Textile, Eclat

With the creation of Eclat, a vibrant screenprinted textile for drapery and upholstery, weaver and artist Anni Albers delved into the art of screenprinting. This was a new textile-making direction for the designer, brought about by her experimentation with lithography in the mid-1960s. At that time, her husband was asked to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where the head of the workshop, June Wayne, encouraged her to try lithography. Albers experienced a newfound expressive quality in the medium and, by the 1970s, printmaking had become her primary focus. This knowledge of printmaking, as well as her passion for the techniques, no doubt impacted her subsequent textiles designs. Like other well-known works by Albers, the surface of this textile is animated by parallelograms that together create a dynamic three-dimensional effect. Eclat was intended as both a drapery fabric and for light upholstery applications, and was first available in a dozen colorways—this particular version is executed primarily in a persimmon color. In 1957, Albers began her association with Knoll Textiles as a consultant on a line of new textiles, including a series of casement fabrics. These fabrics were quite typical of Albers’s work during her years as both a student and teacher at the Bauhaus and later in the United States, where she and her husband, Josef Albers, emigrated in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College (1933–49). The design of these casement fabrics recalls her entirely functional approach to textiles with an ongoing curiosity about and experimentation with new fibers and techniques.