| | | | Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living AbstractionEdited by Anne Umland, Walburga Krupp, Charlotte Healy. Text by Laura Braverman, Leah Dickerman, Briony Fer, Mark Franko, Maria Gough, Jodi Hauptman, Medea Hoch, Juliet Kinchin, Eva Reifert, Natalia Sidlina, T’ai Smith, Adrian Sudhalter, Jana Teuscher, Michael White, Annie Wilker.
 A definitive survey on the Dada participant and pioneer of abstraction between art and craft, spanning her textiles, marionettes, stained glass, paintings and moreA New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021
Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp’s work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design.
This richly illustrated catalog explores the artist’s interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings and relief sculptures. It also features 15 essays that examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp’s career. Arranged into six chapters that follow the exhibition’s sections, these essays trace the progression of Taeuber-Arp’s creative production both chronologically and thematically. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay on Taeuber-Arp’s materials and techniques, and an exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp’s production.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born in 1889 in Davos, Switzerland, and trained at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School in Munich. In 1914, she began a successful applied arts practice in Zurich, where she also taught textile design and participated in the Dada movement. Starting in the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, most significantly the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. When she moved to Paris in 1929, she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the Nazi occupation, Taeuber-Arp spent her final years in the South of France, and died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction.'PRAISE AND REVIEWSTLmag Mechteld Jungerius Presents an overview of Taeuber-Arp’s output and her various sources of inspiration and vividly renders the apparently playful ease with which the artist dismantled longstanding barriers between art and life... Financial Times Jackie Wullschläger Her art, as the subtitle “Living Abstraction” implies, began as performance — yet is refreshingly ego-free. Smithsonian Amy Crawford A hub of the avant-garde scene in the 1920s and ’30s, deeply involved in the Dada movement and later geometric abstraction. New York Times Catherine Hickley Taeuber-Arp’s dazzling artistic range...encompassed beaded bags, necklaces, cushion covers, rugs and stained glass, all in abstract, geometric designs. She made costumes with hats fashioned from paper doilies and designed furniture, interior décor, kitchens--even a meticulously planned broom cupboard. [...] blur[ing] the boundaries between fine art and applied art. New Criterion James Panero Does much to bring Taeuber-Arp out of the shadows and into her own light. New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl No matter how committed she could be to geometric order, Taeuber-Arp communicated her freedom. T Magazine Kate Guadagnino Her nimble, irrepressible creativity is a reminder that art making, especially in times of strife, is an inherently optimistic act. New York Times Roberta Smith Her egalitarian view of art and craft proved that abstractions in woven wool can trounce the oil on canvas kind. The Week By showcasing all the many media that Taeuber-Arp touched, this exhibit recasts long-held assumptions about a hierarchy in which painting and sculpture reign supreme. New York Review of Books Sanford Schwartz A boon to get finally a sense of the full scope of her artistry. It is as if a time capsule has been opened. Texte zur Kunst Changes how we see Taeuber-Arp as an individual and as a pivotal player within networks of artistic exchange. Hyperallergic Ela Bittencourt Taeuber-Arp’s production thrived on myriad tensions: between abstraction and figuration, applied and fine arts, a constructivist rigor and gestural fluidity. Art In America Rachel Wetzler Emphatically frame[s] her art and design work as deeply intertwined, countering a tendency—dating back to the posthumous catalogue raisonné of her work Arp compiled in 1948—to downplay her applied art efforts as something like a side hustle. |
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| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/17/2021 “Composition” (1930) is reproduced from Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction, published to accompany the definitive survey currently on view at Tate, en route to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in November 2021. “Only when we go into ourselves and attempt to be entirely true to ourselves will we succeed in making things of value, living things, and in this way help to develop a new style that is fitting for us,” the artist is quoted by curators Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp. And indeed Taeuber-Arp refused to limit herself, always moving between art and craft at the very edge of the avant-garde, producing costumes, choreography, marionettes, jewelry, textiles, sculpture, painting and much more. Today, this highly-anticipated exhibition catalog feels as sparkling and alive as any on our list. Every work in it is fresh, original and experimental. continue to blogFROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/17/2021 Featured photograph, of the remarkable, until now largely-overlooked, self-described "artist/painter" Sophie Taeuber-Arp in costume for a 1925 housewarming party organized by artist Walter Helbig in Ascona, Switzerland, is reproduced from MoMA’s gorgeous, enlightening and destined-to-be-classic new release, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction. Published to accompany the first American retrospective of the artist’s work in forty years, arriving in New York in November 2021 after stops in Basel and London, this definitive 352-page survey features 435 color reproductions spanning art and craft, including textiles, marionettes, masks, costumes, choreography, architecture, interior design, stained glass, paintings, drawings and much more—right down to a philosophy of life that feels fresher and more necessary than ever. Today, “we can celebrate Taeuber-Arp’s hybrid body of work in all its complexity,” co-curators Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp write, “without being forced to choose between a binary either/or (either art or craft). Instead, Taeuber-Arp’s multivalent, interdisciplinary practice insists on both/and: both art and craft, major and minor, visual and functional, serious and beautiful. Such openness is part of what makes her abstraction ‘living,’ in its ability to sustain multiple, at times contradictory, reinterpretations, repositionings and readings. It is also the hallmark of all great works of art, both fine and applied.” continue to blog | OF RELATED INTEREST |  | NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON/D.A.P.ISBN: 9780894683138
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