Fig. 31. Fig. 32. Chimú artist. Sampler. Peru, 1100–1300. Cotton, wool, 17 × 10 in. (42.2 × 22.9 cm). Anni Albers. Detail of textile sample. Linen, 24 ⼀攀 × 15 ⼀挀 in. (61.6 × 39.4 cm). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Conn. (1994.16.3) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Anni Albers, 1970 (1970.75.22) anticipates Albers’s use of draft notation, a standard system of its rectangular thread-interlacing will be better than one 22 for drafting weaves implemented by the industry of mech- which conceals its structure.” Albers was aware of the 20 anized looms. Notably, draft notation served her in the openwork tradition in the Andes and may have studied the study—and teaching—of the samples of ancient weavings descriptions and technical analyses of the various types of that she started to collect later in her life, coinciding with openwork, including gauze, provided by Raoul d’Harcourt her trips to Latin America with Josef.21 Andean fragments in his 1934 book on the Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their 23 were among the pieces she added to the Harriet Engelhardt Techniques, whose French 昀椀rst edition she owned. Memorial Collection of Textiles at Black Mountain College, Following the abrupt closure of the Bauhaus instigated which she also used to teach structural and formal prob - by the Nazis in 1933, Anni and Josef Albers relocated to lems; she would cut—sometimes even unravel—a piece of the United States. Between 1936 and 1946, they taught tapestry to observe the thread’s intersections from above at Black Mountain College and traveled often in Latin and trace the course of each thread (昀椀g. 31). America. During this time, Anni made three major wall With her keen interest in the structural aspects of hangings—Ancient Writing, Monte Alban, and With weaving, Albers demonstrated an alliance with some of Verticals—in response to the landscape and architecture the artistic postulates of Constructivism, a movement that of Mexico, a country where only a very few fragments of heavily in昀氀uenced the Bauhaus, notably with her “unpreju- ancient textiles survived. These new, cryptic geometric diced” attention to materials and her aim for transparency designs paved the way for her “pictorial weavings,” which in the constructed works. Made years after she left the she started to make in 1947. Unlike her industrial designs, Bauhaus, one of her textile samples concretizes her vision which she continued to pursue, the pictorial weavings for the modern work through its use of an open weave were formal exercises with discontinuous weaving pat- (昀椀g. 32). As she saw it, the more transparent a weaving’s terns aimed at experimenting with threads as a pure artistic structure and the more clearly that structure is expressed expression. Pasture (1958; 昀椀g. 33) presents a supplemen- in its design, the better: “[A] weaving that exhibits the origin tary weft joined to a double-cloth support, embodying a 32