page_title: Sophie Taeuber-Arp
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Sophie Taeuber-Arp / France
caption_attribution_description: English: 3 views of: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, relief at three levels, 1937 or 1938, painted wood, diameter 60 cm
context_page_description: Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect and dancer.
  Born in 1889, in Switzerland, the daughter of a pharmacist, the family moved to Germany when she was two years old. Some years later she began attending art schools, and moved back to Switzerland during the First World War. At an exhibition in 1915, she met for the first time the German-French artist Hans/Jean Arp, whom she married shortly after. It was during these years that they became associated with the Dada movement, which emerged in 1916, and Taeuber-Arp's most famous works - Dada Head - date from these years. They moved to France in 1926, where they stayed until the invasion of France during the Second World War, at the event of which they went back to Switzerland. In 1943, she died in an accident with a leaking gas stove.
  Despite being overlooked since her death, she is considered one of the most important artists of concrete art and geometric abstraction of the 20th century.
context_section_description: In 1926 Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp moved to Strasbourg, where both took up French citizenship; after which they divided their time between Strasbourg and Paris. There Taeuber-Arp received numerous commissions for interior design projects; for example, she was commissioned to create a radically Constructivist interior for the Café de l'Aubette – a project on which Jean Arp and de Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg eventually joined her as collaborators. In 1927 she co-authored a book entitled Welly Lowell with Blanche Gauchet.
  From the late 1920s, she lived mainly in Paris and continued experimenting with design. The couple became French citizens in 1926 and in 1928 they moved to Meudon-Val Fleury, outside Paris, where she designed their new house and some of its furnishings. She was an exhibitor at the Salon des Surindépendents in Paris in 1929–30.
  In the 1930s, she was a member of the group Cercle et Carré, founded by Michel Seuphor and Joaquín Torres García as a standard-bearer of non-figurative art, and its successor, the Abstraction-Création group (1931–34). Taeuber-Arp also provided the cover art for the February 1933 issue of Eugene Jolas's avant-garde little magazine, transition.
  Sophie Taeuber-Arp explored the circle which represented the cosmic metaphor, the form that contains all others. She referred to this period as “ping pictures”. 
  She appears to be the first artist to use polka dots in fine art with works such as Dynamic Circles, 1934, in the footsteps of Kazimir Malevich and his Black Circle (1915).
  Later in the decade she founded a Constructivist review, Plastique (Plastic) in Paris. Her circle of friends included the artists Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp. She was also a member of Allianz, a union of Swiss painters, from 1937 to 1943. In 1940, Taeuber-Arp and Arp fled Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation and moved to Grasse in Vichy France, where they created an art colony with Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Magnelli, and other artists. At the end of 1942, they fled to Switzerland.
caption: Relief at three levels, 1937 or 1938
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3264", "Image ImageLength": "2448", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "SAMSUNG", "Image Model": "GT-I9195", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2016:10:27 17:11:51", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "304", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "828", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "942", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2874", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/20", "EXIF FNumber": "13/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "125", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:11:06 11:58:25", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:11:06 11:58:25", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "1/20", "EXIF ApertureValue": "69/25", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "78", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "69/25", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "37/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "7000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2600", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "S08Q0LEGC01"}