This gouache is a study for a modernist curtain for the theater in Oppeln, a Polish city that was at the
time part of the Weimar Republic. Albers made it while enrolled in a course taught by Paul Klee at the
Bauhaus art school in Dessau, Germany. The two-dimensional composition captures the structure and depth of a woven textile—a medium to which Albers devoted her nearly 75-year career—and embodies the principles of the Bauhaus, which sought to unify visual art and functional design. In 1933 the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis, and Albers fled to the United States with her husband, the artist Josef Albers, to join the faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. At the college, Albers carried on aspects of the Bauhaus’s interdisciplinary approach, attracting guest artists, including Cage, to teach.