Linkage or Fusion?: Anni Albers, Lena Bergner, and Textile Axonometry

ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY 20 LINKAGE OR FUSION?: ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY SUMMARY ANGELA H. BROWN Axonometry is a graphic technique for rendering three-dimensional forms on a planar surface. Useful in engineering and architecture, it can convey accurate proportions and angles without the distortions of perspectival drawing. This technique, and the geometries that it produces, appear in several works by Anni Albers and Lena Bergner, both of whom attended the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop and later pursued textile design abroad (Albers in the U.S. and Bergner in the USSR and Mexico). This paper examines the relationship between textile construction and axonometry in Albers’ and Bergner’s respective oeuvres, arguing that their instruction at the Bauhaus—including their coursework with Paul Klee—trained them to value what Albers termed “linkage.” While “fusion,” for Albers, blurs separate parts into a homogenous whole, “linkage” ensures that the multiple components of a design remain distinguishable when combined. In 1932, after receiving her Bauhaus diploma and joining the so-called Red Bauhaus Brigade in Moscow, Lena Bergner designed Metro, a plain-weave textile imagining the city’s first underground transport station, which at that point had not yet opened.1(FIG. 1) In a small rectangular sample, dark green subway cars pull in and out of partiallyexposed subterranean tunnels, which run along the perpendicular lines of an urban grid, complete with stacked rectangular buildings and stairs. The infinite repeatability of this labyrinth is suggested by two devices: the structure of the textile itself, which can be expanded according to the existing weave pattern; and Bergner’s use of axonometry, a means of rendering three-dimensional space or volumes without the illusions of linear perspective. As is easier to see in the gouache-onpaper design for Metro, Bergner makes use of several grids: a two-dimensional, linear grid, drawn in red lines; a threedimensional, modular grid, implied by isometric volumes; and a representation of an urban gridiron plan, which allows greater efficiency of movement and communication. (FIG. 2) Then, an additional, more covert grid-structure is at work in the textile: that of the warp and weft. Weaving itself involves the intersection of perpendicular lines in the form of threads, which, when held apart in the rectilinear frame of the mechanical loom, can appear as a three-dimensional matrix. In a reversal of the architectural process that is implied in Metro—wherein the two-dimensional grid becomes a guide for the erection of buildings and excavation of tunnels—a matrix of threads held in tension becomes a flat, malleable plane as the threads are pulled together. In a 1957 article titled “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” Anni Albers writes: Fig. 1 Lena Bergner, »Metro« Fabric Sample, 1932, Cotton and linen, 41 × 59.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Jack Lenor Larsen Incorporated, 1985 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY Fig. 2 Lena Bergner, Design for "Metro" Textile, 1932, Gouache, graphite, and crayon on paper, 21 × 28.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Jack Lenor Larsen Incorporated, 1985 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 21 “If the nature of architecture is the grounded, the fixed, the permanent, then textiles are its very antithesis. If, however, we think of the process of building and the process of weaving and compare the work involved, we will find similarities despite the vast difference in scale. Both construct a whole from separate parts that retain their identity, a manner of proceeding, fundamentally different from that of working metal, for instance, or clay, where parts are absorbed into an entity. This basic difference, however, has grown less clearly defined as new methods, affecting both building and weaving, are developing and are adding increasingly to fusion as opposed to linkage.”2 This is one of many articles in which Albers addresses the tensions between hand-weaving and mechanized textile production for a U.S. readership. As Michael Beggs has shown, when Albers left Black Mountain College (the experimental college where she taught from 1933 to 1949), she was better known as a writer and commentator on textiles than as an artist and weaver trained at the Bauhaus.3 Much of her writing was concerned with maintaining handweaving as a means of exploring innovative design amidst a rapidly industrializing world. In articles such as “Handweaving Today” from 1941, Albers argued that experimentation in handweaving would be critical to advancements in the textile industry—a view that American weavers like Mary Atwater felt inflated textiles’ importance as an art form and overdetermined