contents, the typeface, whether to use all caps or title case for the headings, or the best medium (screen print or lithograph) with which to print images. In this discussion, we presciently hear the murmur of Albers’s new interest in printing. Or perhaps a concern with translating threads into images that

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had already emerged in sketches and gouache images she created in 1947, or the rug design she executed in 1959, where the thread — or rather the image described by intermingling lines — starts to conceptualize her knot of practices. Indeed, the production of On Weaving, between the years of 1962 (when she began discussions with editors at Wesleyan University Press) and 1965 (when it was published) paralleled the development of her new adventure in printing, a transition that was thematized for a couple of years, from 1963 to 1964, in the space of lithographs and silkscreens. Given the opportunity to turn her threads into lithographs during the fall of 1963, Albers accepted Tamarind Workshop’s invitation to experiment with this graphic medium. Her notebooks from the time reveal drawings of interlacing threads— sometimes one or two or several threads begin at the edge of the graphic field and then bind toward the center into a knot, traversing the field as they exit on the other side. Others, however, depict an autonomous universe, a kind of knotless net with no beginning or end. The story would continue. The title of Albers’s final text, “Material as Metaphor,” which she gave as a lecture in 1982, implied (through the preposition “as”) the correlation, overlap, and symmetry between concrete and rhetorical things. One might say that these two objects or devices (writing and weaving) were inseparable in Albers’s mind. Indeed, they had always, in some sense, mediated one another; she understood the codes of written and diagrammatic language through the codes found in textiles and vice versa. Yet she also understood that they implied two different experiences and modes. Material is thus not a metaphor (in an ontological sense). Material comes to be compared with (the idea of the) metaphor only through another device, the use of a preposition, as. The comparison, as, carries with it the mark of its mediation across linguistic and conceptual categories. Such an insight, we might say, emerged at precisely the moment of the designing and publication of her book, On Weaving, and of her simultaneous engagement with a new practice, printing.

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notes 1. All parenthetical page citations to Albers’s text in this essay refer to the current volume. 2. In Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), German media theorist Bernhard Siegert explains how cultural techniques entail certain operations and constitute particular effects. For instance, in his chapter on the ontic operation of the door, which produces “the primordial difference of architecture — that between inside and outside” (192), Siegert explains that cultural techniques “inevitably comprise a more or less complex actor-network that includes technical objects and chains of operations (including gestures) in equal measure” (193). 3. I have previously argued that Anni Albers, having developed her practice at the Bauhaus and having written in the discursive field of postwar America, was very attentive to the specific workings of different media — what differentiated, say, woven and textual objects and practices. See my “Conclusion: On Weaving, On Writing,” in Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 141–74. Here, I situated her ideas alongside and against the modernist discourse of medium specificity promoted by the art critic Clement Greenberg, on the one hand, and the emergent field of media studies found in the work of the Canadian literary scholar and theorist Marshall McLuhan, on the other. But for reasons that will become more apparent, it is perhaps more fruitful to consider Albers’s work and practice, including her deployment of the book, through a method of cultural techniques as detailed by Siegert. 4. In this sense, Albers’s book could be said to yield what Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky proposed in his essay from 1917, “Art as Device.” Here he argues that art is a technique or device of “defamiliarization,” whereby the work’s content or material is presented in a “strange” way (as in poetry) in order to enhance the reader’s perception of the world. This parallels a statement about the medium made by Albers in 1939: “Recognizing in matter its potentialities and its limitations may also help us clarify the ideas of the medium in art when it is immaterial. This idea of the medium in art is often misunderstood. A distinction is necessary, to any artistic end, between the medium serving a purpose outside itself and the medium in its own right as for instance words used for reporting vs. words used in poetry. Some media have to be released from their representative meaning to make them fit for artistic purpose.” From “Art — A Constant,” in Anni Albers: On Designing (Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 46. The initial publication of On Designing was by Pellango Press in 1959. The first edition by Wesleyan University Press was in 1962. 5. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 28. 6. Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen authored three exhibition catalogues on this theme: Wall Hangings, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969); Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972); and Art Fabric: Mainstream (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981). Although not well received by art-world critics, these exhibitions and catalogues importantly framed the development of practices that would become known as “fiber art.” For more on these exhibitions and the work of artists working with thread and thread-like techniques in the 1960s and

