Sophie Taeuber-Arp is far from a household name. The way that she worked across disciplines and
genres and creative roles are a real positive now, but it means that in the past, it was hard to say,
oh, who is Sophie Taeuber-Arp? My name is Anne Umland. I'm a senior curator in the
department of painting and sculpture here at the Museum of Modern Art and I am one of
the four co-curators of the exhibition, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction.
For Sophie Taeuber-Arp, abstraction was always connected to an everyday lived reality. She was
making objects or designs for things to be handled and touched and manipulated. She's creating spaces
for people to move about in. When she began her career, it was with
the intent of making a name for herself as an applied artist and as a craftsperson.
But what happens is that she has the realization that this elemental structure of her textile
grids could be used to create a new language of abstraction. And you can watch her take those
basic vertical and horizontals in those very bright colors. If you just shift right to the work
to the right, you can see how the grid here is now translated and cut out colored paper elements.
Or here on this wall, you can watch her sort of explode the grid into this much more dynamic,
animated type of composition and form with all these little individual tessellated squares.
And then we can watch, as she translates these same basic
shapes to a mural painting to a cardboard relief to stained glass.
During these same years in Zurich, Sophie Taeuber-Arp is teaching at the local trade school.
She teaches textile and embroidery design and she encourages her students to go back to the very
basics. It's almost as though she's saying let's take everything apart so we can start over again.
If you want to practice designing, you might try the following. Draw a square and try to divide it
in the most natural and simple way with an eye to using the forms or dividing lines
as decorations. Then as a further exercise, make somewhat more complicated divisions
and fill in the various fields with two or three pure colors. You might start with a line.
Attempt to discover what expression you can obtain by means of different wavy or zig-zagged lines.
In 1915, Sophie Taeuber-Arp meets an artist and a poet named Hans Arp
and he introduces her to a number of members of the Dada group and she performs at their events
and is very much a participant. Dada I think set out to be undefinable. Raucus performances and
nonsense poetry readings, and all the rest. But fundamentally it was an anti-bourgeois
movement that protested what they saw as the culture of rationality that had led to the
unprecedented devastation and carnage of World War I. Here, we're just looking at some of the puppets
that Taeuber-Arp created for the puppet play King Stag in 1918. Prior to this within the sort of
folk tradition of puppet making the goal was to make your marionettes as lifelike as possible.
And Sophie Taeuber-Arp takes a very different approach, re-imagining the human body not made
up of flesh and blood and bone, but of these elementary geometric components. She leaves
the way that they're put together visible so that you see the joints.
When she gets to Paris and to France, that sort of marks another major shift in her practice.
For the first time during her mature career, she was freed from her teaching obligations
and she was able to devote more time to her fine arts practice. Her textile grid structure in a
way has gone underground, but still everything is very clearly structured, right along horizontal
and vertical axes. By introducing subtle irregularities, just the way like this
little rectangle doesn't quite touch that circle, those little tiny irregularities and decisions add
up to a particularly dynamic form of composition. This wall is just interesting to look at because
you can see like that same shape, this almost half of amphora shape. She cuts it in half,
moves it around. She turns it upside down. Pieces talk, positive and negatives come
in and out of focus. And again, that's a way of just like watching her language kind of evolve.
In June of 1940, Taeuber-Arp and her husband flee their home just outside Paris days before
the Germans march in. There her work takes another shift and she begins to make these
absolutely lyrical colored pencil drawings. This is in part dictated by her circumstances by the
scarcity of art supplies and that she's in large part during this period making works on the move.
For the first time, you see the grids just gone. It's almost as though that rational structure
and the face of the chaos of World War II and Taeuber-Arp s displacement just wasn't adequate.
She begins to make these meandering line drawings that are remarkably free in the way that they look
or the movement that they evoke, but that are as precisely planned as everything else that you've
seen in this show. She outlines her lines and she fills them in with countless little velvety marks.
We know from her letters, she worries every day about how to find food. She spends hours,
she says, standing on line waiting for butter. Then at the same time,
in the same sentence she says, and then I made six drawings. It's a radical thing, I think,
to continue to find joy in the creative act when you're worrying about how you're
going to have food on the table, when you're living in isolation and in exile.
In our complicated times, I have frequently asked myself why we do such embroideries at all when
there are so many more practical and especially more necessary things to do. I believe the urge
to make the things more beautiful is a deep and primeval one. Only when we go into ourselves
and attempt to be entirely true to ourselves will we succeed in making things of value,
living things, and in this way, help to develop a new style that's fitting for us
In 1943, just a few days shy of her 54th birthday, Sophie Taeuber-Arp died accidentally
of carbon monoxide poisoning. She went to the home of a friend of theirs, Max Bill, and
used a guestroom that had a wood-burning stove. She didn't realize that the flute was closed and
so never woke up again. This gallery contains on the wall behind me the last works that she made.
If you look at those drawings, you might notice that they look like
nothing you've seen. Really the exhibition ends as much as anything else with
new directions and with a thought of had Sophie Taeuber-Arp lived, just imagine.