the connection between craft, industry, and education.4 Albers, however, consistently pushed back against the idea that handweaving was a craft that should remain completely separate from mass-producible textiles. She instead proposed a symbiotic relationship between the two and felt that the mechanization of weaving and other constructive practices was inhibiting textile artists as well as industrial designers and architects who would benefit from close study of “the separate parts” that make up the whole. Fusion, like linear perspective, hides basic information—the details of an object’s construction or material constitution.5 Linkage, however, allows each line and each thread to remain autonomous, therefore communicating to the viewer exactly how the object was built. The breakdown of a machine into its constituent parts is a necessary step in communicating knowledge. Though prototypes for such taxonomies can be found in ancient sources, one of the most famous examples is Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–72), which compiled the many technological and scientific advances of the Enlightenment into a single publication comprising thirty-five volumes. As Yve-Alain Bois has highlighted, several of the weaving diagrams in the Encyclopédie were rendered using axonometry—a technique, Bois argues, that went essentially dormant among European and Euro-American modernists until 1923.6 After 1923, axonometry reappears in drawings by Theo van Doesburg, Alberto Sartoris, and, at the Bauhaus, by Hannes Meyer (who would marry Bergner in 1937).7 This re-emergence, as Bois points out, goes mostly unremarked by its practitioners and by historians of modernist architecture in Western Europe and the Americas. In this paper, I address not the connection between architectural rendering and axonometry (which is clear in van Doesburg’s, Sartoris’, and Meyer’s work), but rather the connection between textiles, machines, and axonometry—a triad that connects the weaving diagrams in the Encyclopédie with works by Anni Albers and Lena Bergner produced nearly two centuries later. By seeking axonometric moments in Albers’ and ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 22 Bergner’s work, I argue (1) that both weavers illustrate a commitment to linkage (over fusion) in their post-Bauhaus work, and (2) that what I will call a textile axonometry brings into clearer focus the reciprocal relationship between weaving techniques and Bauhaus pedagogy.8 FUNDAMENTS OF DESIGN Linkage as a design principle is inherent to the machine but becomes blurred as machines’ speed and efficiency increase.9 In “The Pliable Plane,” Albers warns against the increasing pervasiveness of this blurring or “fusion” in building and weaving, recognizing the importance of an entity whose separate parts are distinguishable: a whole constructed through “linkage.” She, like Bergner and other students at the Bauhaus, had intensive experience with linkage in her coursework with Paul Klee, whose theories on the fundamental elements of design are partially collected and summarized in his Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook), first published in 1925. Described within its opening pages as an “initial plan for a section of the instruction at the state Bauhaus in Weimar,” Klee’s Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch presents a progression from some of the most basic fundaments of design—lines and planes—to more complex combinations of these fundaments, wherein active and passive visual forms combine to create what Klee calls energies (causes) and impacts (effects).10 In section 6 of the book, he focuses on structure, which he explains is rhythmic or divisional—that is, that the structure of a designed thing depends on varied forms of repetition. Klee illustrates this mathematically, providing numerical analogues for horizontal and vertical lines, as well as a grid that he calls “the chessboard.”11 (FIG. 3) In the notebooks of several Bauhaus weavers, the use of graph paper or grids to plan textile patterns is in close dialogue—both visually and conceptually— with the drawing exercises assigned in Klee’s course on form. Drawing exercises from Klee’s class in Bergner’s notes show several forms conjugated from basic grids or chessboards. (FIG. 4) The divided squares recall the grids of weaving drafts, in which filled-in squares indicate whether weft threads are to pass over or under the warp threads. This system, a direct precedent of the zeros and ones of computer programming, allows a weaver to plan a textile’s overall pattern in advance, which must be built up (pixel by pixel) along horizontal and ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 3 Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch [Pedagogical Sketchbook], Bauhausbücher 2, Munich 1925, pp. 12–13 Image credits: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Archive Fig. 4 Lena Bergner, Reinschrift