Anni Albers

Decorative wall hangings of this sort comprised some of the Bauhaus weaving workshop's most successful products, along with shawls and blankets, yet this was also a space for Albers to experiment and innovate. Unlike her colleagues, she adopted a palette of neutral threads and focused her attention on complicated weaving techniques and modern geometric design. This reflects, in part, her intention to create designs that could eventually become models for industrial mass production. This pattern is based on repeating and interlocking forms of stripes and blocks, created with a triple-weave technique.

In 1924, Albers published an essay, "Bauhaus Weaving" that described both a history of weaving and spoke to its future potential. Noting that very little had changed structurally from the "ancient craft" of textile weaving, she stressed that modern equipment had not revolutionized the basic grid structure of woven cloth. She also laments that current mass production has lost contact with the materiality of weaving and that the divide between designers and weavers has led to poorly designed and poorly crafted products. The Bauhaus weaving workshop, with its synthesis of design and craft emerges as the solution to this industrial stalemate. While she celebrates the handloom (which she would continue to use in her own work), she ends the essay with a vision for modern textile production, based on the designs and materials developed through craft-based experimentation. This particular wall hanging was one of the first to include new synthetic fibers, including artificial silk, which would later become standard materials for mass-produced textiles.

In the sketches for her wall hangings, Albers reveals this combination of weaving technique and modernist design. Her limited use of color was influenced by contemporary theories of color relationships, often reflecting the glass artwork of her future husband Josef Albers.