Taeuber-Arp, Sophie

Taeuber-Arp, Sophie (née Taeuber) (1889–1943). Swiss designer, textile artist, painter, sculptor, and editor, the wife and frequent collaborator of Jean Arp. She was born at Davos and studied textile design at the School of Art in St Gallen, 1908–10. After continuing her studies in Munich (where she also trained as a dancer) and in Hamburg, she taught weaving and textile design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich from 1916 to 1928. She met Arp in 1915 and they evidently fell in love at first sight, although they did not marry until 1922. From 1915 until Arp's departure for Cologne in 1919 they collaborated on works of various kinds—mainly abstract collages—and were leading lights of the Dada movement in Zurich. Arp wrote that ‘In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper', and he often paid tribute to the inspiration she gave him: ‘It was Sophie Taeuber who, through the example of her clear work and her clear life, showed me the right way, the way of beauty.’ Herbert Read also stresses her love of clarity, which contrasted with Arp's taste for the accidental: ‘For all its feminine charm and playful fantasy, Sophie's work was always marked by a certain craft-like quality: she was delicate but precise, and if one reviews her work as a whole, one is struck by its geometrical regularity. Her ideal was always clarity. But Arp, early in his Dada days, discovered “the law of chance”, the part that could be played in art by the unconscious’ (Arp, 1968). Sophie played an important part in Arp's career not only because of artistic stimulation, but also because in the 1920s her income from teaching and design (including clothes and jewellery) was their chief means of support.

In 1927–8 the Arps collaborated with van Doesburg on the decoration of the Aubette restaurant in Strasbourg, then settled at Meudon, near Paris, where they lived from 1928 to 1940. They were members of the abstract groups Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création, and Sophie founded and edited a periodical of abstract art, Plastique, of which five numbers appeared in 1937–9, published in Paris and New York. The first number was devoted to Malevich and the third to American art. The Arps left Meudon following the German invasion, and from 1941 to 1942 they lived at Grasse in southern France. In 1942 they fled to Switzerland, where Sophie died in an accident with a leaking stove the following year. She was little known as a painter in her lifetime, but over 600 oils by her came to light after her death.