von Paul Klees Unterricht, p. 68, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, PKS LM-B 1/060 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Image Archive / © Heirs after Lena Bergner ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 23 vertical axes. While Klee’s work and pedagogy is often credited for having guided the work of the Bauhaus weavers, it is also possible—and highly likely—that there existed a more reciprocal relationship in which the weavers’ notational techniques led to Klee’s examination of rhythm and structure through the mathematics of the chessboard or grid. And, as Bergner’s sketch shows, the repetition of diagonals over a grid produces implied axonometries: triangles retreat or come forward, suggesting volumes that the eye can see both from above and below. Alex Potts has noted the way in which Klee’s paintings combine the regularity of the grid with sketchier lines and vernacular symbols like arrows. This combination recurs in the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch; Klee consistently suggests human estimation and error while seeking to codify or provide exact formulae for the fundaments of design12. Potts argues that “a certain larger understanding of things in the modern world” is implicit in Klee’s approach.13 He cites Carl Einstein, an early critic of Klee’s, who wrote that Klee’s art showed how “myth and world can hardly be united with one another … [instead,] they make fun of one another in an ironic struggle, because we are not capable of finding their unity.”14 As Klee stated in a 1924 lecture: “We have found the parts, but not the whole.”15 However, for Albers and Bergner (and perhaps other weavers who took classes with Klee), it was the act of combining the parts—linking separate entities without fusing them—that was fundamental to their own work and teaching. LINKAGE AND THE MACHINE, LINKAGE AND THE LOOM In the Encyclopédie, Diderot and his fellow encyclopédistes made machines legible as organisms made up of interconnected parts. The machines were alphabetized, and the book included etchings of each part and written descriptions of how they worked together—a prime example of Albers’ linkage and formal precedent for Klee’s more facetious combination of diagrammatic grids and references to nature and anatomy in the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch. The Encyclopédie’s audience, however, was not primarily builders, designers, or engineers by trade, but rather the formally educated, moneyed classes, who longed to know (or to feel as if they knew) a bit about everything. The book therefore allowed an elite group to imagine building any machine by following the given instructions. Most of the illustrations in the Encyclopédie are in linear perspective, offering illusionistic views of how each device might look in space and how a person might look operating them. However, two loom illustrations—one labelled “Métier à Marly” (a loom for the weaving of Marly gauze) and the other simply “Tisserand, Métier”—are shown in axonometric projection. (FIG. 5) A likely explanation for this appearance of axonometry among many perspectival views is that the illustrations were stolen from Jean-Baptiste ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 5 Loom for the Production of Marly Gauze. Métier à Marly. Diderot et d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, Paris 1751– 1772, Tome XI (1765), Pl. 1 ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 24 Colbert, who initiated the production of Descriptions des arts et métiers faites ou approuvées par messieurs de l'Académie royale des sciences de Paris, for which information was being collected and drawings made since the late seventeenth century.16 Seeing the loom and its parts as axonometric projections allows the reader to more readily understand how the machine is constructed. Axonometry reveals linkage and precise measurement, while linear perspective implies fusion (where perhaps there isn’t any). The axonometric view of the loom also reveals the linkage of the threads themselves: how they are arranged to form one horizontal (slightly angled) plane and two vertical planes, and how these planes— the warp and the strings that lift it—work together while the individual threads retain their identity. The weaver, positioned at the front of the Marly loom, would be able to see a sort of rectangular prism formed by these planes of parallel threads. She would look into three-dimensional space as she pulled the angled planes together to form the gauze, a much flatter (though not completely two-dimensional) plane. I argue that the weaving process, in which the weaver views multiple flat planes simultaneously and must translate these into a (grid-based) pattern, is best represented, like architecture, with axonometry. In 1943, when Bergner was living with Meyer in Mexico City, she similarly broke down the parts of the loom. Interested