A major figure of both the Dada and Constructivist art movements, Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp is a pioneering figure of the 20th-century avant-garde. In recent years she has gained increasing recognition for her contribution to art, being the subject of a major retrospective exhibition co-organised by The Museum of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Basel, and Tate Modern in 2021.
Read MoreBorn Sophie Henriette Gertrude Taeuber in Davos, Switzerland, Taeuber-Arp began her studies at the School of Applied Arts in St. Gallen in 1906, where she focused on textile design and embroidery until 1910. Later, she moved to Munich to study at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School, and then to Hamburg, to attend the School of Arts and Crafts. However, in 1914, the outbreak of the First World War forced Taeuber-Arp to return to Switzerland where she joined a summer artist colony, enrolled in Rudolf von Laban's school of modern dance and performed at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada.
At an exhibition in 1915, Taeuber-Arp met German-French sculptor, painter, and poet Jean Arp, who was fleeing the military draft in Germany. The two married in 1922 and became lifelong collaborators. From 1916 onward, the artists were heavily involved in Zurich's Dada movement, which—against the backdrop of wartime destruction—favoured irrational and absurd production over bourgeoise artistic traditions.
While she worked across an astounding range of media, some of Taeuber-Arp's most well-known works are her 'Dada Head' series (1918–1920)—oval-shaped sculptures which resemble simplified human heads. Head (1920), for example, comprises oil-painted pieces of turned-wood with visible joints, adorned with glass beads and wire arranged to recall earrings. The series' style and materials are indicative of Taeuber-Arp's combination of fine art craft techniques; throughout her life, she ignored any hierarchy between the two.
The 'Dada Head' works likely grew out of a 1918 commission to design marionettes for an adaptation of the play King Stag at Zurich's School of Applied Arts, where Taeuber-Arp taught embroidery and design from 1916 to 1929. Her methods of teaching colour theory and design reflected the direction of her practice at the time; recurring throughout her work were grids, geometric units and an approach to colour, form and line.
That style was closely associated with the Constructivist movement, which aimed to reflect early 20th-century modern industrial life through geometric abstraction and austere aesthetics. Taeuber-Arp and Arp's collage Untitled (Duo-Collage) 1918, for example, comprises paper and silver leaf composed on paperboard on in a grid composition. To the Arps, grids were reminiscent of the pattern of textile fibres, and relieved artists of the burden of making subjective choices.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Taeuber-Arp worked on a number of architectural and interior design projects, including the decorative scheme for the Café Aubette cultural centre in Strasbourg, on which she collaborated with her husband and de Stijl painter and architect Theo van Doesburg. By 1929, the couple had built their own home and studio near Paris, for which Taeuber-Arp created minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired furniture.
In Paris, the couple became associated with groups like Abstraction-Création, Cercle et Carré, and Allianz. Into their circle came artists such Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1937, Taeuber-Arp founded the international art magazine Plastique, which she edited until 1939.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp's flourishing career was cut short by an accidental death from monoxide poisoning in 1943, not long after fleeing to Zurich to escape the Nazi occupation in France. Despite Jean Arp's efforts to promote her legacy, including making posthumous recreations of her work, independent recognition of Sophie Taeuber-Arp contributions to modern art had been relatively limited until late.
A retrospective exhibition of Sophie Taeuber-Arp's artwork, travelling from the Kunstmuseum Basel to the Tate Modern, London, and MoMA, New York is slated for mid-to-late 2021. A book on Sophie Taeuber-Arp's life and career, written by her great niece Silvia Boadella, was published by Skira in 2021.
Michael Irwin and Elliat Albrecht | Ocula | 2021