74 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
THEA RT WORLD
A WOMAN’S WORK
Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MOMA.
BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
for her. That the medium was “woman’s
work” by the standards of the time added
to my startlement, upending the lazy pe-
jorative. No doubt feminism’s revaluing
of historic values had sensitized me. Good
is good whether accomplished with a
brush or with a needle.
Now here the embroidery is again,
like an old friend, in “Sophie Taeuber-Arp:
Living Abstraction.” The show tracks the
artist’s multifarious achievements, under
the radar of ruling styles, until her death,
in 1943, when she was fifty-three years old.
The work’s nubbly, asymmetrically struc-
tured bars and swatches in white, black,
red, blue, gray, and two browns generate
a seemingly effortless majesty. The exe-
cution secretes bits of fun that I hadn’t
noticed before: a minuscule, eccentric
off-colored shape in a brown field; an al-
most imperceptible checkerboard pattern
of alternating horizontal and vertical
stitches in a black area (prophetic of the
black-on-black paintings of Ad Rein-
hardt); and a small lump of congested
yarn that would seem to be a flaw if it
did not so candidly emphasize the work’s
tactility. No matter how committed she
could be to geometric order, Taeuber-
Arp communicated her freedom.
Sophie Taeuber was the fourth child
of a pharmacist father and a mother who
ran a linen-goods store in Davos. After
her father died, of tuberculosis, when
she was two, her mother boarded stu-
dents at their home in the mostly Ger-
man-speaking town of Trogen. Taeuber
studied fine and applied art at schools
in Switzerland and Germany. In 1915, at
an art show in Zurich, she met the Al-
satian sculptor and poet Arp, who used
Jean as his first name in France and Hans
everywhere else. They were among the
early members of Dada, which centered
on a night club in the city, the Cabaret
Voltaire, and convened artists and writ-
ers in revolt against anything that could
be associated with the obscenity of the
First World War. Others on the galvanic
scene included the Romanian poet
Tristan Tzara and the German Hugo
Ball. The multitalented, routinely dar-
ing Taeuber fit right in.
The Dadaists, deprecating museum-
worthy art, devoted their self-defining
energies to evenings marked by such high
jinks as improvisations of willfully in-
comprehensible poetry. They conceived
of their activities as the termination—a
sardonic swan song—of a disgraced
Western civilization. Taeuber, elaborately
costumed, would dance in a manner that,
in 1917, Ball described as “full of spikes
and fishbones.” Only one blurry photo-
graph documents that phase. Also scant-
ily recorded, with set designs and a few
photographs, is her hectic three-act mar-
ionette show of 1918, an adaptation of an
eighteenth-century commedia-dell’arte
play, “King Stag.” The production closed
after three performances, amid the per-
ils of that year’s deadly f lu pandemic.
The marionettes survived and are on
view at MOMA—astonishingly inventive
human, animal, and fantastical figures,
such as a several-sword-wielding whirl-
Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” from 1916, is utterly assured. ing dervish of a gizmo—in brightly © FONDAZIONE MARGUERITE ARP, LOCARNO, SWITZERLAND
M
y first-ever solid take on Sophie
Taeuber-Arp, the subject of a won-
derful retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art, occurred nine years ago, by
way of a survey, also at MOMA, of the
genesis of abstract art, circa 1910-25. Until
then, I had regarded the Swiss virtuoso
of many crafts lightly. But on that occa-
sion, which featured such heavy hitters
of the aesthetic revolution as Kandinsky,
Mondrian, and Malevich, I kept com-
ing back to a smallish wool embroidery
of rectangular forms, “Vertical-Horizon-
tal Composition” (1916), by Taeuber-Arp.
Beautiful, utterly assured, and ineffably
heartfelt, it made the artist’s associates,
nearly all male, seem relative louts, worked
up about innovations that were a breeze