in the Indigenous textile traditions of Mexico, Bergner had read an article by anthropologist Francisco Rojas about the creation and use of various handwoven baskets and textiles in Mexico’s Mezquital Valley, the home of many Otomí (or Hñähñú) weavers.17 The article seems to have inspired Bergner to plan a program for textile education in the Bauhaus style for the Otomí. Though the program was never implemented, its beginning stages show that Bergner was interested in how Bauhaus pedagogical approaches could be translated, adapted, and optimized. She began, like Colbert, with axonometric renderings of the loom and its parts.18 In black ink on off-white paper, Bergner isolates different parts of a loom. Several of the drawings are less obviously axonometric, because they show small or less angular parts such as a yarn cone, a loom shuttle, and a formed shed; and the final drawing in the suite is a demonstration of six different weaving designs, shown in flat squares.19 Each part is numbered, and Bergner wrote oneto two-word descriptions in German, Spanish, and English directly onto the front of each sheet. Some of the loom parts that Bergner chose are the same as those isolated in Colbert’s Descriptions. (FIG. 6) Bergner’s loom shuttle and two rectangular wooden frames differ only slightly from Colbert’s, but Bergner pares each of her drawings down to their simplest lines, doing away with details like woodgrain and very sparingly incorporating shadow. She also pares down the number of weaving ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 6 Jean-Elie Bertrand, Descriptions des arts et metiers: faites ou approuvees par messieurs de l'Academie Royale des Sciences de Paris. Avec figures en taille-douce. Nouvelle edition. Publiee avec des observations, & augmentee de tout ce qui a ete ecrit de mieux sur ces matieres, en Allemagne, en Angleterre, en Suisse, en Italie, Neuchâtel 1875, Tome XIX, Pl. 7 ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 25 designs compared to those shown in Descriptions, opting for six rather than Colbert’s twenty-eight. (FIG. 7) The cumulative result is a suite of ten drawings that read as art (in the vein of van Doesburg or El Lissitzky) rather than as illustrations in a manual. When they were exhibited at Barry Friedman’s Gallery in New York in the mid-1980s, several of the drawings were even labeled “Loom Abstractions.”20 PEDAGOGICAL GUIDES When Bergner originally conceived of the drawings, however, she was not thinking of the Otomí. Instead, many of the Otomí curriculum drawings are directly based on a series of similar sketches that Bergner produced in 1927 or 1928. The earlier versions are collected in a sketchbook held in the gta Archiv in Zurich, in Hannes Meyer’s papers. That sketchbook, featuring black and white diagrams, spaces left for potential texts, and a yellow cover, follows the general format of the Bauhausbücher, including Klee’s Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, which was published only two years prior. There is no Bauhaus book from this series that focuses solely on weaving theory and technique, so it is possible that Bergner’s sketchbook was a first attempt at such a publication, either requested by Bauhaus directors and senior faculty or pursued on her own volition in order to highlight the Weaving Workshop’s pedagogical advances as critical to the Bauhaus as a whole.21 One page of Bergner’s 1927–28 sketchbook includes a draft notation for a block weave (evoking the rhythmic patterning of Klee’s chessboards), and six weaving designs in flat squares, almost exactly matching those that Bergner would render more neatly for the Otomí curriculum. (FIG. 8) Two axonometric drawings appear in this earlier sketchbook that do not make their way into the drawings in 1943. One shows the placement of a loom shaft that appears frontally and isolated in the later drawings. (FIG. 9) The other is a diagram of a Jacquard harness structure, in which a twist of threads is held in tension between a perforated board and a smaller wooden rectangle, producing an image that recalls the relationship between bones and muscles illustrated in section 8 of Klee’s Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch. (FIG. 10) In order to explain the loom as a machine and the design possibilities it facilitated, Bergner used axonometry to highlight each of the loom’s separate parts and how they linked together in space. ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 7 Jean-Elie Bertrand, Descriptions des arts et metiers: faites ou approuvees par messieurs de l'Academie Royale des Sciences de Paris. Avec figures en taille-douce. Nouvelle edition. Publiee avec des observations, & augmentee de tout ce qui a ete ecrit de mieux sur ces matieres, en Allemagne, en Angleterre, en Suisse, en Italie, Neuchâtel 1875, Tome XIX, Pl. 11 Fig. 8 Lena Bergner, Skizzenbuch, 1927-1928, p. 59. Credit: gta Archive / ETH Zurich, Hannes Meyer Fig. 9 Lena Bergner, Skizzenbuch, 1927-1928, p. 62. Credit: gta Archive / ETH Zurich, Hannes Meyer Fig. 10 Lena Bergner, Skizzenbuch, 1927-1928, p. 64. Credit: gta Archive / ETH Zurich, Hannes Meyer ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 26 IS A TEXTILE ALWAYS AXONOMETRIC? As in Bergner’s Metro, where the axonometric city echoes the grid of the weave itself, Diderot’s axonometric Tisserand reveals the common structural principles at work in the machine and the textile. The linkage of the textile involves the coordination of intersecting planes. We might even say that this structure— essentially unchanged since antiquity and evident in Klee’s pedagogy—is the starting point for construction in general, for Bau. Another Bauhaus weaver, Helene Nonné-Schmidt, arrives at axonometric designs through Klee’s pedagogical exercises. In her notebooks, one page shows that she, like Bergner, was experimenting with the permutations of parallel and perpendicular lines in rotation. (FIG. 11) Rotating and overlapping the edges of a square and a triangle, NonnéSchmidt creates a form similar to Josef Albers’ Structural Constellations (1948– 66) made decades later. As Yve-Alain Bois has shown, Josef Albers’ Structural Constellations are one example of a sort of “return” to axonometry in the midtwentieth century.22 The Structural Constellations follow a series of prints influenced by the architecture of preColumbian monuments that the Alberses visited in Mexico between 1935 and 1968.23 These too have an axonometric quality in which one line can both come forward or digress, forming closer or more distant edges of implied volumes. In To Monte Alban, for example, based on the Zapotec (or Binnisá) site on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, the same parallel lines form the shadowed steps of two different pyramids at once, while two empty rectangles function as both the top and the base of those pyramids. (FIG. 12) Anni Albers’ textiles are often described as having been inspired by the architecture and textiles of Central and South America as well, but are they axonometric? Take Albers’ With Verticals (1946) for example. (FIG. 13) It is a vertical wall hanging, made to be seen on its own, like a painting.24 Though it does not represent recognizable volumes, like buildings or pyramids, With Verticals is certainly in dialogue with built space. Albers’ placement of deep red vertical lines of varying lengths suggests a ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 11 Helene Nonné-Schmidt, Weberei I. Semester, unregelmässige Wahlbewegung, April bis Juni 1927, p. 43a, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Klee Family Donation, SFK HNS 3/53 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Image Archive / © Helmut Bliefernicht Fig. 12 Josef Albers, To Monte Alban, 1942, Zinc plate lithograph, 61 x 48.3 cm © 2025 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ProLitteris, Zurich Fig. 13 Anni Albers, With Verticals, 1946, Cotton and linen, 154.9 x 118.1 cm © 2025 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ProLitteris, Zurich ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 27 tightly stitched, pulsing labyrinth, as the eye attempts to find a path between pillars of thread. Upon closer looking, the main weave, comprised of red and cream thread, pulses, too. The weft threads, despite running parallel, form perpendicular diagonals by passing over and under the warp in a pre-planned rhythmic pattern. When they meet, these diagonals create the illusion of three-dimensional corners. As in Josef Albers’ To Monte Alban, one cannot tell whether one is looking down or up at these implied volumes, and the dark verticals offer only a flickering sense of gravity or orientation. The grid of the textile and the rectilinear space of the loom encourage geometric renderings in which space does not retreat to a false vanishing point, but rather stays right at the surface, with straight and diagonal lines implying three-dimensional volumes. Both Alberses were aware that these geometries were not unique to art of the twentieth century. Since her time at the Bauhaus, Anni Albers was interested in Andean weaving including textiles from the Wari, Tiwanaku, and Pachacamac groups (500–900 C. E.), the Ica, Chimu, and Chancay groups (900–1400 C. E.), and the Inca (1438–1534).25 In her 1965 book On Weaving, Albers maps out the history of the loom, from the warpweight loom (a vertically hanging twobar loom used in Ancient Greece) to the Jacquard loom and power-driven machinery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; however, she goes into particular detail with regards to the backstrap loom, used by generations of Indigenous weavers, including those with whom Albers weaved in Peru and Mexico.26 Some Andean textiles contain implied axonometric spaces in a manner similar to With Verticals. For example, the vertices in an Uncu (men’s