Sophie Taeuber-Arp

A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021

Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp’s work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design.

This richly illustrated catalog explores the artist’s interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings and relief sculptures. It also features 15 essays that examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp’s career. Arranged into six chapters that follow the exhibition’s sections, these essays trace the progression of Taeuber-Arp’s creative production both chronologically and thematically. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay on Taeuber-Arp’s materials and techniques, and an exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp’s production.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born in 1889 in Davos, Switzerland, and trained at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School in Munich. In 1914, she began a successful applied arts practice in Zurich, where she also taught textile design and participated in the Dada movement. Starting in the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, most significantly the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. When she moved to Paris in 1929, she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the Nazi occupation, Taeuber-Arp spent her final years in the South of France, and died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.

A Wall Street Journal 2021 holiday gift guide pick

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) was a pioneer of modern art. She was at the center of Zurich’s Dada movement and is considered the most important female Swiss artist of the early 20th century. She was a modern dancer, painter, sculptor, textile artist, designer; and interior architect. She made paper, textiles, wood, and glass shine – she bound light to matter in paintings, jewelry, embroidery, rugs, marionettes, furniture, and sculptures.
This unique portrait shows how Taeuber-Arp remained passionately devoted to her art despite the threat of two world wars. Through her work, she not only found and preserved her inner self and joy in extremely difficult circumstances, but also tapped enormous strength to endure the challenges in her life and remain true to herself.
The author, Silvia Boadella, is Taeuber-Arp’s great niece and grew up with Sophie’s art. Her approach is intimate and empathetic, as if she were looking at the world through Taeuber-Arp’s eyes, when drawing from family memories, stories, and documents as well as from unpublished sources. She has created a visually and verbally powerful narrative that for the first time connects stations in Taeuber-Arp's life with her works. Through the many well-chosen illustrations, including photographs from the family archives, she makes this story into a lively experience. Fundamental topics central to every human life, such as love, birth and death, are woven through the text to offer direct emotional access to Taeuber-Arp's works and allow the reader to engage with them creatively, and to experience first-hand how the artist lives on through her art.

Upon first encountering Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s (1889–1943) diminutive Head (1920), one might wonder whether it is an abstract sculpture, a playful portrait or a functional object. Indicative of the artist’s pursuit to break down the conventional boundaries between the applied and fine arts, the work defies easy categorization. Its stylized features—a single eye, a long trapezoidal nose, delicately beaded “earrings”—hint at the artist’s interests in modernist abstraction and in the stuff of everyday life. A dancer, designer, puppet maker, sculptor and painter at the heart of the Zurich Dada movement, Taeuber-Arp made Head in the wake of World War I, during a time of profound political and cultural self-questioning. Almost a century later, her witty wooden figure has lost none of its punch as an investigation of art across aesthetic and material boundaries rather than within them. Curator Anne Umland’s essay positions this intriguingly anthropomorphic work within the broader arc of Taeuber-Arp’s remarkably vibrant and versatile career.