Sophie Taeuber-Arp

During World War I, Zurich was the creative capital of the European avant-garde. The city was home to the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub where Dada was launched in 1916 in response to the violent war. Initiated as an all-out assault against the rules of art and the conventions of modern life, Dada aimed to explode typical concepts of how art should be made and viewed and what materials could be used.

In 1918, she designed marionettes and stage sets for a puppet adaptation of the 18th century play "King Stag.” Taeuber painted the marionettes’ faces like Oceanic masks and crafted their bodies from turned wood. Some were dressed in ruffled tulle, another was adorned with feathers; and the sets were decorated with abstract gridded patterns.

Dada’s interest in the developments of psychoanalysis inspired the adaptation. At the play’s climax, the king’s evil minister cried, "Kill me, kill me. I have not analyzed myself and can't stand it anymore!"

Taeuber was also a dancer, performing regularly at the Dada hub Cabaret Voltaire in costumes designed by her husband, Jean Arp. Her ecstatic motions were once described by fellow Dada artist Hugo Ball as “a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity.”


She performed under the pseudonym “G. Thauber” so as to avoid censure from her buttoned-down colleagues at the city’s School of Applied Arts.

Between 1918 and 1920, she made a series of turned wood sculptures that she called “portraits". Yet their ovoid shapes and painted patterns evoke mask-like faces that are far from naturalistic.

Taeuber likely created this particular Head as a self-portrait. She adorns herself with playful wire curlicues, like bouquets strung with green and purple beads that spring like flowers from her ears.

The other three heads that exist today—Taeuber originally made six to eight—are embellished solely by the colored geometries of their painted surfaces.

One of these is likely a portrait of Arp. But, in a humorous challenge to “pure sculpture,” the combination of a bulbous head atop a long neck and base makes him look like a hatstand.

All four heads are visible in this recent photograph (in positions 3, 5, 6, and 7 from left).

Alongside them are other painted wood sculptures made around the same time. Their names suggest age-old uses: Amphora, Powder Box, Chalice—a reminder of her deep interest in the collisions between functional and decorative, figurative and abstract, life and art.

Taeuber decorated the café with panels of bright, geometric color blocks that danced across the walls and stained glass windows. Like many of her paintings and smaller-scale artwork from this period, her café designs embraced the grid.

The grid would become the most generative formal device of her career, inspiring numerous works that explored its potential as a governing logic for the lively interplay of proportion and color.

Van Doesburg’s plans for the interior decoration still exist, but the original artwork is gone. Shortly after the café’s opening, the owners removed the designs. It was then further destroyed by the Nazis, who labeled it “degenerate art.”

Such is the case with this painting, where only a hint of the grid remains but nonetheless guides Taeuber’s arrangement of the geometric units.

For some, this painting’s design evokes a cluster of dancers’ arms, recalling Taeuber’s formative training in dance and her lifelong exploration of meeting points between the figurative and abstract.

Here, undulating, organic forms balance atop each other, like a stack of see-saws. The grid is now gone, but Taeuber retains its spirit of strong symmetry by centering the tipsy horizontals around a vertical spine.

Even with a spare palette and vocabulary of forms, there’s a feeling of freedom and energy.

From the late 1930s, Taeuber’s new compositions were markedly tenser.

Here, the frame can barely hold the lines that repeatedly double up and cut into each other. One can imagine Taeuber snipping the circles that were prevalent in her earlier work, creating lines that uncurl into swirls and sticks and scatter across the page.