Taeuber-Arp, the curve as an alternative

Paris,

In recent years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp has become an increasingly familiar figure to a wide public, and especially to those who would be her current compatriots: her face is present on the new fifty Swiss franc banknotes.

When she died early in an accident, in her mid-fifties, the artist had already worked with very diverse techniques and materials: textiles, beads, in theater and dance performances, costumes, murals, furniture, graphic design, architectural projects, paintings, sculptures, reliefs, drawings… Ignoring hierarchies and traditional gender divisions, she considered creation as a vital activity and carried it out as such, and that perspective is, to a large extent, the reason for the fascination that she continues to exercise among young authors.

Extensively trained in applied arts (in St. Gallen and then at the Debschitz school in Munich, where she specialized in wood carving and textile design) and familiar with the avant-garde circles consolidated in Paris and Zurich, she associated the experimentation and novelties of the formal language of these groups with her inclination towards spirituality and also applied them to the everyday sphere: to pillows, tablecloths, bags, furniture and even to establishments, such as the Aubettea café in Strasbourg that was considered the sistine chapel of modernity. These were times when the reign of industrial mass production gave rise to a renewed appreciation of craftsmanship and manual techniques, influenced by the ideals championed by the Arts and Crafts movement.

However, we mainly associate Taeuber-Arp with his abstract paintings based on simplified geometric shapes that he carried out in the French capital in the 1930s: compositions of bright colors and evident rhythm, never static or austere.

Some of them are part of the first exhibition that Hauser & Wirth offers at its headquarters in Paris: “Sophie Taeuber-Arp. La règle des courbes”, which can be visited from January 17 and has been curated by Briony Fer. It consists of almost fifty works dated between 1916 and 1942 and coming from both the Arp Foundation and private and public collections: these are paintings, drawings, gouaches, wood reliefs and an iconic Dadaist head selected because they are significant in the author’s formal vocabulary (geometric and abstract), based largely on that curved line, which she stretched, folded and deformed with multiple and rich fruits.

Sweeping against the conventional oppositions between Dadaism, germinated in her country, and the geometric abstraction towards which she moved, and between fine arts and utilitarian objects, this project aims to delve into the audacity with which Taeuber-Arp became involved in the cultural context of her time.

In his training, as we mentioned, he placed more emphasis on textiles and applied arts than on painting and sculpture, and this will have to do with the fact that his production always oscillated between art and design, the diagrammatic and the ornamental, destruction and construction, parts and sets. In addition to amalgamating the languages of decoration and technology, he brought together the aforementioned Dadaist and abstract codes in works that were both playful and speculative and in which curves and circles offered an alternative measure to calibrate the relationships between creation and the world, with respect to the severe grids dominant in abstract painting. They have arrived in Paris from early experiments such as Composition in form U (1918) to the broken circles of his latest drawings, such as Geometric construction (1942).

At the height of interest in the constructivist movement, characterized by its rigorous geometry, he created some of his most curvilinear compositions, translating decorative volutes and arabesques into simple forms. The distinctive methods he developed represent a proposal for a Dadaist model of abstraction, even when its components seem to belong to a set of precisely constructivist tools. This is largely due to the techniques she employed, which she learned in her studies as a designer.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Lines trait large, 1939-1941

The title of the exhibition refers both to those curves that were used as an organizing principle and to an instrument used to measure lengths and distances. Taeuber-Arp used a wide range of drawing tools as if they were an extension of the hand, including French curves and other templates, as well as flexible and straight rulers. The works on display from the 1930s show an increasingly organic process in their proposals, with shapes soft that suggest, as in the series Coquillea concern for natural structures. This gives rise to a central paradox in the artist’s legacy: the more organic it becomes, the more it departs from the use of patterns.

One of the most captivating series that exemplifies his language of curvature is the small subset of the paintings curve called Echelonnements (Gradations), which began in 1934. In these works, both curved edges and straight lines stand out, revealing the cumulative effects of a pile of irregular shapes. Those “forms” in Echelonnement (1934) are white, suggesting that they were cut out in blue base, as negatives rather than positives.

Also on display are what became some of his last pieces, made in 1942, generally called geometric constructions; It is a set of drawings executed with black ink on paper, ruler and compass. Taeuber-Arp painted on small sections with white paint, in addition to cutting and rotating others, the cuts acting as horizontal or diagonal, thus generating a circular movement from the fragments. Although the shapes he works with are always simple, his own methods of layering and mixing made them infinitely variable.

The exhibition can be seen until March.