Author Description

Sophie Taeuber ranks among the pioneers of classical avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Davos, Switzerland, in 1889, she was educated as an artist at the School of Applied Arts in St. Gallen, Switzerland, at Wilhelm von Debschitz s teaching and experimental workshop in Munich and the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg. Taeuber returned to Switzerland in 1915 to study at Rudolf von Laban s dance school in Zurich, where she became involved also in the Dada-movement between 1916 and 1920. Among the Dadaists she met the French artist and writer Jean Arp, who became her husband in 1922. She was a member of the Swiss "Werkbund, " an important association of artists, architects and designers 1915 32 and taught textile design at the Zurich School of Applied Arts in 1916 29. Sophie Taeuber moved to Meudon near Paris in 1928 to live and work in her self-designed studio home until she had to flee from the German occupation to Grasse in the south of France in 1940, and again in 1942 to Zurich, where she died in January 1943. Sophie Taeuber s work shows remarkably versatile and immensely gifted artist. It covers the universal range of the modernist movement: applied and fine art, dance, architecture, interior design and teaching. For the past decades, exhibitions of Taeuber s work were largely limited to what is held in public collections. For the first time now, a big retrospective exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus (Switzerland) and Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Germany) can draw also on many private collections and present an abundance of works that have never been shown in public at all before, or that have not been on display for many years. The exhibition and the coinciding book show the entire range of Taeuber s creativity and her mastery of material, shape, and color, her inventiveness and her interdisciplinary thinking and approach. In contrast to most previous publications on this extraordinary artist, her work in fine and applied art is treated equ