Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (born January 19, 1889, Davos, Switzerland—died January 13, 1943, Zürich) was a Swiss French Dada artist, textile designer, and modern dancer whose multimedia works bridged the gap between fine and applied arts.

After studying textile design in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and in Hamburg, Taeuber-Arp left for Zürich in 1915. That year she met Jean Arp, who became her artistic collaborator and then her husband (1922). Together Taeuber-Arp and Arp created abstract multimedia works that they called Duo-Collages. Those early works were founded on geometry and patterns and were visibly influenced by Taeuber-Arp’s experience with textile design. Starting in 1916 she taught textile design at Zürich’s School of Arts and Crafts, a position she held through at least 1928. In 1916 she also immersed herself in the Dada movement, which had taken hold of the avant-garde artists of Zürich. That year she also began to study modern dance with choreographer Rudolf Laban. She became an accomplished dancer and performed, sometimes with German dancer Mary Wigman, at the Cabaret Voltaire, a central meeting place of the Dadaists.

In addition to dancing, Taeuber-Arp’s contribution to the Dada genre included a series of wooden heads (“Dada heads”), which she fashioned out of hat stands and on which she painted stylized geometric faces, including one of Jean (Untitled [Dada Head, Portrait of Hans Arp], 1918). Also with wood she created marionettes for a 1918 production of Carlo Gozzi’s 1762 fairy tale The King Stag.

In 1926 Taeuber-Arp and Arp, now married, moved to Strasbourg, France, and became French citizens. There, along with Arp and Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg, Taeuber-Arp worked on a commission to repurpose a mid-18th-century building into what would become the Café de l’Aubette, a restaurant with a dance hall and a theatre. The trio worked on the project through 1928. Unfortunately, the new design was not well received by the residents of Strasbourg, and changes were made to the interior soon after its completion. What remained of their original design was later destroyed by the Nazis.

Taeuber-Arp and her husband moved to Paris in 1928, where they stayed until 1940. During those years she exhibited her work—including several times with the Surrealists in the mid- to late 1930s. She and Arp also joined artist groups Cercle et Carré (1930) and Abstraction-Création (1931–34). In 1937 she helped launch and became editor of an art journal titled Plastique, which was published until 1939. She created polychrome and monochrome wooden reliefs in the 1930s, which integrated biomorphic with geometric forms, and during that period and into the 1940s she also produced a series of “line” pictures, another manifestation of her interest in geometric abstraction. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded, she and her husband fled Paris, and in 1942 they returned to Zürich. She died in 1943 from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.