Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean (Hans) Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp on the 50 Swiss Francs note
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean (Hans) Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp on the 50 Swiss Francs note
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
1936
Paris, France
Wassily Kandinsky in Paris
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artist designer painter sculptor
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born on January 19, 1889, in Davos, Canton Grisons, Switzerland. She was the fifth child in a middle-class Prussian family. Her father, Emil Taeuber, was a pharmacist who died of tuberculosis when Taeuber-Arp was two years old. Her mother, Sophie Taeuber-Krusi, opened a Bed and Breakfast in Trogen, Switzerland to support the family.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp studied drawing at the School of Applied Arts in Saint Gallen, Switzerland from 1908 to 1910, but desired exposure to a wider range of ideas, and headed to Germany to study textile design. In Germany, her schooling reflected her interest in diverse fields and her unhappiness with strict boundaries and programs, as she bounced back and forth between the Teaching and Experimental Studio for Applied and Liberal Arts in Munich and the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg. She studied not only design, but also dance, weaving, and bead work from 1911 to 1913. In 1916 she attended the famous Leban School of Dance in Zurich.
Between 1915 and 1920 Taeuber lived a dual life. During the day she was a lecturer in embroidery and weaving at the School of Applied Arts (Zurich), a post she held until 1929, and in the evenings she participated in Dada sorées, usually in disguise to avoid recognition and the loss of her teaching job. Arp and Taeuber were involved in many Dada events in Zurich. Taeuber's interests during this period revolved around dance, performance, puppetry, costumes, and artistic collaborations. Her concern for the total work of art was shared by many of the other Zurich Dadaists.
Taeuber worked on puppet designs and set decorations for French and Swiss theater productions from 1916 to 1929, and from 1918 to 1920 she produced a series of heads constructed from hatstands, portraits in polychromed turned wood which hold their own amidst any of Dada's sophisticated objects. During her Dada period she collaborated with Käthe Wulff on the choreography for the ballet "The Merchent" (backdrops by Arp and Hans Richter) and choreographed the "Noir Kukado" using the Leban system of notation. The choreographic element, her prowess as a dancer, and her background in textile design continually influenced her two dimensional work. In 1915 Taeuber worked on a series of duo collages with Arp which he later identified as the first manifestations of "Concrete Art. "
From 1915 to 1920 the prevailing formal elements of her two dimensional work were horizontal/ vertical sectioning, often compared to her textile designs. The period 1920-1926 marked a relatively inactive period in her career during which she produced costume designs and guaches. Starting 1916, Taeuber-Arp was also a professor of textile design and technique (a department she helped found) at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. This dual life ended when she felt financially comfortable enough to resign from the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts in 1928/1929.
Taeuber-Arp travelled to Pompeii in 1926 and that same year completed a mural painting for Paul Horn, an architect in Strasbourg. The mural led to a commission for the interior of the Café de l'Aubette, a total artistic environment and the first realized Constructivist publicspace which integrated art and function. The project was completed in 1927, in collaboration with Arp and de Stijl (style) artist Theo van Doesburg. Taeuber-Arp coauthored a manual for the decorative arts entitled Design and Textile Arts with Blanche Gauchet in 1927 and ten years later founded and edited the Constructivist review, Plastique/Plastic (Paris).
In 1928 Taeuber-Arp and her husband moved to Meudon-Val Fleury, outside Paris. Their house and its furnishings, which have been described as a merging of art and utilitarian concerns, were designed by Taeuber-Arp, who made use of principles that ran parallel to those of the Bauhaus. In 1930 she began her "ping" picture series, works dominated by circles, a form that she believed contained all forms, and, in 1932, her "space paintings, " based on a straightforward grid. During the mid to late 1930s she worked on biomorphic/geometric pieces, some of which were executed in wood relief. Taeuber-Arp and Arp fled Paris in 1940 and settled in Grasse.
In 1942 they executed a series of lithographs with Sonia Delaunay and Alberto Magnelli. For Taeuber-Arp, this was the last of a long series of joint artistic ventures.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp participated in a number of group exhibitions during her life time. Particular note should be made of her inclusion in the first Carré exhibition at the Galeries 23 (Paris) in 1930. The show involved representatives from many of the 20th century's most advanced manifestations of modernism, including Futurism, Dada, the Bauhaus, German Abstraction, Constructivism, the Polish Blok group, the French Cubists, Purists, and de Stijl. After her death numerous exhibitions, some of which included works by her husband Hans(Jean) Arp, were organized in both Europe and America. In 1981 the Museum of Modern Art (New York) mounted the one woman show "Sophie Taeuber-Arp" which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), and the Musée d'Art Contemporain (Montreal).
Sophie Taeuber-Arp is now recognised as one of the key figures in the Dada artistic movement, though in her lifetime she fought for her less figurative style of art to be recognised as fine art.
She was the founder and editor of the Constructivist art journal "Plastique (1937 - 1939), which kept her in touch with important avant-garde figures.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was exhibited at the Hauser & Wirth, London and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Her work "Composition à cercles et demicercles" sold at Christie's London 'Impressionist/Modern Works on Paper' in 2015 for $135,636.
Her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., etc.
Composition dans un cercle
1937Elementary Forms
1917Vertical and horizontal composition
1928Figures
1926Untitled
Vertical and horizontal composition
1916Draft for the tearoom on the ground floor of the Cafe Aubette
1926Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles
1930Oval Composition with Abstract Motifs
1922unknown title
Projet pour l'Aubette
1927Rising, Falling, Flying
1934Echelonnement desaxe
1934Untitled
1918Dada Head
1920Composition Dada
1920O. T.(Croisement de droites, plans)
1942Composition
1937Moving Circles
1933Sophie Taeuber-Arp believed that melding the fine and applied arts could establish a visual vocabulary for the technological age and was committed to the concept of the "total work of art. "
Quotations:
"It is not possible for us to take ourselves back to the exact circumstances of those in a past era, attempting to create art in the style of the past is always inauthentic."
"The intrinsic decorative urge should not be eradicated. It is one of humankind's deep-rooted, primordial urges. Primitive people decorated their implements and cult objects with a desire to beautify and enhance....it is a sense emanating from the urge for perfection and creative accomplishment."
Members of this organization believed that the applied arts could be used to create an appropriate expression of the technological age.
Swiss Werkbund , Switzerland
1915 - 1932
It was the organization dedicated to non-figurative art.
Cercle et Carré , France
1930
In 1934 Sophie Taeuber-Arp protested the organization's policies and formally withdrew along with Jean Hélion, Otto Freundlich, Fernandez, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Robert Delauney, Georges Valmier, and Hans (Jean) Arp.
Abstraction-Création , France
1931 - 1934
It was a union of Swiss painters.
Allianz , Switzerland
1937 - 1943
Quotes from others about the person
Hans Arp: "I met Sophie Taeuber in 1915 in Zurich. Like the leaves on a tree in a fairytale, her luminous works descended on my existence. Only a few days after our first meeting, we executed embroideries and collages together. Together we planned large montages. We had met in the beauty of the starry firmament and its mighty architecture had foreordained out work forever."
Hugo Ball: "All around her is the radiance of the sun... She is full of invention, caprice, fantasy. . . . It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting, and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. The figures of her dance are at once mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic."
In 1915 Sophie Taeuber met Jean (Hans) Arp at the Gallery Tanner exhibition in Zurich. On October 20, 1922 they got married. This initial meeting served as a turning point for both of them.
