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. From 1916 to 1929, Taeuber-Arp would teach textile design at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts, a position that supported her and her husband, the artist Jean Arp. Upon moving to Zürich in 1915, she began making textile works and geometric nonrepresentational paintings she referred to as “concrete.” Her discerning assemblies of circles, squares, diagonal lines, and other shapes bridged the nascent Constructivist movement and textile design. 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