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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1970s, see Elissa Auther, String Felt Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and T’ai Smith, “Architectonic: Thought on the Loom,” Journal of Modern Craft 4, no. 3 (November 2011): 269–94. In particular, Anni Albers read and cited Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas (London: Cambridge University Press, 1933, 1942) and Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926) in her essays “Weaving at the Bauhaus” (1939) and “Design: Anonymous and Timeless” (1947), respectively. Both of these essays are found in On Designing. In The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), Whitehead describes the relationship between objects and events in a way that would have appealed to Albers’s understanding of textile techniques and fabrics: “An object is an ingredient in the character of some event. In fact the character of an event is nothing but the objects that are ingredients in it and the ways in which those objects make their ingression into the event. Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say, ‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature that can ‘be again’ ” (143–44). Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963) required collaboration with his former students and colleagues at Yale, Norman Ives and Sewell (“Si”) Sillman. Because the color plates were essential to the book’s technique of demonstration of the relativity of color, Norman Ives designed the three-part layout, while Sillman worked carefully with the method of screen-printing to mix the “eighthundred–plus colored inks for the plates.” See Brenda Danilowitz, “A Short History of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color,” in Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries, ed. Vanja Malloy (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2015), 20–21. As Isabelle Stengers summarizes Whitehead’s use of this term: “The name ‘event’ celebrates the ‘fact’ that what we discern always has a beyond.” Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Ideas, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 44. The process of printing and the way this was figured in the formal properties of the image are described by Nicholas Fox Weber in “Anni Albers as a Printmaker,” The Prints of Anni Albers: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1963–1984 (Bethany, CT: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 9–20, 10. Nicholas Fox Weber, “Foreword,” in Anni Albers, Selected Writings on Design, ed. Brenda Danilowitz (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), vii. See Frederik Stjernfelt’s discussion of Peirce’s theory of the diagram in Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 90. Anni Albers, letter to Ted Dreier, May 19, 1948. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archives, Albers-Dreier Correspondence, Box 2 Folder 17. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1978), 208: “[T]he flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.” Siegert, 193. In a quote that echoes Albers, Siegert continues: “The door appears much more as a medium of the coevolutionary domestication of animals and humans. The

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construction of a fold with a gate, something that turns the hunter into a shepherd, leads not only to the domestication of animal species but above all to the interruption of those human-animal metamorphoses that Paleolithic cave paintings attest to. Already Gottfried Semper recognized the fold as ‘the most original vertical spatial enclosure [Abschluss] invented by man.’ ” 16. Wesleyan University Press archive.

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contributors Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer, teacher, and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, in their functional roles, as independent wall hangings, and as pictorial weavings. Born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899, she became a student in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1922–1925) and Dessau (1925–1932), where she met her husband Josef Albers and changed her name to Anni Albers. The Alberses immigrated to the United States in 1933, where from 1933 to 1949 Anni Albers headed the weaving studio at Black Mountain College. In 1949, she became the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The following year, Anni and Josef Albers relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, where Anni Albers continued to weave, design, and write. In 1959, a collection of her writings was published as On Designing; this was followed in 1965 by her pioneering book On Weaving. The recipient of numerous awards and citations, Anni Albers received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in the field of Craftsmanship in 1961. She died in Orange, Connecticut, in 1994. Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and founder and president of Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization devoted to medical care, education, and the arts in isolated villages in rural Senegal. He has written fifteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier, and, most recently, Freud’s Trip to Orvieto (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017). Manuel Cirauqui is a curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, where he organized the exhibition Anni Albers: Touching Vision (2017). His writing has appeared in BOMB, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Frieze Magazine, and in several exhibition catalogues. T’ai Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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plate credits All works by Anni Albers © 2017 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Frontispiece. Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937. Photo: Helen M. Post. Courtesy the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. 1. Earliest known representation of a loom. Predynastic Egyptian decorated pottery dish, ca. 3700 b.c. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London. Image from Ciba Review, No. 16, December 1938. 2. Loom from Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. © Vb 8317; Museum der Kulturen Basel; all rights reserved. Photo: Omar Lemke, 2017. 3. Amasis Painter (6th century b.c.; attributed to). Lekythos (oil flask) with women making woolen cloth. Greek, Attic, ca. 550–530 b.c. Terracotta, h. 6 3/4 in. (17.15 cm). Fletcher Fund, 1931 (31.11.10). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, New York. 4. Vessel (with rattle) made of pottery. Moche, Trujillo. Am1913,1025.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum. 5. Back-strap loom (diagram) of the type used in Peru. Image # 123725. The American Museum of Natural History Library, New York. 6. Okinawa loom, Japan. A transitional loom with back strap and foot treadle. From A Study of Okinawan Textile Fabrics, by Toshio and Reiko Tanaka, © 1952 by Meiji-Shobo Ltd., Kanda, Tokyo. 7. A medieval loom. From the Ypres Book of Trades, ca. 1310. Source unknown. 8. A Chinese draw-loom. Source unknown. 9. A modern weaving room. Cone Mills Corporation, NC.

