THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 75
painted, metal-hinged wood. Clips from
a speculative re-creation, which was
filmed in 1993, stir a longing in the viewer
to have attended the original show. You
don’t have to have been there, but what
bliss if you were.
Largely inspired by Taeuber’s tours
de force of design, experiments in non-
figurative art took hold in the Dada cir-
cle. Further embroideries and gouaches
of hers, also entitled “Vertical-Horizon-
tal Composition,” develop a language of
form so fluent that she could seem to
have been born to it: intricately balanced,
invariably surprising. She extended the
mode to involve triangles and then cur-
vilinear or patchy, scattered shapes, all
vivacious and, such is the intimacy of
her surfaces, begging to be touched. She
often detoured from two dimensions,
painting wooden heads with irrational
abstract patterns, as if cogitating some
superior realm of the psyche. Asked by
Tzara in 1920 to supply a photograph of
her face, she had several taken in which
she peeks out, smiling, from behind one
of the “Dada Heads.”
T
aeuber and Arp married in 1922,
and she joined his name to her
own. They travelled widely among the
hot spots of the European avant-garde
before settling in France, in 1929. Her
repertoire included some staggeringly
labor-intensive beading, which she de-
ployed in jewelry and small purses that
she could sell commercially. She also
made delicately woven tablecloths that
you wouldn’t dream of setting a coffee
cup on. Her devotion to crafts can seem
strategic, allowing her to evade com-
parison with the big-time fine-art styles
of the era—in which, nonetheless, she
was fully versed. An inveterate joiner,
she enhanced group shows of numer-
ous tendencies, including Surrealism.
People liked having her around.
Starting in 1930, Taeuber-Arp con-
centrated on oil painting. She proved a
topnotch contributor to the movements
Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Créa-
tion—both of which were organized to
promote geometric abstraction—at a cer-
tain loss of charisma. Another painter.
But look closely. She exercised such tech-
nical subtleties as building up what ap-
pear to be freehand flurries of curling
lines with tiny, almost undetectable strokes
to give them subliminal physical mass.
Whatever she did, including incursions
in stained glass and designs for architec-
ture and interior-decoration projects, ac-
quired mystique from how she did it.
In 1940, Taeuber-Arp and Arp fled
their home, outside Paris, for the Unoc-
cupied Zone of southern France, shortly
before German troops entered the city.
The couple contemplated but stalled a
possible immigration to the United States
(they had visas) before taking refuge back
in neutral Switzerland. In January of
1943, Taeuber-Arp spent a night at a
friend’s house. She lit a woodstove in the
guest room but, having inexplicably ne-
glected to open the flue, died in her sleep
of carbon-monoxide poisoning. The ca-
lamity persists as a rankling hurt.
A friend has suggested to me that
the Taeuber-Arp show exemplifies what
he calls “the MOMA apology tour.” Hav-
ing promulgated a canon of modernist
masters and movements since its earli-
est days, under the direction of Alfred H.
Barr, Jr., in recent years the museum has
taken to celebrating past talents and phe-
nomena that it once consigned, when
considering them at all, to marginal sta-
tus. A concurrent show at the museum,
“Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw,” pre-
sents works by a Chicagoan outsider
artist who died in 1972. Yoakum began
painting at the age of seventy-one, to-
ward the end of an obscure, knockabout
life, and was warmly embraced by a co-
hort of wackily figurative Chicago art-
ists who, flipping off New York influ-
ences, dubbed themselves the Hairy
Who; they have lately been coming in
for recuperative justice themselves. Yoa-
kum’s landscapes of sensuously swollen
forms, seething with visceral imagina-
tion, fill one blank in MOMA’s narrative
of twentieth-century art.
But Taeuber-Arp’s case goes beyond
a gesture of belated catholicity. Her el-
evation revises what is understood as
“major” in modern art. Far from inci-
dental in her epoch, she was integral to
the wholesale expansion of what art
could be and how it could alter the world
at large. The show recasts assumptions
of value that were long held hostage to
hierarchies of medium and that were
dominated, with rare exceptions, by men.
The story it tells liberates thinking about
what has mattered—and still does, and
henceforth will—in our cultural annals
of consequential genius. A LA VIEILLE RUSSIE
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