The Richly Woven History of Textile Art
The Blanton Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art reveal the form's storied past and ties to modernism through the work of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay and others.

Austin, Texas

Near the beginning of "Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper" at the Blanton Museum of Art, a 1968 photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson portrays Albers with her husband, Josef, whose "Homage to the Square" paintings earned him renown. While Josef relaxes on a couch, Anni sits behind it, half-hidden—as it always seemed to be in life. Both had been creating art since the 1920s; her textiles merited a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949 that toured to 26 museums. But when she died in 1994, the second sentence of her New York Times obituary called her his widow. His, in 1976, mentions her near the end, in the context of their 1925 marriage.

Anni Albers-Installation View

Nowadays, the situation has nearly reversed. Fiber art has gained status, and she is considered to be among the most important textile artists of the 20th century; Josef is admired more as an important color theorist and as a highly influential teacher at Yale than for his art.

The Blanton show, curated by Fritz Horstman of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, concentrates on work Anni made from the 1950s to her death, a period during which she continued to create innovative designs and try out weaving techniques and materials until, in 1968, she abandoned weaving to make prints.

Handsomely installed in one large gallery, "In Thread and On Paper" groups various bodies of her work, includes her preparatory drawings, and stresses sightlines rather than chronology. One wall, mounted with her "Connections" portfolio—nine silkscreen designs from 1925 to 1983—suggests why that's appropriate. These pivotal works reveal no progression: bars, quadrilaterals, triangles, curves and meandering squiggles occur and recur in no particular order. Yet from there visitors can see works that draw on these designs.

For example, a large tapestry titled "Orchestra III" hangs across the room. Subtly colored in purple, lilac and deep yellow on a creamy background, it mirrors a 1983 design, in blue, red and yellow against a black background in "Connections." Also easily visible is "Smyrna Rug," designed in 1925, reflecting another piece in that portfolio.

Perhaps the most delicate and graceful weavings here are five white-on-white cotton hangings, dated 1979-83. With angular designs created by texture—sheer portions etched by acid or raised portions made by the weave or machine embroidery—they play with light and might divide a room, cover a window or simply decorate.

Albers was renowned for exploring unconventional materials, as a large batch of small swatches illustrates: Along with cotton, linen and wool, labels list cellophane, rayon, metallic thread, jute, raffia, synthetic fibers, lurex, chenille, polyester and foil. They show how Albers combined colors and textures, and—taking advantage of the way light bounces off some materials—created weavings that gleam. She tried to do the same with prints. "TR III" (1970), a triangular design that glitters gold, utilizes zinc plate embossing on silkscreen. But the material proved too difficult, and she gave it up. Yet well into her late years, Albers thrived as a prolific, innovative printmaker.

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Washington

At the National Gallery of Art's "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," Albers is credited with pioneering the exploration of weaving's "properties, techniques, and potential social role" in a wall text, but in this survey exhibition, she is just one of many stars. Its galaxy encompasses about 60 artists and includes wall hangings, fashions, functional items, basketry, sculpture, videos and photographs, plus paintings that illustrate the connections between fiber art and abstraction—about 160 objects dating from 1913 to last year.

Rossbach's "Constructed Colorful Wall Hanging"

Curated by Lynne Cooke, a senior curator at the NGA, "Woven Histories" argues that textiles and modernism have been entwined since the birth of the latter and that fabric artists undermined and ultimately disproved the hierarchy separating art, design and craft. She also credits the rise of feminist, Native American, black and gay culture in the 1960s and '70s with disrupting the pecking order. Even so, the artist with the largest number of pieces on view (13) is the relatively unknown Ed Rossbach, a white college instructor whose wife, Katherine Westphal, was also a fiber artist. His works—like "Constructed Color Wall Hanging" (1965), a pastel maze of braided thread; his tan, wavy-grid "Tapestry" (1964); and his festive "Christmas Basket" (1968)—are standouts.

The exhibition begins in the interwar years, when Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay, along with Albers, disputed the lines between the "women's work" of applied art and fine art. Taeuber-Arp's charming 1916 embroidered wool cushion panel (executed in 2021 by Ina von Woyski Niedermann) makes a good case. With its stylized flowers, mountains, hearts and squares, it holds its own against, say, Paul Klee's "Static-Dynamic Gradation" (1923) painting, a field of colorful rectangles. Moreover, many artists straddled the lines. Delaunay's luminous, bright-hued abstract painting "Electric Prisms" (1913)—evoking Parisian streetlights—hangs near two silk dresses (c. 1926) made with her abstract designs.

"Replica of a Chip"

Both weaving and early modernism relied on the grid (think Mondrian), as several examples show. From a few feet away, "Untitled" (1960), a small square of vertical black and white lines, looks like a weaving—but it's a painting by minimalist Agnes Martin, who was a close friend of fiber artist Lenore Tawney. It's juxtaposed with "Passion" (2013), a work of horizontal white wool strands by Rosemarie Trockel honoring the grid paintings that made Martin famous.

Both weaving and modernists also moved away from the grid. "Peluca Verde" (1960-61), displayed slung over a pedestal, is a tangle of bright green looped yarn by Sheila Hicks. "Cintas entrelazadas" (c. 1969) is a colorful braided hanging by Olga de Amaral, who sometimes covers her fibers with gold leaf, a nod to her Colombian heritage. A basketry gallery shows how sculptors like Ruth Asawa and Martin Puryear borrowed weaving techniques.

Lanceta's panels

Fiber art has often served as a social marker of identity and community; consider the pre-Columbian textiles that inspired Albers, for one. Here, Spaniard Teresa Lanceta's intricate multicolored wool-and-cotton panels (1999; 2015) beautifully demonstrate the intermingling of Iberian and Moroccan motifs. And Marilou Schultz's desert-hued blanket, "Replica of a Chip" (1994), was crafted using traditional techniques of her Navajo/Diné heritage at the behest of Intel Corp., which wanted to celebrate its Pentium processor. See, too, her "Untitled (Unknown Chip)" (2008), whose deep reds, blues and greens give it an enchanting pop.

Here and there, "Woven Histories" loses its way: In a section that a wall text says links textile design and production to "low-wage economies and exploitative labor practices," the freshest piece was "The Threader" (2007), a video by Senga Nengudi. It follows a worker in a passementerie factory whose incessant clanking is enough to drive one mad, but lacks a clear link to the exhibition's message. Elsewhere, some sections lose the exhibition's narrative thread, beg for more examples (artists' use of digital technologies, for instance), or seem over-stuffed (basketry).

Yet at its best, "Woven Histories" valuably showcases works that prove both eye-catching and eye-opening.