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10–12. Diagrams showing methods of draft notation. Anni Albers. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 13–15. Diagrams showing the fundamental constructions. Anni Albers. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 16–26. Diagrams showing modified and composite weaves. Anni Albers. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 27. (1) Knotted net, pre-Columbian. After Junius Bird, Handweaver & Craftsman, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1952. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 27. (2) Looping, knotless net, Neolithic Switzerland. After Ciba Review, No. 54, January 1947, p. 1947. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 27. (3) Looping, developed from knotless net. Ibid., p. 1948. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 28. Early techniques of thread interlacing. Twining. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 29. Early techniques of thread interlacing. Gauze or leno weave. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 30. Braid of the early Nazca period. After Lila M. O’Neale. Anthropology, Memoirs, Vol. II, No. 3, Field Museum, Chicago. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 31. Early techniques of thread interlacing. Soumak. Persian rug knot. Turkish rug knot. Source unknown. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 32. Loom, Santa Ana Hueytlalpan (after Bodil Christensen): “Otomi Looms and Quechquemitls from San Pablito, State of Puebla, and from Santa Ana Hueytlalpan, State of Hidalgo, Mexico,” Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, No. 78. 33. Twining, Admiralty Islands, Papua New Guinea, diagram from C. Nooteboom: “Quelques Techniques de Tissage des Petites Îles de la

Sonde” (Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, No. 3), © 1948 by Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, Netherlands. Reproduced by permission. Photo: Collection Nationaal Museum ver Wereldculturen. Coll. no. RV-300-1765. 34. Shaped shirt, ancient North Chile. 41.1/5403, Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, The American Museum of Natural History. 35. Fragment, Egypt, 5th century. Wool sprang, 11 × 16 5/8 in. (27.9 × 42.2 cm). Museum purchase from Friends of the Museum Fund, 1938-26-3. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York. 36. Braid, Nazca culture, Peru, 500– 650 a.d. Cotton, woven, 13 × 3 9/16 in. (33 × 9 cm). The Yale University Art Gallery 1958.13.8. Yale University Art Gallery, The Harriett Engelhardt Memorial Collection, gift of Mrs. Paul Moore. 37. Study made with grass. Anni Albers, late 1930s. Photo: Todd Webb. © Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, ME. 38. Study made with metal shavings. Anni Albers, late 1930s. Photo: Todd Webb. © Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, ME. 39. Study made with twisted paper. Anni Albers, late 1930s. Photo: Todd Webb. © Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, ME. 40. Study made with corn kernels. Anni Albers, late 1930s. Photo: Todd Webb. © Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, ME. 41. Study made on the typewriter. Anni Albers. Typewriter printing in black ink on paper mounted on board, 10 5/8 × 6 5/8 in. (27 × 16.8 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.18.7. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 42. Studies made on the typewriter. Anni Albers. Typewriter printing in blue ink on paper mounted on board, 10 5/8 × 6 5/8 in. (26.9 × 16.8 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.18.4. Photo:

Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 43. Studies made by puncturing paper. Anni Albers. Pinpricks on paper mounted on board, 27 × 16 7/8 in. (68.5 × 42.7 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.18.9. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging4Art. 44. Arrangement made by nature as contrast to arrangement made by design. Charles Eames. © 2017 Eames Office, LLC (eamesoffice.com). 45. Lace, Peru, Chancay, Late Intermediate period, 1100–1300 a.d. (detail). Cotton, 6 3/8 × 5 in. (13.6 × 11.4 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.86. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 46. Looped bag, Salta, northern Argentina (detail). Bast fiber, 24 × 13 1/2 in. (30.5 × 34.2 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.24. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 47. Study in twining. Nina Pattek, 1965. 48. Screen in looping technique. Dorothy Cavalier Yanik, 1962 (detail). 49. Tarascan lace, Mexico. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology; YPM ANT 231417, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT; peabody.yale.edu. Photo: Nathan Utrup. 50. Chiapas inlaid technique, Mexico. Source unknown. 51. Lace, Puebla, Mexico (detail of plate 52). 52. Lace, Puebla, Mexico. Cotton, 24 × 16 in. (61 × 40.6 cm). The Yale University Art Gallery, 1958.13.63. The Harriett Engelhardt Memorial Collection, gift of Mrs. Paul Moore. 53. Jason. Casement material, plain weave, leno reinforced. Jack Lenor Larsen. 54. Bahia Blind design by Larsen © Cowtan & Tout. 55. Space Divider. Anni Albers, 1949 (detail). Horsehair, jute, cellophane, and cotton, 12 1/2 × 14 3/4 in. (31.7 × 37.5 cm). Gift of the designer. The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: David Royter.

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56. Free-hanging room divider. Anni Albers, ca. 1949 (detail). Cotton, cellophane, and braided horsehair, 87 × 32 1/2 in. (221 × 82.5 cm). Gift of the designer. The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Sybil Wilson. 57. Drapery material, offset twill. Anni Albers, 1946 (detail). Photo: Todd Webb. © Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, ME. 58. Upholstery material, corded weave. Anni Albers, 1949 (detail). Photo: David Royter. 59. Fragment, Middle East, 13th century. Silk and linen 4&1 satin, 5 × 11 7/8 in. (12.7 × 30.1 cm). Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902-1-209-a,b. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Art Resource, New York. 60. Skirt fragment, USA, late 18th– early 19th century. Cotton, linen, and wool plain weave, 35 × 53 in. (88.9 × 134.6 cm). Museum purchase through gift of Jacques Séligmann, 1951-6-3. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/ Art Resource, New York. 61. Textile, Norway, ca. 1940. Wool, mercerized cotton, and silk double cloth, 23 1/4 × 17 3/4 in. (59 × 45.1 cm). Gift of Elisabeth Aschehoug, 1941-57-4. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/ Art Resource, New York. 62. Sound absorbing wall material, with diagram indicating light reflection. Anni Albers, Bauhaus period, 1929. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archive, Anni Albers papers 29.2. 63. Drapery material. Anni Albers, 1927. Cotton and rayon, 6 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. (15.9 × 10.8 cm). Gift of the designer. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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64−68. Diagrams showing tapestry constructions. Anni Albers. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 69. Diagram of warp position in a fabric of ca. 1600 b.c., showing double image of a bird with upraised head and neck, Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru. 41.2/1205, Courtesy of Junius Bird and The Division of Anthropology, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. 70. Painted effigy cloth, Peru, central coast, Chancay, Late Intermediate period 1100–1300 a.d., showing the difference of form elements from those of woven pieces. Cotton, 36 × 45 in. (89.5 × 113.7 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.23. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging4Art. 71. Cermonial Robe (Chilkat Blanket). 19th−20th century, Alaska. Tlingit culture. Wool (goat), commercial wool, plant fiber; 53 1/2 × 65 1/2 in. (134.9 × 166.4 cm). The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979 (1979.206.1040). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York. 72. Soumak technique, work of Ainu, Japan. © Ild 615; Museum der Kulturen Basel; all rights reserved. Photo: Omar Lemke, 2017. 73. Serape, Querétaro, Mexico, late 19th to mid-20th century. Woven cotton, 81 × 50 in. (205.7 × 127 cm). Yale University Art Gallery 1958.13.22. The Harriett Engelhardt Memorial Collection, gift of Mrs. Paul Moore. 74. Woman’s loin cloth with embroidered “pile” of the Bushongo, Congo. Purchased from J.F.G. Umlauff, 1912. Courtesy of Penn Museum, image # 295335/AF1416. 75. Fragment, possibly Egypt, 300– 900 a.d. Linen and wool tapestry weave, 6 3/8 × 9 in. (16.2 × 22.9 cm). Gift of Kirkor Minassian, 1921-29-1. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper

Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Art Resource, New York. 76. Textile, Fragment of a Band with Animals and Plants, Coptic, 5th– 6th century a.d. Flax, wool, 13 3/4 × 23 1/4 in. (35 × 59.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 08.480.52. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. 77. Coptic weaving. Photo: Robert Perron. Whereabouts unknown. 78. Looped weaving, Head, Coptic. Collection Norman Ives. Photo: Robert Perron. 79. Fragment of a Head, Coptic, Egyptian School. Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images. 80. Wool slit tapestry square, Egypt, 5th– 7th century. 6 × 5 3/4 in. (15.3 × 14.6 cm). Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902-1-72. Photo: Andrew Garn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York. 81. Looped weaving, Fragment with Figural Decoration, Coptic, 4th–5th century a.d. Flax, wool, 14 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. (36.8 × 36.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 38.683. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. 82. Band Fragment with Figural and Botanical Decoration, Coptic, 8th century a.d. Flax, wool, 20 1/2 × 4 in. (52.1 × 10.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Pratt Institute, 41.803. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. 83. Fragment of a Woman’s Head, Coptic, Egyptian School. Detroit Institute of Arts/ Founders Society Purchase, Octavia W. Bates Fund/Bridgeman Images. 84. Tapestry fragment, possibly Granada, Spain, 13th century (detail). Silk and metallic slit tapestry, 13 3/4 × 7 in. (34.9 × 17.8 cm). Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902-1-82. Photo: Scott Hyde. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York. 85. Peruvian sampler, Peru, Chimú, Late Intermediate Period, 1100−1300

a.d. Cotton and wool, 17 × 10 in. (42.2 × 22.9 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.3. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 86. Peruvian sampler. 25 1/2 × 10 in. (64.8 × 25.4 cm). 41.2/5401, Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. 87. Shirt, tapestry weave, Chimú, Peru. Purchased from Samuel Mathewson Scott, 1902. Courtesy of Penn Museum, image #43177. 88. Tapestry, a deity, Tiahuanaco, Peru, Huari, Middle Horizon, 600−1000 a.d. Wool, 9 × 5 in. (22.2 × 11.7 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.6. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 89. Tapestry detail, Middle Ica, Peru. Photo: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Whereabouts unknown. 90. Miniature Tunic, Wari, 500– 800 a.d. (detail). Cotton, camelid fiber, 8 11/16 × 12 1/2 in. (22.1 × 31.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, The Guennol Collection, 71.180. Photo: Brooklyn Museum. 91. Textile fragment, probably central coast, Peru, 1100−1300 a.d. Possibly Chancay culture. Cotton, plain weave with brocading wefts, 7 1/2 × 7 in. (19.1 × 17.8 cm). Anonymous gift through the Needlework and Textile Guild, 1930.791. The Art Institute of Chicago. Image Source: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York. 92. Tapestry, cloth, Pachacamac, Peru. William Pepper Peruvian Expedition; Max Uhle, subscription of Phebe A. Hearst, 1897. Courtesy of Penn Museum, image #32609. 93. Tapestry, fragment, Peru, Chimú. Late Intermediate, 1100−1300 a.d. Wool, 19 × 13 3/4 in. (47 × 32.7 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.9. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 94. Mantle fragment, Peru, 400–100 b.c. (detail). Wool tapestry with discontinuous

