Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a key member of the Dada movement who eschewed boundaries between fine and applied arts and, despite living across two world wars, produced works in which joy and colour triumph above all. Taeuber-Arp studied textile design at the School of Arts and Crafts in St. Gallen and dance at the Laban School in Zürich and was a member of the Schweizerischer Werkbund, an association of professional artists in Switzerland. Upon moving to Zürich in 1915, she began making textile works and geometric nonrepresentational paintings she referred to as “concrete,” bridging the nascent Constructivist movement and textile design. A small cloth bag of 1920, for example, is embroidered with glass beads that form geometric patterns reminiscent of her painted compositions; while over a hundred years old, it still appears astoundingly contemporary. A signatory of the Zürich Dada Manifesto, Taeuber-Arp performed often at the movement’s celebrated Cabaret Voltaire, for which she also designed sets, costumes, and small marionette puppets that don a robotic or cyborgian futuristic sensibility. In 1926, Taeuber-Arp moved to France, splitting time between Strasbourg and Paris. In 1940, she left Paris in advance of the Nazi occupation. In 1942, she returned to Switzerland, where she died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of fifty-three.
Melanie Kress
