Sophie Taeuber-Arp

From the Chapter «First Meeting»
White jasmine blooms on her worktable. Lost in thought, Sophie draws the blossoms. A pale green flicker radiates from the flower’s five-petaled star. In the backlight, a darkness appears in the delicate, almost transparent calyx.

Nature’s beauty defies imitation! Sophie erases the drawing, opens her eyes wide and absorbs the rhythm of the white stars. With abandon, she sketches a composition of circles, triangles, and finely arched lines from which the jasmine blossoms wink at her: Go into the city, we’ll meet again there. – Not much later, she is strolling along Bahnhofstrasse and enters the Tanner Gallery. That is where she sees it. A carpet with dancing triangles and organic forms from which the scent of jasmine wafts towards her. She glances at the sign on the wall below it to the right. In black on white: Hans Arp.
Ah, she whispers, it’s you.

She returns to the gallery again and again until he stands before her. Dressed elegantly like her, they meet as equals. He smells of enchantment. Unruffled, she heads towards the carpet:
Is this your work? It speaks to me. I also play with triangles and circles.
He raises his hat: Hans.
She bows her head: Sophie.

From the Chapter «Dance»
Not long after this, the rector of the School of Applied Arts summoned Sophie to his office.
You are forbidden to take part in any further Dada actions. If you still participate, you will lose your position here.
Sophie thinks of the birch tree. Tied up, cut down. She stands proudly before the rector. I heard you, she says, turns, and leaves the room.

The following evening, she returns to the stage. Over her head, she has placed a mask with ellipses for eyes and a half-moon mouth. Her eyes shine through the cardboard and onto the audience like laser beams, signaling:
Here I am again, dancing!

At the opening of the Galerie Dada, Sophie dances to Hugo’s sound poem Karawane wearing a frightening, cubical mask designed by Marcel and a sack dress by Hans. She has made her arms longer with cardboard tubes. The mask is wide enough for her to shake her head violently inside it, in righteous anger at the world. The untamed aspect of Dada appeals to her. And she enjoys the respect of her artist friends.

From the Chapter «Mother»
Stars, snow, Christmas – she can’t imagine this holiday without her mother.
Every year they were given an advent calendar when they were children. It was covered with glittering snowflakes. They took turns opening a door every day and on Christmas, the big door. In her memory, Sophie could hear herself saying to her siblings: Come, let’s watch at the window. Maybe we’ll see the Christ child flying to us. – It’s already dark. The stars are twinkling. There! Sophie nudges both of them. Look, I think he’s flying there! – They strain to see but can’t make anything out. What does he look like? – Like an angel. Like Papa. Mama told me he’s an angel now too.
In the evening, the Christmas tree candles will glow. The three children can hardly wait. With her light child’s hand, Sophie paints an angel in thick yellow paint on black paper. Then she dips a fine brush in thin white paint and sprays little white dots all over the page, a snowflake dance. She wraps it in blue paper and gives it to her mother as a present: Now you have Papa back.

And now? What is she wrapping Mama in? And for whom? Now she is an orphan, nineteen-years-old. What happened to her childhood faith? She looks at her wall decoration, a striped panel of cloth that serves as a bulletin board for portraits of chiefs. They look resolute. She also has family photographs at hand. Mama loved to read, to tell stories and to dress her children up in costumes from foreign cultures, to transform and adorn them. Sophie learned how to dream with her.

From the Chapter «Marionettes»
Half-dreaming, half-waking, she takes up her pencil and sketchbook and draws it all. She recalls the colors and notes them down meticulously with little arrows pointing to the individual forms. What shall this become? It could be made into a festive dress for a wedding.

Later, in her studio with Hans, both are rapt in a sober trance. Sophie’s marionettes hang on the wall behind them. They dangle, feign, charm.
Realization: These are the figures from her dream, the apparitions in the cloth! She could have painted, embroidered, or woven them, but no, she recreated them as marionettes so that they could move, weightless, tumbling dreamily. Each one has got a headdress, visible, made of brass, wood, feathers, or glass beads. Her own has remained invisible.

It’s all one, Sophie thinks: painting, drawing, embroidery, weaving. Her figures, her forms, her colors, her thoughts meander through the textiles, pillows, tea cozies, watercolors, gouaches, reliefs, beadwork. They fly through the various materials as through landscapes and transform themselves in them, and Sophie transforms herself with them.

She takes the Stag King from the wall and plays with him: how majestically his golden antlers move! He balances worlds in their arcs.

