“Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” Anni Albers writes in On Weaving. [1] Meaning, for her, is not added to matter; it is released when a material and a tool are set into disciplined motion. In 1976, at Kenneth Tyler’s Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village, New York, she exchanged the tug of warp for the shove of a press. Copper plates dusted with resin met dampened sheets of Arches; the press closed; paper rose around a square like a perfectly tailored cuff. The four plates that emerged—Triangulated Intaglios—compose with the stillness of held breath: triangles enter, pivot, recombine, and recede into light.
The suite appeared in an edition of twenty per plate (with customary proofs), a scale that suits its inward pitch. By contrast, Josef Albers conceived several postwar print projects for broader circulation (for example, White Line Squares (Series I) at 125 impressions. The point is not rivalry but orientation: his editions broadcast; hers confide.
Albers’s lifelong problem—how to achieve order without succumbing to symmetry—finds fresh leverage in intaglio, and the suite unfolds in three distinct dialects. One is mass, visible in the black-field plate commonly catalogued as Triangulated Intaglio II. Here unmodulated triangles knit into a tessellation so precise it seems machined, yet the surface hums with decision: a turn here, a check there, the refusal of the easy repeat. The square sits within a palpable plate mark, a built-in frame that keeps the field taut and simultaneously announces the work’s making. A second dialect is grain, exemplified by the pale plate aligned with I (and, in hybrid form, with III). There is no heavy tone—only etched points that gather into triangular units the way threads coalesce into texture. Grain stands where mass might have been, and the eye conducts the composition as breath passes through a flute. Finally, there is switch, a figure–ground inversion that forms the companion to II, commonly catalogued as IV. It duplicates the geometry but transforms perception by shifting which areas carry ink, here in red. Corridors become walls; weight becomes interval. With this single variable—ink—Albers reprograms the viewer’s experience without altering the construction itself.
Graph‑paper studies were Albers’s rehearsal, a quiet score of units, rotations, and counter‑rotations. Intaglio does not “illustrate” weaving so much as transpose it: thread density becomes aquatint tone and wiping; tension becomes pressure; the pause of a float becomes the pause of untouched paper. The melody holds; the timbre deepens.
Triangulated Intaglios participates in a necessary unlearning: the recognition that abstraction’s language never belonged only to painting and sculpture. MoMA’s recent Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (April 20–September 13, 2025) makes this explicit—opening with Albers’s own articulation of threads as primordial bearers of meaning and demonstrating how textile intelligence underwrites modern abstraction. [2] The museum’s earlier Taking a Thread for a Walk (2019–2021) likewise framed textile thinking as an engine of modernism rather than a decorative sidebar. [3] These exhibitions do not merely contextualize Albers; they follow her method: read structure first.
That method is enriched by looking sideways. Ruth Asawa, who traveled to Mexico during her Black Mountain years, learned looped‑wire basketry there and transformed it into suspended drawing—line as volume, craft as abstraction. Olga de Amaral folded gesso and gold into fiber, making surfaces that answer light like terrain. Different materials, same refusal of the old border between “art” and “craft”—and the same conviction that restraint can be voluptuous.
Albers rooted her practice in ancient American textiles—the “great teachers,” as she called the weavers of Peru—studying Andean and Mesoamerican pattern systems whose geometric logics endure across media. Triangulated Intaglios borrows nothing literally, yet its clarity, repetition, and figure–ground play are legible within that longer lineage of structural intelligence.
Part of the prints’ presence is the paper itself: Arches Cover, a mould‑made, 100% cotton sheet designed for printmaking. Dampened for printing and strong under pressure, it accepts a saturated yet velvety deposit of ink and records a crisp bevel at the plate edge. The luxury here is not ostentation but attention—time, judgment, and the discipline to leave everything extraneous out.
What Albers models is not merely a look but a method: define a unit, set rules (rotation, inversion, adjacency), run the sequence, register the difference. The variable may be as simple as ink (black or red) or as granular as dot versus mass; each adjustment yields a new perceptual argument. This is serial, procedural, and open—generative in spirit—without abandoning touch.
Two years after Triangulated Intaglios, Albers issued the Second Movement etchings at Tyler; later she folded her methods into the self‑curated portfolio Connections 1925/1983. The arc reads as inevitable: a life’s problem—how to let structure speak—tested across instruments. If these prints feel newly central now, it is because the culture has caught up to their premise: that the most persuasive elegance is born of clarity.
NOTES
[1] Anni Albers, On Weaving. Expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Originally published 1965 by Wesleyan University Press.
[2] The Museum of Modern Art, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, MoMA, New York, April 20–September 13, 2025. Exhibition page: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5733
[3] The Museum of Modern Art, Taking a Thread for a Walk, MoMA, New York, October 21, 2019–January 10, 2021. Exhibition page: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5101
SELECTED REFERENCES
Albers, Anni. On Weaving. Expanded ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. (For primary statements on structure, material, and the "event of a thread.")
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. "On Weaving," overview. https://www.albersfoundation.org/alberses/teaching/on-weaving
National Gallery of Australia (Kenneth E. Tyler Collection). Julia Greenstreet, "The Prints of Anni Albers: Line Involvements." https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/the-prints-of-anni-albers-line-involvements/
The Museum of Modern Art. "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," 2025; "Taking a Thread for a Walk," 2019-2021. https://press.moma.org/exhibition/woven-histories/
Brooklyn Museum. "Anni Albers, Triangulated Intaglios II (1976)," object record. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/166570
Whitney Museum of American Art. "Josef Albers, White Line Squares (Series I)" (1966); "Formulation: Articulation" (1972). https://whitney.org/collection/series/3457
