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 Victoria and Albert Museum and one small collage at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, has no access to her work.