Anni Albers

Line Involvements IV
1964

A black and white abstract etching featuring a series of intertwined lines that create a knot-like pattern on a dark background with horizontal shading gradients. The artwork is matted and framed.

Not on view

Date
1964

Classification
Prints

Medium
Lithograph

Dimensions
Sheet (sight): 14 5/8 × 19 3/4in. (37.1 × 50.2 cm)

Accession number
2020.43.5

Series
Line Involvements

Edition
AP outside the edition of 20

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing and Print Committee and Sheree and Jerry Friedman

Rights and reproductions
©The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/63054

Audio

Anni Albers, Line Involvements IV, 1964

In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 (Spanish)

0:00

Anni Albers, Line Involvements IV, 1964

0:00

Jennie Goldstein: Line Involvements es una serie de litografías de la artista Anni Albers, un conjunto de obras que realizó en 1964. Albers es mayormente conocida como tejedora y diseñadora textil, alguien que hacía tejidos específicamente para colgarlos en una pared, en lugar de ser objetos funcionales con un uso específico. Es algo que hizo durante décadas.
Narrador: En 1963, un año antes de crear esta serie, Albers cambió su enfoque de manera definitiva y, de los tejidos, pasó a dedicarse a la litografía.
Jennie Goldstein: Y lo que es tan interesante de Line Involvements es que puedes ver que, aunque haya trabajado en un medio impreso, los hilos siguen ahí, en el sentido del filamento individual o las hebras que conforman el tejido, hay algo que está hilado. Eso sigue siendo evidente. A medida que la serie avanza, cada obra se vuelve más compleja y entrelazada que la anterior, más ornamentada y entretejida. Comparte con el diseño textil el mismo tipo de preguntas fundamentales sobre qué es lo que se puede lograr con una línea. Y ¿qué se puede lograr con una serie de cuerdas o hebras cuando llegan a tener una especie de comunicación entre ellas?
Narrador: Esta serie se compone de siete impresiones. Debido a que una exposición prolongada a la luz daña las obras en papel, estamos exponiendo solo tres por vez, y vamos rotando su exhibición. La muestra siempre incluye una impresión próxima al inicio, al medio o al final de la serie.
Anni Albers, Line Involvements IV, 1964

In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019

0:00

Anni Albers, Line Involvements IV, 1964

0:00

Jennie Goldstein: Line Involvements is a series of lithographs by the artist Anni Albers, a group of works that she made in 1964. Anni Albers is best known as a weaver, a textile maker, someone who made textiles often specifically to be hung on the wall as opposed to usable, functional things. And she did that for decades.
Narrator: In 1963, a year before making this series, Albers permanently shifted her focus from textiles to lithographs.
Jennie Goldstein: And in Line Involvements, what’s so interesting is that you can see that although she’s working with a print medium, the thread, the sense of the individual string or strand that makes up a textile, a woven thing, is still there. It’s still apparent. It gets more and more complicated, successively ornate, and interlocking and interwoven as the series progresses. So it shares with textiles the same kind of fundamental questions about what can a line do. And what does a series of strings or strands do when they come into a kind of communication with each other?
Narrator: There are seven prints in this series. Because prolonged exposure to light will damage works on paper, we’re showing them only three at a time—rotating them on and off view. The display will always include a print from near the beginning, middle, and end of the series.