There is an atmosphere of undiluted male here.
Vanessa Bell, private letter to Virginia Woolf, August 21, 1908
Drawing on specific textile-artworks produced by British artist Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), German Anni Albers (1899-1994) and Russian Lyubov Popova (1889-1924), the present text attempts to map the nexus of discourse in and through which, the said female artists applied the language of geometric abstraction on items of everyday life from 1913 until 1927. Despite the visual similarities among the textile-artworks produced by these three women arising from the common pictorial language, as well as the technical nature of the medium, on a second plane, their works present major differences, as each artist’s conception of the specific stakes born by geometric abstraction differs according to the cultural context within which they found themselves positioned – as well as positioned themselves – in terms of gender, class and national identity. —Apostolos Ntelakos