From the Chapter «Alpstein»
Sophie goes back to Trogen. The house she grew up in has a different sound. It stands there, unfamiliar, it is uninhabited. Erika and she emptied the house for it to be sold. The contents were divided among the three siblings, much of it given away. Sophie mostly took furniture. Should she go in? No, she is drawn to the mountains. She wants to feel free!
She climbs to the mountain pasture on the same path she took as a child.
On difficult ascents, her mother would sing to encourage her:
Sleeping Beauty was a lovely child,
lovely child,
lovely child…
and protected by her mother’s firm hand and the melody, which enveloped her like a light blue bellflower, Sophie no longer felt the effort. She would raise her little legs to master the giant steps as the tinkle of the goat bells pealed into the Sleeping Beauty melody with a random disharmony, fine and clear, already ringing out her future Dada compositions and the free effortlessness of art.

Sophie’s mother, herself a master of watercolor painting, showed her the world of mountains:
Look at the shadows, Sophie. Where they’re precisely outlined, you see the shadows of the mountains and where they’re airy, those of the clouds. And down there, you see the mountain lake glittering like a gem, like an emerald.
Sophie is enraptured by the shades of green light. In the world of mountains, Mama taught her to see, first in Davos then in the countryside of Appenzell: An education in light – color – shadow.

From the Chapter «Betrayal»
In 1926, at the age of 37, Sophie was commissioned, along with Hans, to renovate the Aubette, an 18th century building complex in Strasbourg. An amusement center that conformed to the most modern principles of design was planned for the right wing. Although she was already a very successful interior designer, this commission fulfilled a childhood dream. In addition, the Aubette was named after the French word for dawn: aube. And this morning light dawns in Sophie.

But something inside her is out of balance, she swings internally, she swings externally. She swings between Zurich and Strasbourg, between teaching and being an artist full-time. Can she risk the leap? Give up material security and devote herself completely to art? That is the only way she could execute the Aubette project with Hans alone.
She cannot decide. She wavers between the two. Would keeping the old arrangement be a betrayal of herself, of her inner destiny?

Now the stars are aligned. She will receive a high fee for this commission. But then what? Will she be obliged to run after money again, to acquire collectors, sell her works? Wouldn’t this eat up more of her time than a calm, secure teaching position in Zurich? She enjoys teaching, she loves inspiring her students’ creativity but she does not find it fulfilling. When teaching she doesn’t speak with her soul the same way she does when she is immersed in herself, in “bordered silence” as Hans calls it, sharpening her colored pencils and diving into the motion that originates deep within her, bringing her inner light to the fore and binding it to matter.

The profound joy of creating! Affording herself as much room for her creative work as at all possible! Ending the exhausting swinging back and forth will nourish her. Serene and free, she will shape her inner and outer spaces, just as she will with her big opportunity: the Aubette.
Yet she does not dare. Sophie betrays herself and leaves herself open to betrayal.

I can’t manage the Aubette project alone, she says to Hans.
But you have me at your side.
It would be easier with three.
Then let’s bring in Theo van Doesburg. He’s well-known. A fighter.
Theo is vain. And difficult.

Sophie does not listen to the warnings of her inner voice and lets Theo onto her stage. They bring him onto her team. He immediately starts dominating. When she shows him the Aubette, he says: I will shatter this architecture, I will smash this room to pieces. – Destruction – this is the opposite of what Sophie has in mind: She wants to enter into a dialogue with the existing buildings, to create a floating balance between what is and what will be newly designed. She wants the people who will later be in these rooms to sense this harmony so that they feel good in these rooms, so that they enjoy moving in them, so that they experience the friendliness of her concrete art. Sophie would like to lead them into this newness gently and reticently. She would like them to witness how her geometric figures interact freely and playfully with Hans’ organic shapes.

[…]

From this Sophie learns to devote herself completely to her art from that point on. She resigns from her teaching position in Zurich. Using the income from the Aubette and the sale of her mother’s house in Trogen, she builds a studio-house in Meudon outside of Paris, moves in with Hans, and with their friends she begins a new life filled with mutual inspiration.

It is a solid stone house, constructed according to her own plans and under her management. It offers her protection, like a second skin.
She sits in her dressing gown, wrapped in a wool blanket, her feet in fur lined shoes. In cozy warmth, she incubates her art. She remembers Hans’ embrace amid the horror of betrayal. The image with the small circles appears to her anew. She paints it onto warm white paper. It exudes a sense of calm, of balance. No hectic back and forth, no excessive strain. Pigeon-blue, peace-blue – bound to her sparkling red blood.

The time has come for her self-realization as an artist using every ounce of her powers of concentration, art work by art work. Her refreshed soul creates from fullness, even when she loses herself now and then in serving others, offering tea to all the guests, cooking for them, running an open house because Hans is so fond of it. An internal harmony emerges. And yet externally, destruction is imminent. War looms.