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warps, interlocked, 34 × 34 in. (86.3 × 86.3 cm). Gift of Harvey Smith, 1951-17-1. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York/ Art Resource, New York. 95. Double cloth, Pachacamac, Peru. William Pepper Peruvian Expedition; Max Uhle, subscription of Phebe A. Hearst, 1897. Courtesy of Penn Museum, image #32315B. 96. Triple cloth, Peru. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM#4428-30/4273 (digital file #99360003). 97. Tapestry, Peru, Chimú, Late Intermediate, 1100−1300 a.d. Cotton and wool, 6 7/8 × 19 7/8 in. (17.5 × 48.6 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.16.8. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 98. Fragment, Peru, ca. 600 a.d. Wool discontinuous and interlocked warps and wefts, 6 7/8 × 9 1/8 in. (17.5 × 23.2 cm). Museum purchase from Friends of the Museum Fund, 1938-56-3. Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York. 99. Carpet fragment depicting angels, early 16th century (detail). Wool and silk pile, asymmetrical knot, 39 3/8 × 26 in. (100 × 66 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Herbert L. Pratt in memory of his wife, Florence Gibb Pratt, 36.213g. Creative Commons-BY. Photo: Brooklyn Museum. 100. Tapestry weave, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, unknown artist, Norwegian, 17th century. Wool, bast fiber, 83 1/2 × 61 in. (212.09 × 154.94 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 43.18, © Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art. 101. Figures in a Rose Garden, South Netherlandish, 1450–1455 (detail). Wool warp, wool, silk, and metallic weft yarns, 149 × 104 in. (378.5 × 264.2 cm). Rogers Fund, 1909 (09.137.3). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image © The

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Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York. 102. Lace headcloth, Peru, 1400–1550 a.d., 29 1/2 × 27 5/8 in. (75 × 70.2 cm). Museum purchase from Au Panier Fleuri Fund, 1960-172-2. Photo: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. 103. Wall hanging, Dark River. Lenore Tawney, 1961. Linen and wool, 164 × 22 1/2 in. (416.6 × 57.2 cm). Greta Daniel Design Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Ferdinand Boesch. 104. Tapestry, Une Mesure d’un Conte de Fée (A Measure of a Fairy-Tale). Hans Arp, 1917. Woven by Sophie Täuber-Arp, 1926. Woven wool, 4 × 9 1/4 in. (10 × 23.5 cm). Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck. Photo: Wolfgang Morell. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2017. 105. Tapestry, Ramure. Hans Arp, 1963. Woven wool, 78 × 57 1/2 in. (198 × 146 cm). Executed by Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson, edition of 9 (3/9 executed in 1963). Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck. Photo: Wolfgang Morell. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2017. 106. Tapestry, La Férule. Michel Seuphor, 1960. 63 × 51 in. (160 × 129.5 cm) Belfius Art Collection. Photo: Phillipe Leclercq. 107. Tapestry, Composition vertical-horizontale (Composition Aubette). Sophie TäuberArp, 1927/1960. 191.5 × 124 cm, 3/1. Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno. 108. Tapestry, Nue au Cercle Rouge. Auguste Herbin (1882–1960). Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs (1902–1969), Aubusson, France, 1963. Wool, 78 × 61 in. (198.1 × 154.9 cm). 2314. Collection of Simona Blau. 109. Wool tapestry, Cassiopée. Victor Vasarely, executed 1963. Photo: Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA). 110. Wall hanging, Jacquard weaving. Anni Albers, 1925. 83 × 61 in. (210.8 × 154.9 cm). Whereabouts unknown. Photo: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 111. Wall hanging. Anni Albers, 1926, Woven, silk (three-ply weave); 70 3/8 ×

46 3/8 in. (178.8 × 117.8 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Association Fund, BR48.132. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 112. Wall hanging. Anni Albers, 1927/1964. Cotton and silk, 58 1/4 × 47 3/4 in. (147.9 × 121.3 cm). Gift of the designer in memory of Greta Daniel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. 113. Wall hanging, With Verticals. Anni Albers, 1946. Red cotton on linen, 61 × 46 1/2 in. (154.9 × 118 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2004.12.1. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 114. Tapestry, Two. Anni Albers, 1952. Linen, cotton, and rayon, 18 × 41 in. (47 × 102 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1996.12.3. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 115. Tapestry with leno weave. Anni Albers, 1950. Cotton and bast fiber, 25 1/2 × 15 in. (64.8 × 38.1 cm). Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. Photo: Steven Watson. 116. Pictorial weaving, Development in Rose II. Anni Albers, 1952. Linen, warp-stripe, weftbonded plain weave with open work and self-patterned by areas of discontinuous wefts, discontinuous single interlocking wefts, and gauze weave backed in areas with plain weave and/or main warp and ground weft floats. 24 3/8 × 17 3/4 in. (62 × 45.2 cm). Restricted gift of Laurance H. Armour, Jr. and Margot B. Armour Family Foundation, 1970.345. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York. 117. Pictorial weaving, Pictographic. Anni Albers, 1953. 18 × 40 in. (45.7 × 101.6 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images. 118. Pictorial weaving, Variations on a Theme. Anni Albers, 1958. Cotton, linen, and plastic, 34 1/2 × 30 1/2 in. (87.6 × 77.5

