Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (2016-17). Photo: Michael Brzezinski / courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London We cross the street. It is finally revealed, through more points of interest (here, a revolutionary newspaper was created), that we will go for lunch to the Platonic ideal of a Parisian bistro. I’m half waiting to wander into Les Deux Magots for coffee with Gertrude Stein. Finally, we will talk about her work as an artist – if that word does not seem too weak when you think of a work that includes magazine design and editing, tapestry and sculpture, textiles and painting and collaboration with architects. An exhibition of her work is about to open in Hepworth Wakefield, just the last chapter of a long life that began in Nebraska in 1934. Her artistic background is powerful: she goes back to the Bauhaus, having been taught by the great German painter Josef Albers in Yale – Josef was the husband of Anni Albers, also a great German weaver, who was both a fan of the school during the Weimar Republic before moving to the United States. I’ve been around the block 10 times already! I set myself the task of making art that deserves strict attention because it is art But first, it’s apparently me who has to answer a question. “What color do you think of when you think of Anni Albers?” Hicks asks, her sly look piercing. Feeling that there may be a right and a wrong answer, I look back desperately on my memories of the Tate Modern show in 2019 and finally murmur something that does not come to mind, in fact, a particular color. “Exactly!” she says. “The color looks completely arbitrary.” He tells me that Albers’s fabrics were about structure. That, Hicks, on the other hand, has to do with color. “The color is in my blood! A chacun son domaine! “ It’s the color he wants to talk about today. We are discussing the golden sunflower of my blouse. Her shirt, blue as the sky of Paris on the first spring day of the year. the butter yellow of the jacket she wore last Monday at the Stella McCartney show. Later, back in the studio – a seductive cave whose shelves sparkle with jewel-colored thread spools – our conversation is marked by murmured instructions to her assistants. They, four of them, are sitting around a long table, working long lengths of thread in flame and red and green and blue in hedonistic ropes, a final sculpture. He works, he says, “as a painter. A little more here, a little more here, paint over it, draw it. It is not like working on a loom where you set up a program. It’s intuitive: a stroke. “I can change it at any time.” He murmurs, “A droite… A peu moins… for calmer an peu l’orange…” Hicks in her studio in Paris. Photo: Ed Alcock / The Guardian What he does not want to discuss, for example, is the fundamental and ancient role of weaving in human society, its function as a metaphor, its place in myth. He thought about all this many years ago, when he traveled to Latin America on a Fulbright scholarship in the late 1950s, studying pre-Columbian fabrics. It was inspired by this line of study by Yale art history professor George Kubler, author of The Shape of Time, who not only showed his students many slides from Andean mummies but “looked like a a mummy walking a bunch; a fascinating man, presided over his ranks in such a strong way “. As a result of these courses he experimented with the reconstruction of ancient weaving techniques on a simple loom, something he started with weaving, at the same time that he was studying painting under Albers. Even now he makes small textiles in a simple frame like a kind of diary. Later, she shows me some of these woven “notebooks” in which she has incorporated feathers, or corn husks, or scallop shells like the ones left over from our lunch bistro or branches she picked up with her granddaughter from the Jardin du Luxembourg. Today, however, she puts aside all these ethnographic things that interested her. “I have moved on. I’ve been around the block 10 times already! “I set myself the task of working, making, thinking and making art that deserves strict attention because it is art.” It was not a matter of gender. It was not a matter of struggle. It was none of that. It was color It does not seem to make a hierarchical distinction between things that are made to fit a slit in a building, things that are made to meet an order, and things that are meant to be a gallery. “I feel that you do not like to be stuck,” I mock. “That’s definitely what my husband would say,” she replies, like Kathryn Hepburn. “Everything I do is for one person only,” he says. The same of course. “I like it and I like to do it.” The rest – discussions with curators, publishers or architects – is a secondary issue. In the 1970s, he even made embroidered panels for the interiors of Air France’s first fleet of Boeing 747s. Her assistants on that occasion were nuns from a silent Carmelite monastery. They needed the job. The bottom was falling out of the wafer market. There are other stories to tell: the time when he got angry with all the Armenian carpet merchants in Paris, when he bought tons of carpets from the auction house Drouot, to be used in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (though he never was). And at a time when he was editing American Fabrics and Fashions magazine, when he got Madame Grès a fancy Dutch art scholarship because the fashion designer claimed, “he was a real sculptor.” The tiny, ancient Mrs. Grès “with her turban and Jaguar drove to The Hague and took the prize and got in her car and drove straight back” – skipping her own party. And then the big couturier made Hicks a black-and-red dress (which Hicks may or may not wear at her Wakefield opening), the big lady was sitting on the floor with pins in her mouth, and Hicks told her, ” I’m very ashamed, “and Grace replied sternly,” Madam, you too are a woman who knows what it’s best to do. “ Sheila Hicks, in the courtyard outside her studio in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Photo: Ed Alcock / MYOP Color, though: Josef Albers was the great color theorist, his lessons on the subject famous – and Hicks taught in her own classroom, then in Chile, at her Fulbright. But she tells me that the first work in the Wakefield exhibition precedes her lessons with him: it is a painting from a summer she spent in Taxco, Mexico, in 1954. She had already done two years at the University of Syracuse, until – and this story is delivered with a particular sangfroid, his tragedy may have been mitigated for Hicks by time and repetition – a friend of hers from the class suggested they try to move to Yale. The Ivy League Foundation at the time, in addition to a handful of girls in art school, “only took boys. Which we thought would be fun. Not a lot of competition, right? ” So her friend picked up their briefcases for the Easter holidays, “and it was Albers who looked at them. He liked her job. He liked my job. He said, “Yes, put on these girls.” And then that summer, my girlfriend put her head in the oven and put gas on herself. “ “What am I doing now? I did not want to go back to school, because everyone would ask what happened.” He went to Taxco that summer to think about it and then decided: “I’m going to Yale because I do not know anyone. “Of course, I knew about color before I got to Yale because that ‘s what Albers saw in me.” to talk to the class. “And most of the time he used my job – he took it out anonymously and used it as an example. So there was a kind of mutual appreciation – but anonymously. “It was none of that. It was color.” Cordes Sauvages / Hidden Blue (2014). Photo: Michael Brzezinski / The Deighton Collection. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London And then there was Anni Albers. Hicks laughs when she tells me how she is defined as a student of Annie Albers. Not a bit of that. But when she started making these makeshift looms for her art history studies, Josef Albers introduced them both. Anni did not teach at Yale – there was no textile department and there were definitely no female teachers. Joseph “was not even very polite. He said, “Come with me, girl, be in my office at four, we will meet my wife.” Hicks, “like a stupid student,” had no idea who his wife was. The guy next to her whistled, “You’re not going home with your teachers!” And Hicks replied, “No …
