To capture the unconscionability of historical fact and suggest the intimacy of details-the individual lives, stories, and dreams that were lost-is a unique challenge for memorializing the Holocaust in the visual arts. For some artists, representations of the specific-possessions, faces, names-serve as synecdoche, parts of the larger, missing whole. These images provide a channel for our compassion, which, having rested on the apprehension of individual souls, unleashes the imagination to conjure the absent millions. For other artists, the denial of figuration itself evokes the vastness of the destruction. The abstract image, in its refusal to tell, calls attention to the inadequacy of language. Yet whether crafted in the vernacular of the representational or the idiom of the abstract, the work must affect viewers, perhaps more compellingly than other art, with unmediated immediacy.

In 1965, The Jewish Museum approached Anni Albers with a commission to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. An artist, designer, writer, and teacher, Albers elevated textiles from utilitarian product to a medium of powerful aesthetic statement. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Albers studied weaving before immigrating to America with her husband, Josef, a painter and instructor at the Bauhaus School. As a student at the Bauhaus, Anni learned from Paul Klee the expressive liberties of the formal grid, and in the fabrics of ancient Andean cultures she recognized a powerful visual language. Albers developed her own style of "pictorial weavings," which she mounted on linen bases and framed-elevating textile to a pure aesthetic. Her Holocaust memorial, Six Prayers, achieves both universality and intimacy and gently, though powerfully, provokes the viewer into private contemplation.

Albers's elegy is composed of six vertical tapestries woven of beige, black, white, and silver. While the use of so limited and somber a palette might call attention to the problem of differentiation in response to mass murder, Albers varies the weave, allowing one of these colors to dominate in each of the six panels, thereby giving each segment a unique tone. Against the structural grid of warp and weft, Albers sets meandering threads of black and white whose spontaneous irregularity is suggestive of an individual will-or individual wills-charting some personal terrain across an imposed order of overlapping verticals and horizontals. Poised within the restrained quiet of abstraction, these ambling filaments are texts that spread across the scroll-like tapestries, transcending the limited utterances of verbal language for a more universal elegy. Words are at once evoked and denied by the appearance and disappearance of these threads. Though the six commemorative stelae are solemn in their monumentality, there is an intimacy to the tapestries. Weaving-which consists of the intertwining of disparate threads-symbolically suggests the process of tikkun, or social repair.

Wilhelm Worringer, a theorist whom Albers much admired in her Bauhaus days, wrote in Abstraction and Empathy that beauty in representational art derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, which reflects our confidence in the world as it is. Abstract art, by contrast is the result of our insecurity and alienation from a world in which we can no longer comfortably envision ourselves or empathize with others. When conceiving of her Holocaust memorial, Albers may have meant to evoke something of Worringer's sense of anxiety and loss. Yet Albers, who devoted her life to developing the language of abstraction, believed in the potential of nonobjective art to reach beyond the communicative capacities of the representational. In mediating between abstraction and the suggestion of script, and between the assertiveness of art that is framed and hung on the wall and the intimacy of entwining threads, Albers creates a place of rest, something in between the world of things and the transcendental unknown. Her woven textiles not only elicit thought and hope; they are themselves six prayers.