Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943)

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born in Davos, Switzerland. She trained at the art school of Wilhelm von Debschitz in Munich, Germany until the start of World War I, when she returned to Switzerland. There she launched a successful applied arts practice. The following year, she began attending the Laban school for expressionist dance in Zurich. At an exhibition in 1915, she met her future husband, the French-German artist and poet Jean (Hans) Arp. The two married in 1922 and collaborated frequently on projects. Taeuber-Arp became an active participant in the Zurich Dada movement, initiated by Arp and other avant-garde artists in exile to escape the war. In order to support herself and Arp, she taught embroidery and textile design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich from 1916 to 1929. She was commissioned by the school’s director in 1918 to design marionettes for a modern adaptation of the 18th-century fairy tale The King Stag. These and Taeuber-Arp's related series of wooden heads made out of hatstands are today considered icons of the Dada period.

Over the course of her career, she worked as a designer of textiles, beadwork, costumes, furniture, and interiors, as well as an applied arts teacher, puppet maker, architect, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and magazine editor. In 1928, Taeuber-Arp and her husband moved to Paris, where she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the 1930s, she was associated with two groups of artists also devoted to abstraction, Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création, and helped create and became editor of the short-lived art journal Plastique/Plastic.

In 1940, she and Arp fled Paris for Grasse in the South of France ahead of the Nazi Occupation in World War II; they made it back to Zurich in 1942. In this last phase of her career, she contributed to the print portfolios 5 Constructionen + 5 Compositionen and 10 Origin, published by the association of Swiss modern artists Allianz, and made a series of exuberant line drawings. After Taeuber-Arp's accidental death in 1943 by carbon monoxide poisoning, Jean Arp worked to promote her legacy.