SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP

Davos, Switzerland, 1889 — Zurich, Switzerland, 1943

Sophie Taeuber-Arp's work dissolves the boundaries between fine and applied art with a rigor that continues to resonate today. Born in Davos in 1889, Taeuber-Arp trained across a network of progressive institutions in St. Gallen, Munich, and Hamburg, while her studies in dance with Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman sharpened her sensitivity to rhythm, movement, and spatial structure — qualities that became foundational to her visual language. She performed at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire under a pseudonym to protect her teaching position at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, where she taught textile design from 1916 to 1929. Her use of a pseudonym illuminates the institutional suppression of women's avant-garde participation and underscores the radical coherence of her interdisciplinary practice.

Taeuber-Arp affiliations with the Swiss Werkbund, Cercle et Carré, Abstraction-Création, and Allianz, and her founding of the trilingual review Plastique (1937–39), situate her at the core of European avant-garde networks. Her 1926 Aubette commission in Strasbourg — a radically Constructivist interior designed with Hans Arp and Theo van Doesburg — has been called the "Sistine Chapel of modernity." By the 1930s, her paintings, reliefs, and interiors had achieved international visibility, and she participated in Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s landmark Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA (1936).

Her Composition (1938) was included in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women, which opened on January 5, 1943, just eight days before her accidental death by carbon monoxide poisoning at Max Bill's house in Zurich on January 13, while she and Arp were attempting to obtain passage to the United States. She died without knowing the exhibition had opened. Her Composition verticale-horizontale (1927-1928), a geometric abstraction in oil on wood relief mounted on pavatex, was shown in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025).

Recent scholarship has significantly reframed her legacy. The transatlantic retrospective Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction, organized by Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate Modern, and MoMA (2021–22), presented over 400 works and marked her most comprehensive American exhibition in nearly forty years. Taeuber-Arp work has since been featured in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at MoMA (2025). Hauser & Wirth's ongoing representation of her estate and the developing online catalogue raisonné continue to provide the scholarly infrastructure for her sustained reassessment.

Work by Sophie Taeuber-Arp is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Taeuber-Arp's contributions in the record of art history.