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BIOGRAPHY


1930–1943


 

In Paris, Sophie Taeuber-Arp joined the artists’ group Cercle et Carré and participated in their exhibitions. In 1931 she became a member of the association Abstraction-Création. Her artist friends Theodor and Woty Werner hired her to design the interior of their Paris apartment. A year later, in 1932, she left the Schweizerischer Werkbund. Her visit to the Sztuki Museum in Lodz, which was facilitated by Jan Brzekowski, led to a fruitful artistic exchange between the Polish avant-garde association a.r. and the Parisian artist’s group Abstraction-Création. Sophie Taeuber-Arp participated in various group exhibitions, and often showed her work with Artistes Suisses at the Galerie Vavin and at the Kunsthalle Bern with Hans Arp, Kurt Seligmann, Hans Schiess, and many others. She designed the layout for Anatole Jakovskis’ book Hans Erni, Hans Schiess, Kurt Seligmann, S. H. Taeuber-Arp, Gerard Vulliamy in 1935. Theodor and Woty Werner helped her secure the commission to design the interior of the Bauhaus professor Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Berlin apartment. Her work was shown in the exhibition These, Antithese, Synthese at the Kunstmuseum Luzern and in 1936 in Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik, an exhibition of contemporary Swiss painting and sculpture, at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Additionally, she participated in the Konstruktivisten-Ausstellung, an exhibition of constructivist art, at the Kunsthalle Basel. Sophie Taeuber-Arp founded the international artists’ journal plastique with César Domela, A. E. Gallatin and L. K. Morris in 1937. The same year she joined the Swiss artists’ group Allianz. In 1938, she exhibited at the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and at the Exposition of Contemporary Sculpture in London. Her illustrations appeared in Hans Arp’s poetry collection Muscheln und Schirme in 1938 as well. The couple fled from German occupation in 1941 to Grasse, where they stayed with Alberto and Susi Magnelli. A selection of the collaborative drawings made by Taeuber-Arp, Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Magnelli during that visit were published in 1950. In 1941, for the first time since the beginning of the war, Taeuber-Arp was able to visit her family in Switzerland. She returned to see them again the following year, in November 1942. Sophie Taeuber-Arp died on January 13, 1943 of carbon monoxide poisoning in Zurich.