Indigenous Cosmologies

widely accessible in many of Mexico City’s public buildings, epitomised the eclecticism of Mexican modernism. It was a mix often completed by a Baroque backdrop in the form of an ornate colonial-era church. 

Anni Albers realized that the murals amounted to more than a mere question of style. She immediately understood that Diego Rivera’s 1923 mural cycle in the Secretaría de Educación Publica, which heroized indigenous life and set a romanticized dignity of agrarian labour and peasant society against the grasping vulgarity of metropolitan elites, drew on Aztec myth and history. The paintings were part of a broad and politically complicated drive to cement Mexican nationhood by elevating indigenous art and culture and advancing the idea that contemporary Mexico was part of a historical continuum.

Josef Albers basked in the creative collision of worlds in Mexico. The atmosphere freed him from the stifling formality of the western tradition. He wrote that Monte Albán, the sacred ancient site on the outskirts of Oaxaca was “more perfect and beautiful than the Parthenon itself.” In 1936 he made three paintings, Archeologic I, Archeologic II and Temple all now lost and known only from black and white photographs of the time. Their concentric compositions suggest Mexico’s ancient sites and are quite unlike any of his previous works. Shedding the formality of their roles as teachers and community leaders, in Mexico Josef and Anni Albers could indulge their sensuous natures as explorers, collectors, and above all as artists. The effect on their work was steadily transformative. Josef turned both to the ubiquitous strong colours of vernacular art and to architecture and the radical geometries of the ancient archaeological sites for inspiration.

The Alberses’ own collection of pre-Columbian figures—which they invested with a quasi-religious significance and described as idolos—began quite casually in 1935. Anni Albers in her introduction to their publication in 1970, displayed the breadth of her understanding of these objects. Sensitive to the web of scientific, political, aesthetic, and commercial interests surrounding collecting, Albers wrote that, as collectors, she and Josef were “amateurs in the true sense of the word and mainly visually oriented.” As true modernists who believed unwaveringly that works of art spoke a universally understood and shared language, Josef and Anni Albers valued their collection as traces of creative invention that validated their own creative lives. Besides collecting hundreds of figures and objects, Josef photographed similar artefacts in museums just as intensely as he photographed the sites from which they had been retrieved. Anni treasured her remarkable collection of pre-Hispanic textiles, both as examples to teach her students and as objects of wonder. In the Alberses’ home these collections were never on display. Stored in closets and drawers they were ever-present private reminders, talismans perhaps, of true creativity.

 In 1941 Josef began a series of pen and ink drawings, whose crisp modulated lines evoked his observations of Mexico’s ancient temple sites. Although he described these works, which were later translated into zinc-plate lithographs, as Graphic Tectonics, he also gave them evocative titles like Sanctuary, Shrine, and, in reference to his most admired archaeological site, To Monte Alban. The sharp lines and angles of the ancient structures uncovered on those sites led his printmaking in other new directions. The woodcut Tlaloc (1944), named for the Mexican rain god, deploys a single line that moves back over itself and reads both as the eponymous abstracted personage and as the overlapping planes of a simplified architecture.

she wrote to Bird, “that my speculations may seem far-fetched to non-weavers though to me as a weaver concerned with questions of structure it was natural to take up the problem of wide fabrics from another point of view than considered before.” Her research was published as the essay “A Structural Process in Weaving” along with many of her other writings, in her first book, On Designing (1959).

Josef Albers’s paintings from the 1930s and 1940s appear at first so varied that it would be impossible to predict from them that Albers would by the 1950s become the creator of an endless series of paintings that employed a single compositional scheme—the square. Yet even in these earlier works, as is best seen in his Tenayuca group of studies and paintings (1938 – 1943), Albers, having found a format that intrigued him sufficiently, would revisit it over a period of time and execute infinite variations without becoming dull or boring or formulaic. In 1940, in works like To Mitla—yet another work named after a site that Albers photographed repeatedly—line is eliminated in favour of pure colour. To Mitla re-forms the deep red painted fortress-like walls surrounding the Palace of the Columns in the village of Mitla in layers contained by the intense green of the fields and the blue of the sky. In other works, like Mantic (1943) and Construction in Red, Blue and Black (1939), solid planes of colour suggest surfaces, openings and hidden spaces within the architectures of both ancient and modern Mexico. Albers was moving, though not in a straight line, towards the series of paintings he would begin in late 1946.

Named Variants or Adobes they were prefigured by the small but significant painting To Oaxaca (1943) in which diagonals disappear and a solid frontal architectonic plane, penetrated by a door-like block of colour, strikes a new and authoritative note. 

After 1967 Anni Albers turned to making graphics and screen prints in which her Mexican and Latin American experiences resonate. In several series and in a range of printed mediums, she endlessly manipulated arrangements of colour and design based largely on the meander or the triangle motif. By this time the arts of Mexico and Peru (which they visited in 1953) had become a part of her: internalized and memorialized in her work just as the traces of pre-Hispanic architecture were implicit in the nested squares of Josef’s Homage to the Square paintings.

The treasured pre-Columbian miniatures they had collected together would continue to delight Anni and Josef Albers to the end of their long lives. These artefacts, as Anni Albers later wrote, would “bring back recollections of places and incidents” and sustain their belief in the paths they had chosen for their lives and their art.

Brenda Danilowitz is an art historian and chief curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on the work of Josef and Anni Albers and has organized exhibitions of their work in the US, Europe, Mexico, and Latin America.

[1] Anni Albers. Preface to Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures. (New York London, 1970).

[1] The date of Monte Alban remains uncertain. During her lifetime she variously documented its date as “1936” or “1945”. 

[1] Letter to Junius Bird, April 12, 1952. Copy in the archives of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Box 6, Folder 38.