Trude Guermonprez was a much-admired weaver and professor of textile arts at California College of Art. She was trained at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Halle, Germany, sometimes called the “little Bauhaus,” as many of its faculty had studied or taught there. After World War II, she made her way to California by way of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she taught alongside Anni Albers, and Pond Farm Workshop in Guerneville, California, where she joined another former Bauhausler, Marguerite Wildenhain.
Like Anni Albers, Guermonprez admired the aesthetic and structural integrity of double cloth, which has two independent, intersecting planes. In this piece, she used over-twisted yarns in one of the layers to create an interlocking grid of varied textures in off-white. The crepe effect also draws up the sparsely used black wefts into lines of abstracted calligraphic script, another deep interest which Guermonprez developed more fully in her later work.
