Collective Threads MOMus Thessaloniki, Greece Through May 11Recently, the output of the Soviet textile designer Anna Andreeva has been the subject of renewed interest among art historians and collectors. In 2018 some of her works were acquired by the MoMA permanent collection in the department of architecture. MOMus, a contemporary museum in Thessaloniki, Greece, is currently hosting a retrospective entitled Collective Threads, which examines her legacy within Moscow’s Red Rose silk factory, named after the German revolutionary martyr Rosa Luxemburg. For more than forty years, from 1944 until at least 1987, Andreeva worked together with other members of the factory’s design collective. Anna Andreeva, Cherëmushki, late 1950s, Gouache on paper (Courtesy MOMus) “The Urban Fabric on Fabric” One of the recurrent themes in her designs, as several commentators have noted, is urbanism. Moving to Moscow from the tiny village of Ilovai-Brigadirskoe outside Tambov at the age of nine, she quickly grew enamored of the capital. She had originally hoped to train as an architect at the Moscow Architectural Institute and at first even gained admission, but she was ultimately denied entry due to her wealthy family background. Her interest in metropolitan architecture remained and frequently found its way into her prints. On the back of some of Andreeva’s abstract patterns is written: “the urban fabric on fabric” [ткан города на ткани]. She saw tiles of fabric and city blocks as each arranged by grids, thus obeying an analogous logic. This commonality is what allowed Andreeva to break out of the floral and polka-dot patterns prescribed for womenswear while Stalin was still alive. Not long after Khrushchev assumed power, and especially following his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s crimes in 1956, a cultural thaw set in. This occurred in architecture no less than in painting or literature, as the ornamental excesses of Stalinism were repudiated in favor of unadorned concrete-panel or brick construction. Simultaneously, the restrictions imposed on the fiber arts started loosening as well, and Andreeva seized the opportunity to innovate. Perhaps appealing to the spirit of the times, she took Khrushchev’s initiative to address the postwar housing shortage as the subject for her design. Beginning with Cherëmushki (1958), named after a district in Moscow where these new buildings were first erected, she used the image of standardized khrushchëvki low-rises as a central motif. (Dmitri Shostakovich would also dedicate an eponymous operetta to the neighborhood in early 1959, gently satirizing the construction of the new apartment complexes, so it was well-represented across the arts.) Whereas the mass housing blocks were infamously gray, however, Andreeva’s cartoon outlines were colored in with red, yellow, and orange interspersed with green trees. Although the buildings and trees were obviously figurative up close, their shape was heavily abstracted, arranged along the fabric at a repeating geometric interval that made them hard to discern from a distance. Cherëmushki was by all accounts a massive success, premiering at the Expo 58 world’s fair in Brussels. It proved so popular that, when her coworkers Sulamif Zaslavskaia and Natalia Zhovtis wrote an open letter to the Soviet textile industry in the January 1961 issue of Decorative Arts of the USSR voicing their frustration at the state’s refusal to purchase new designs, the pattern was selected as the background. Anna Andreeva, Greetings, Moscow!, late 1950s, Gouache on paper (Courtesy MOMus) This was not the first time a design by Andreeva had appeared in the pages of this magazine, one of the most widely read artistic periodicals of the day. Just a few months earlier, in August 1960, another of her architecture-themed designs was featured alongside an article by Nina Mertsalova titled “Costume and Fabric.” A young woman is drawn wearing a skirt with scenes from the Soviet capital; the style of the illustration looks like it could have come out of contemporaneous American fashion catalogues. Greetings, Moscow! (1959), codesigned by Zhovtis, includes the facades of iconic buildings from the city in alternating blue and white against a checkered backdrop. Unlike Cherëmushki, this pattern does not include any modernist structures. Instead, the Bolshoi Theatre and one of the Seven Sisters float above cars as they zip by. Andreeva was not averse to depicting more historicist styles, whether the neoclassicism of Joseph Bové or the Stalinist Gothic skyscrapers of the 1940s. Yet the overall effect of this pattern is very modern, juxtaposing recognizable buildings with backgrounded squares. The print of Greetings, Moscow! was available for full dresses in multiple colors as well; a black-and-white version is extant. Cityscapes for Festival Designs These two patterns were not, however, the first time Andreeva depicted cities in her work. Her earliest surviving representation of built environments is a rough sketch for the biennial International Festival of Youth in blue ink on a strip of tracing paper, from 1957, the year it was held in Moscow. For ten years, these antiwar and anti-imperialist celebrations had brought students and youth from all over the world to either the Soviet Union or countries belonging to the Eastern Bloc. Andreeva’s illustration shows architectural landmarks of the previous five festivals—Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest, Warsaw—as well as Moscow, along with the official emblems for each festival. Whether Andreeva ever realized this sketch, or even elaborated on it further, is not known. Anna Andreeva, Design for a Moscow Souvenir Scarf, 1960s, possibly 1960 for the Socialist Moscow exhibition, or 1965, in preparation for the Montreal International Exhibition in 1967, Gouache on paper (Courtesy MOMus) Andreeva would go on to design a few other commemorative fabrics representing the capital city at international events. For either the Socialist Moscow