‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction’ Review: Celebrating Abstract Art as It Was Meant to Be

Sophie Tauber was born in Davos, Switzerland in 1889 and learned textile making from her mother. She studied Fine Art and Textile Design in St. Gallen, then studied carpentry, textiles, interior design and experimental art education in Germany. In 1914, she moved to Zurich, where she danced and choreographed, established herself as an artist and met her future husband, sculptor Hans Arp (1886-1966).

Throughout her life, the Taeuber-Arp figured prominently in the European avant-garde. Arps participated in the Dada movement and taught at the Department of Applied Arts at the Trade School in Zurich. In the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, including for the House of Arps in France, most notably – with Hans Arp and De Stijl co-founder Theo van Doesburg – the Aubette leisure complex in Strasbourg, France. Taeuber-Arp died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.

Mobile Surveying at MoMA was organized by Anne Umland, with Laura Braverman; In the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, by Eva Reifert; in London by Natalia Sedlina of Tate Modern; It is independently curated by Walburga Krupp. The Tauber Arp’s first major American gallery in 40 years, featuring about 300 works: paintings, drawings, tapestries, and sculptures; jewelry made of glass beads, wallets and abstract fixtures; furnishings, interiors, graphic and theatrical designs; Wooden containers, heads and dolls.

The opening galleries of the Museum of Modern Art are fun and unpretentious – utterly charming. Here’s a handful of little abstract gouache from the 1920’s: raster grids made of overlapping little colored rectangles—polyphonic rhythms racing across the wall in choppy, shimmering attacks. We see beaded bracelets, necklaces and handbags, where playful shapes animate their curved surfaces and move around shapes like sparkling shaving poles; and asymmetrical combinations with hard edges in colored pencil, gouache and metallic paint, or made of beads and shiny thread, or of pure wool embroidered.

“Abstract Motifs (notebook cover)” (circa 1917-1918), of glass and metal beads on canvas, shimmers like a fantasy bejeweled landscape. “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (circa 1917), consisting of multicolored rectangles in wool on canvas, economically presents the diagonal, re-imagining it, matching the patchwork plane. Anchoring these colorful abstractions are the “Dada Cup” (1916), “Amphora” (1917) and “Powder Case” (circa 1918), polished objects evoking abstract heads, totems and chess pieces.

One exhibition is devoted to gorgeous abstract Dada heads—coloured, embossed, smooth, lathe wooden ovals—and magical multimedia puppets (humans, animals, exotic trees suggestive of angels and robots) and stage sets Taeuber-Arp created in 1918 for the string puppet play “King Stag”. In its abstract tapestries, rugs, and tablecloths, Taeuber-Arp fuses folk art, neoclassical art, and modern abstraction. Its light color flashes and breathes, as if it were weaving feelings, as if it were a piece of cloth covered with leather. In “Cross on Red Ground (Tablecloth)” and “Tapestry” (both 1924), the white-brimmed border suggests theatrical drapes and architectural columns surrounding the abstract drama. And in the stained-glass windows designed for Aubette apartments and condos, Taeuber-Arp employs rectangles of pure primary colors, white and black along with blended colors (pink, orange, grey, green, and brown). This is a modern abstract distillation of nature, but it is also reminiscent of the splashes and blended tones of dark painted details in medieval stained glass.

The last three galleries feature Taeuber-Arp abstract paintings, drawings, and woodcuts from the 1930s and 1940s. Constructivist paintings and de Stijl and notable sculptures include delicate balancing work between a few perfectly coordinated, hard-edged geometric elements. In “Broken Cross”, “Six Spaces with Four Little Crosses” (both 1932) and “Six Spaces Separate” oils (1939), Taeuber-Arp reconciles free lines and warps flat shapes, holding the plane taut and flexible with the precision of a treadmill. on the rope. In painted woodcuts, circular perforations, prominent circles, and cones strike a dynamic balance.

In The Bare Carved Wood “Head” (1937), Taeuber-Arp evokes a teardrop, a knight’s helmet, a yawning beak, a seductive human mouth, and Burt’s chest. Perhaps the most beautiful here are the paintings with lively, non-objective shapes, rectangles, and woodcarving tondos in which tiered shapes – shift, dance, rise, fall, circle and merge with each other – interact as naturally as waves, fluffy birds and solar systems.

Everything in “living abstraction” is beautiful – alive. The show re-establishes Taeuber-Arp at the height of abstraction in the early twentieth century, as it makes us painfully aware of life and brief events. Definitely watch this wonderful exhibition. But dig under the fun surfaces. Taeuber-Arp art appeals to our senses first and foremost – to our love of light, colour, movement and rhythm. However, her real reward is the joy of discovery – the discovery of the treasure that is the brilliance of her art.

-Mr. Esblond, author of The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art (Basic Books), writes about art for the magazine.