Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction

(Hardback)

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Over the course of her almost three-decade-long career, Sophie Taeuber-Arp worked as a designer of textiles, beadwork, costumes, furniture, and interiors, as well as an applied arts professor, dancer, puppet maker, architect, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and magazine editor. Through her exceptionally diverse artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating art, craft, and design. Published in conjunction with the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp's work in the United States in nearly forty years, and the first-ever retrospective in the United Kingdom, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is the most comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist's innovative and wide-ranging body of work. The catalogue explores the artist's interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings, and relief sculptures. Essays by curators and scholars examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp's career, outlining the scope of her creative production at different points in time. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay published on Taeuber-Arp's materials and techniques, and a scholarly exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp's production.

Reviews

Changes how we see Taeuber-Arp as an individual and as a pivotal player within networks of artistic exchange.-- "Texte zur Kunst"
Emphatically frame[s] her art and design work as deeply intertwined, countering a tendency--dating back to the posthumous catalogue raisonn of her work Arp compiled in 1948--to downplay her applied art efforts as something like a side hustle.--Rachel Wetzler "Art In America"
Taeuber-Arp's production thrived on myriad tensions: between abstraction and figuration, applied and fine arts, a constructivist rigor and gestural fluidity.--Ela Bittencourt "Hyperallergic"
A boon to get finally a sense of the full scope of her artistry. It is as if a time capsule has been opened.--Sanford Schwartz "New York Review of Books"
By showcasing all the many media that Taeuber-Arp touched, this exhibit recasts long-held assumptions about a hierarchy in which painting and sculpture reign supreme.-- "The Week"
Does much to bring Taeuber-Arp out of the shadows and into her own light.--James Panero "New Criterion"
Her egalitarian view of art and craft proved that abstractions in woven wool can trounce the oil on canvas kind.--Roberta Smith "New York Times"
Her nimble, irrepressible creativity is a reminder that art making, especially in times of strife, is an inherently optimistic act.--Kate Guadagnino "T Magazine"
No matter how committed she could be to geometric order, Taeuber-Arp communicated her freedom.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker"
Taeuber-Arp's dazzling artistic range...encompassed beaded bags, necklaces, cushion covers, rugs and stained glass, all in abstract, geometric designs. She made costumes with hats fashioned from paper doilies and designed furniture, interior dcor, kitchens--even a meticulously planned broom cupboard. [...] blur[ing] the boundaries between fine art and applied art.--Catherine Hickley "New York Times"
A hub of the avant-garde scene in the 1920s and '30s, deeply involved in the Dada movement and later geometric abstraction.--Amy Crawford "Smithsonian"
Her art, as the subtitle "Living Abstraction" implies, began as performance -- yet is refreshingly ego-free.--Jackie Wullschlger "Financial Times"
Presents an overview of Taeuber-Arp's output and her various sources of inspiration and vividly renders the apparently playful ease with which the artist dismantled longstanding barriers between art and life...--Mechteld Jungerius "TLmag"

Author Bio

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born in 1889 in Davos, Switzerland, and trained at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School in Munich. In 1914, she began a successful applied arts practice in Zurich, where she also taught textile design and participated in the Dada movement. Starting in the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, most significantly the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. When she moved to Paris in 1929, she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the Nazi occupation, Taeuber-Arp spent her final years in the South of France, and died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943. Anne Umland is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Walburga Krupp is an art historian and curator based in Remagen, Germany, and Research Assistant for the Sophie Taeuber-Arp publishing project, Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts, Zrcher Hochschule der Knste. Charlotte Healy is Research Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.