CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/17/2021

Definitive 'Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction' is New from MoMA

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.”