1. Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer.
20 Facts About Sophie Taeuber-Arp
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp's parents operated a pharmacy in Davos until her father died of tuberculosis when she was two years old, after which the family moved to Trogen, where her mother opened a pension.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp studied textile design at the trade school in St Gallen.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp then moved on to the workshop of Wilhelm von Debschitz at his school in Munich, where she studied in 1911 and again in 1913; in between, she studied for a year at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp taught weaving and other textile arts at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich from 1916 to 1929.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp took part in Dada-inspired performances as a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer, and she designed puppets, costumes and sets for performances at the Cabaret Voltaire as well as for other Swiss and French theatres.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp made a number of sculptural works, such as a set of abstract "Dada Heads" of turned polychromed wood.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a close friend and contemporary of the French-Romanian avant-garde poet, essayist, and artist, Tristan Tzara, one of the central figures of the Dada movement.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp provided the cover art for the February 1933 issue of Eugene Jolas's avant-garde little magazine, transition.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp explored the circle which represented the cosmic metaphor, the form that contains all others.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp 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.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a member of Allianz, a union of Swiss painters, from 1937 to 1943.
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In early 1943, Sophie Taeuber-Arp missed the last tram home one night and slept in a snow-covered summer house.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp died there of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning caused by an incorrectly operated stove at the house of Max Bill.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp was the only woman on the eighth series of Swiss banknotes; her portrait was on the 50-franc note from 1995 to 2016.
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In 1943, Sophie Taeuber-Arp was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp began to gain substantial recognition only after the Second World War, and her work is generally accepted as in the first rank of classical modernism.
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In 1970, an exhibit of Sophie Taeuber-Arp's work was shown at the Albert Loeb Gallery in New York City.
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In 2021 the Kunstmuseum Basel presented a retrospective entitled Sophie Taeuber-Arp:Living Abstraction The show traveled to to the Tate Modern and then to the MoMA.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.