Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Though Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s portrait has adorned a Swiss banknote since 1995, the modernist pioneer’s oeuvre has not yet been exhaustively researched or presented. Thankfully, this retrospective attempts to achieve those goals by gathering over three hundred works, including rarely seen costumes as well as a large array of her sketches—works that add complexity to our understanding of her practice.

The show focuses on Taeuber-Arp’s multifaceted, Bauhaus-spirited practice, which is evident in her paintings, her small-scale accessories and fabrics, and her designs for theatrical sets and original marionettes—notably for Carlo Gozzi’s 1918 avant-garde play König Hirsch (King Stag). Iterations of shapes manifest in her design objects, as in the famous wooden sculpture Coupe Dada, 1916, and the ironic painted hat rack–object Portrait Jean Arp, 1918, as well as in her mazelike spatial paintings, which also echo her furniture and architectural design—see the drawing Axonometric Drawing of Galerie Goemans, 1928–30, one of two blueprints in the show.

While the exhibition smartly groups motifs and media, the galleries also showcase repetition and difference, shifting between graphics and bas-reliefs, hard and soft surfaces, and representing space as conceived, perceived, and performed by the artist, who attended Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman’s Zurich School of Dance. Though the show balances scholarly approach and sensory enjoyment, its enthusiastic presentation pardonably risks leveling off Taeuber-Arp’s delicate understandings of point, line, and plane by its sheer density. Overall, however, the array points out not only formal similarities but also Taeuber-Arp’s superlative sense for equilibrium.