cm). Private Collection. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 119. Pictorial weaving, Pasture. Anni Albers, 1958. Mercerized cotton, 14 × 15 1/2 in. (35.6 × 39.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edwin C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969 (69.135). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York. 120. Tapestry, La Luz II. Anni Albers, 1958. Cotton, linen, and metal thread, 23 1/2 × 39 1/4 in. (59.7 × 99.7 cm). The Phyllis B. Lambert Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. 121. Vicara Rug I. Anni Albers, 1959. 60 1/4 × 40 in. (153 × 101.6 cm). Executed by Inge Brouard. Courtesy: Neues Museum Nuremberg, on loan from the City of Nuremberg. Photo: Neues Museum Nuremberg (Annette Kradisch). 122. Pictorial weaving, Dotted. Anni Albers, 1959. Wool: compound weave, 23 3/4 × 11 in. (60.3 × 27.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Daphne Farago Collection, 2012.1317. Photo © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 123. Pictorial weaving, North Westerly. Anni Albers, 1957. Cotton, rayon, and acrylic, bands of four-color complementary warp plain weave, weft-faced plain weave, weftfaced plain weave of discontinuous wefts, plain weave of discontinuous wefts, and gauze weave; main warp fringe. 15 1/4 × 23 1/4 in. (38.8 × 59 cm). Restricted gift of Mrs. John V. Farwell III, 1970.346. The Art Institute of Chicago. Image Source: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York. 124. Pictorial weaving, Under Way. Anni Albers, 1963. Woven fabric on cloth, mounted on wood, 29 1/8 × 24 1/8 in. (73.8 × 61.3 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

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The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981. Photo: Cathy Carver. 125. Pictorial weaving, Under Way. Anni Albers, 1963 (detail). 126. Ark Panels for Temple B’nai Israel, Woonsocket, RI. Anni Albers, 1962. Gold, black, white, cotton, and lurex woven panels, 64 × 84 in. (162.5 × 213.4 cm), 1962.12.3. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging4Art.

essay figure credits Afterword. Anni Albers with her book, On Weaving, New Haven, ca. 1965. Photo: © Walter Rüdel, Stuttgart. “The Two Faces of Weaving” 1. Anni Albers, Monte Albán,1936. Silk, linen, and wool, 57 1/2 × 45 in. (146.1 × 115 cm). Harvard University Art Museums/ Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard G. Leahy, BR 81.5. 2. Anni Albers, Ancient Writing, 1936. Rayon, linen, cotton, and jute, 59 × 43 3/4 in. (149.9 × 111.1 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Young, 1984.150. 3. Anni Albers, Six Prayers, 1966–1967. Cotton, linen, bast, and silver thread, 73 1/4 × 117 in. (186.1 × 297.2 cm). The Jewish

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Museum, Gift of the Albert A. List Family, JM 149-72.1-6. 4. Anni Albers, Epitaph, 1968. Cotton, jute, and metallic ribbon, 59 3/8 × 23 1/8 in. (194.8 × 58.4 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2005.12.1. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 5. Anni Albers, Red Meander, 1954. Linen and cotton, 20 1/2 × 14 3/4 in. (52.1 × 37.5 cm). Private Collection, 1954.12.1. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 6. Anni Albers, Blue Meander, 1970. Screenprint, 19 1/2 × 16 in. (49.5 × 40.6 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.11.14. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging4Art. 7. Cover of Anni Albers’s book Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1970). Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. “On Reading On Weaving” 1. Anni Albers, Enmeshed II, 1963. Lithograph, 17 1/4 × 27 1/4 in. (43.2 × 68.6 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.11.2. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. 2. Anni Albers, Line Involvement I, 1964. Lithograph, 19 3/4 × 14 1/2 in. (50.2 × 36.8 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.11.5a. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art.