shirt) produced by the Chancay weavers (c. 1300–1450, Marquez, Peru) prefigure those that appear in axonometric drawings of apartment buildings by Hannes Meyer as well as in Bergner’s cityscape in Metro.27 (FIG. 14) Looking for textile axonometry also reveals a kinship between the embroidered angles in Albers’ Diadem (1982) and the protruding balconies of modernist architectural renderings. (FIG. 15) Chancay textiles like the Uncu in figure 14 were on view and popular in German museums in the early twentieth century, and Albers was certainly drawn to their geometric and technical complexity.28 As in With Verticals, when viewing the Uncu, the eye does the work of attempting to draw the lines that would connect the planes and create volumes. This dimensional effect is not incidental, but rather requires that the weaver plan exactly where certain threads and colors will appear and reappear—a process made possible through the organizational structure of the grid.29 ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY Fig. 15 Anni Albers, Diadem, 1982, Designed for Sunar Textiles, Machine embroidery on polyester © 2025 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ProLitteris, Zurich Fig. 14 Uncu, Men’s Shirt, Chancay, 1300–1450, Marquez, Peru, Cotton and camelid fiber; weft patterned by broaching, 56 x 72 cm Credit: State Museums of Berlin, Ethnological Museum / Lena Bjerregaard. ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 28 Several textile axonometries are at play in the works discussed in this paper: there is the creation of axonometric motifs—figurative in Metro, diagrammatic in Bergner’s loom drawings, and implied in Albers’ textiles and her Andean references—and there is the loom itself as possessing a structure that encourages, even demands, axonometric motifs. Like axonometry, the textile privileges no single viewing point, it eschews illusions of spatial recession, and it is made up of parts or modules that can be expanded ad infinitum. While Bergner’s Metro makes these connections immediately legible via representational drawing, Albers’ textiles show the spatiality of weaving to be axonometric without depicting architecture (or anything nameable at all). “A REPRESENTATION, WITHOUT METAPHOR” Advances in weaving, like those in architecture, are often about material and construction, rather than illusion. Recognizing this, Bergner claimed in a 1939 article that textiles are “a representation, without metaphor” of the life of the people at a specific place and time.30 This claim, seemingly contradictory (since one might argue that all representation involves metaphor), nevertheless attests to the fact that the loom’s and the textile’s most basic components—thread, the grid, interconnected planes—are visible no matter what the weaver attempts to depict. Like axonometric diagrams, textiles eschew fusion, showcasing (and often prioritizing) the autonomy of separate parts. Albers—who mentioned in interviews Paul Klee’s lasting influence on her work and her teaching—perhaps lamented what she saw to be an overemphasis on unity, wholeness, or “fusion” in American modernism because such a unity was a false promise. Instead, her and Bergner’s focus on the parts, which Klee believed could be “found” without the whole, runs throughout both weavers’ textiles, writing, and teaching. With these parts clearly articulated, students, weavers, and designers of all kinds now have the opportunity to observe Albers’ and Bergner’s work and (mentally) take it apart in order to build something new—making textile axonometry integral to the Bauhaus legacy. ANGELA H. BROWN / ANNI ALBERS, LENA BERGNER, AND TEXTILE AXONOMETRY 1 Talesnik 2016, p. 2. 2 Albers 1957, p. 38. Emphasis mine. 3 Beggs 2023, p. 67. See also Smith 2014 and Smith 2006. 4 Ibid. 5 For a discussion of axonometry in relation to Erwin Panofsky’s writings on perspective, see Bois 1981. 6 Bois 1981. 7 See Bois 1981, p. 41 and see Farías Barba, et al. 2018. 8 Thanks are due here to Yve-Alain Bois for his feedback on the paper from which this article emerged. I first began working on this material during his graduate seminar on axonometry at Princeton University in the Fall of 2019. The comments and suggestions provided by the other members of the seminar were also fundamental during the research process. Additional thanks to Emily Grossman for her insight into loom parts and diagram deciphering. 9 Gilbert Simondon articulates this distinction through his separation of “concrete” and “abstract” machines. The former is synthetic. It works like the various interconnected systems in the human body. The latter is analytic, meaning its pieces work together without knowing each other. Abstract machines are explained to students piece by piece rather than as a whole. See Simondon 2017, pp. 27–8. 10 Klee 1925, p. 10. English translation from Klee 2019. 11 Klee 1925, p. 13. 12 See Potts 2009, pp. 304–305. 13 Potts 2009, p. 305.