CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/17/2018

An acute and unceasingly inquiring creative mind in 'Anni Albers: Notebook 1970–1980'

Here is a book among books—a facsimile edition of a humble graph-paper notebook, complete with dark brown tape residues, shorthand notations, and pencil drawings that both conform and do not conform to the printed grid. It was kept by Bauhaus textile master Anni Albers late in her life—primarily during the 1970s—but discovered only after her death in 1994. “We can simply turn the pages,” Brenda Danilowitz writes, “and be dazzled and beguiled by this septuagenarian’s control of her medium and the forms that she could elicit from simple materials—pencil and paper—and apparently straightforward geometry. Or we can look long and hard and compare the pages, studying the nuances and finding shapes within shapes: the soft lines of curving forms; the fine lines joining in a constellation-like manner; solid shapes or tiny points laid out on the grid. And we can let ourselves become caught up in imagining the workings of an acute and unceasingly inquiring creative mind.”