Puppets, Purses and Paintings, Too: An Overlooked Artist With Range
Sophie Taeuber-Arp blurred the boundaries between fine art and applied art, but died early without the recognition she deserved. A major new exhibition aims to fix that.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, in 1920. She had “a deep and primeval” urge to “make the things we own more beautiful,” she wrote.Credit.Nic Aluf; Stiftung Arp e.V.
By Catherine Hickley
May 11, 2021
BASEL, Switzerland Just over a century ago, during another pandemic, the Swiss Marionette Theatre in Zurich closed. The play “King Stag” ended its run in September 1918, after three sparsely attended performances. The Spanish flu kept its audience away.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp s Composition à cercles et demi-cercles (1938) Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck
When Sophie Taeuber took to a Zurich stage in 1917 (long before marrying Jean Arp and, as per Swiss custom, tacking his name onto the end of hers), the Cabaret Voltaire and Dada founder Hugo Ball sat in the audience and watched her dance. He saw a goldfish, darkness, questions, a child, an angel, invention, caprice, wit. “Sophie Taeuber,” he later wrote, “is completely different”.
The major survey
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstractions, which opens this week at the Kunstmuseum Basel, is dedicated to the miraculously unfixable career heralded by that performance. The exhibition will travel to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the autumn the Swiss artist’s first US survey in 40 years by way of London’s Tate Modern in July. The latter will be a first ever for the British public, which, save for a couple of works on paper in the Vic
The biggest exhibitions of 2021
While last year was a disaster for exhibition programming around the world, museums and curators have not been idle and there are plenty of ambitious exhibitions due to open this year (virus-related lockdowns notwithstanding). Below you will find some of the must-see shows of 2021, from the Rijksmuseum’s examination of the slave trade and a reassessment of the Roman arch-villain Nero, to landmark retrospectives for Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jasper Johns. Many exhibitions will be subject to Covid-19 restrictions please check on the respective museum website before visiting Enslaved man working on the fields (around 1850) by an unknown artist