exhibition of 1960 or Expo ’67 in Montreal, she proposed a souvenir scarf. Several preparatory drafts for the Stolitsa, as it has been speculatively titled, have survived. One mixed media mock-up has solid blue, red, green, and yellow rectangles pasted on a beige background. Inside these rectangles appear once again the Bolshoi Theatre and Stalinist skyscrapers, but now they are joined by traditional Orthodox onion domes. Pediments, architraves, Khrushchevian apartment blocks, and metro station signs busily crowd the interstitial space, punctuated by gently rounded cars and trees. An alternate version, also on paper, uses Moscow State University as its centerpiece, surrounded by three St. Basil’s Cathedrals, a couple of State Historical Museums, and a more modern building with giant letters perched atop spelling out the name of the city. Trees and subway entrances also find their way in. Here the colors are primarily red, orange, pink, and green. Finally, a small cutout includes most of the design elements from this second proposal and is similarly colorful. By contrast, the only version known to have been printed on silk has much less variation in its color scheme, using a palette of dark blue, light blue, black, and white. Like the other proposals, it shows cars and trees between the facades of modernist and neoclassical buildings, but the piece as a whole exudes a much more frenetic energy. Architectural Motifs in Andreeva’s Commemorative Fabrics Even Andreeva’s designs celebrating historic events often had architectural and urban details sprinkled in. Two works from the early 1960s in particular showcase this tendency. First, there was her scarf saluting Yuri Gagarin’s epoch-making Earth orbit. Two starry night skies in black and gold run between strips of text, while the two alternate panels give a panoramic view of Moscow’s Red Square. Some of the familiar buildings from the Stolitsa proposals reappear here, including St. Basil’s and the State Historical Museum, along with the Kremlin Senate. As the architectural historian and MoMA curator Evangelos Kotsioris puts it in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, Andreeva seemingly counterposed the cosmic theme of space flight with the “terrestrial, manmade” environment of the capital. A second scarf Andreeva produced the next year commemorated a glorious moment from Russia’s past. For the sesquicentennial of the 1812 Battle of Borodino between Napoleon’s Grande Armée and the Russian Imperial Army, she designed a piece featuring military as well as architectural themes. Although the fighting occurred some 70 miles from Moscow, Andreeva placed St. Basil’s Cathedral and assorted other Russian Orthodox churches next to Nutcracker-like wooden soldiers, cavalrymen, and artillery. Anna Andreeva, Untitled, 1960s, Colored pencil on paper (Courtesy MOMus) Beyond the explicit references to buildings and cities in these designs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, an architectonic influence can be detected in some of Andreeva’s more abstract patterns a decade or so later. One undated sketch from the City or Surfaces series, most likely drawn in the early ’70s, is on view at MOMus. An undulating grid of orthogonal and diagonal rectilinear shapes collide and intersect: Some sections are monochromatic, while others are brightly colored. The whole design suggests an aerial view of a city, with urban blocks crisscrossing each other at irregular angles. Another pattern from this same series by Andreeva has survived, rendered into fabric, produced sometime between 1970 and 1972. This piece almost appears like a pixelated screen, with mostly blue and gold squares of varying sizes clustered together and overlaid onto a backdrop of navy and eggshell. Pink, teal, and light-yellow squares further interrupt the field. While the figures are completely flat, not made to resemble any identifiable structures, they nevertheless hint at a cityscape. (Somewhat similarly, in the 1920s, 2D Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Lazar Khidekel had an architectural resonance. For the most part, the fabrics Andreeva designed are redolent of textiles by Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, but here her work calls to mind these other avant-gardists. She also proposed electrification patterns not unlike those of Gustav Klutsis, whose early abstractions were often inspired by radio towers. Last but not least, Andreeva’s 1972 entry for the prestigious Repin Prize evokes architecture. Mosaic, as it was titled, is an exceedingly complex design: some parts of it look like stain-glass fenestration; others, regarded as vertical bands, could stand side-by-side with Ivan Leonidov’s Narkomtiazhprom skyscraper for Red Square from the early 1930s. Xenia Vytuleva-Herz, Andreeva’s granddaughter, has justly remarked that architectural motifs were her grandmother’s signature. Many of the essays in the forthcoming Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory (Scheidegger & Speiss, 2025), edited by the brilliant historian of Soviet art Christina Kiaer, touch on this preoccupation in passing. Kiaer’s introduction examines Andreeva’s works up through the early 1960s, so designs like Greetings, Moscow! and Cherëmushki feature prominently in her narrative. She focuses on the collective dimension of the design process, and how this fulfilled the earlier Productivist dream of the artist-engineer engaged in production. Julia Tulovsky highlights many of the stylistic continuities that existed between Andreeva and Constructivism. As the exhibition travels, and Andreeva’s work is more widely disseminated, these and other themes will become better known. The architectural heritage of the USSR can be seen not only in the buildings from that period, or in the unbuilt blueprints handed down, but through a variety of media: in the paintings of Deineka, the music of Shostakovich, and the fabrics of Andreeva. Ross Wolfe is a critic, historian, and educator living in New York City.