a multimedia master
For the Swiss polymath Sophie Taeuber-Arp, abstraction was square one. Unlike most of her colleagues in Europe’s early 20th-century avant-garde, Taeuber-Arp didn’t begin with the object and then progress into non-objectivity from there. Instead, the multi-disciplinary artist adapted the grid structure she used in her textile practice into drawings, creating abstract works on paper, dubbed Vertical-horizontal compositions, as early as 1915.
Active within Zurich dada, Taeuber-Arp implemented everyday materials like wool and wood for the variety of works she created. Her drawings were no different; she drew in crayon and used watercolor, tempera, and gouache (she didn’t begin using oil on canvas until the late 1920s). The abstract drawings she created during the late 1910s were strikingly ahead of their time—rectangular planes of color are stacked in Tetris-like configurations, separated not by lines but by precise hatching; curved forms sit within rectangular blocks of contrasting color, giving the appearance of twisting, squeezing movement; and nondescript figures, circles, and crosses interrupt the artist’s exacting grids, creating the impressions of flags or symbols or buildings.
Taeuber-Arp’s seemingly preternatural inclination for abstraction—and the virtuoso facility with line, shape, and color that she used to express it—formed simultaneously with the artist’s skill across the media of design, architecture, and dance. She designed furniture and interiors; created costumes, jewelry, rugs, embroidery, and textiles; developed marionettes for the theater; performed as a modern dancer; realized architectural projects; and produced a robust studio output of graphic design, drawings, paintings, and sculptures—among them, turned-wood “Dada Heads” that remain some of
