I used to write letters to the editor when I would encounter articles that contained gendered language, incorrect information, or just plain bias around women artists.
But now I have a Substack! So instead of sending my thoughts into the ether of letters@nytimes.com (or whatever the publication happened to be) never to be published, I get to annoy you with my nitpicking, griping, and general displeasure. Hooray!
This time, it’s Jackson Arn in the New Yorker I’m objecting to, particularly an April 12th review of the work of Bauhaus/Black Mountain College weaver Anni Albers, who I happened to have written my Master’s thesis on.
I think Arn gets a lot wrong about Albers in his misunderstanding of weaving’s mechanics, as well as his general lack of knowledge of Albers’s biography and writings (not totally his fault, I imagine he didn’t write his thesis on her). I thought I’d set the record straight.
My objections begin right away when he calls Albers’s work “mathematical” and “precise” (maybe they were in her Bauhaus days, but her pictorial weavings quickly melt the chill of mathematics. Here’s just one of many examples).
But my biggest qualm is with Arn’s understanding of 20th century weaving, something he seems to know little about, as is clear here:
“Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art,” a tiny marvel currently on view at the Met, left me feeling that her work has little in common with that of the twentieth century’s other great weavers—none of the improvisational fancy of Lenore Tawney or the sculptural oomph of Olga de Amaral. … The second you see a Sheila Hicks, you are invited to gape, but an Albers like “Development in Rose I” (1952) introduces itself as a grid of pinkish and greenish threads, nothing more.
First of all, there’s plenty in Albers that is improvisation (including the aforementioned “Development in Rose”— development being a key word here), but being surprised that Albers has little in common with Sheila Hicks is like being surprised that Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock have little in common. Or, even better, Pollock and David Salle. They’re part of a timeline of history, related in the way we’re related to our forefathers and mothers, but not identifiably so. This is just what art history is.
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