Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Sophie Taeuber , born the January 19th 1889 with Davos and dead the January 13rd 1943 with Zurich, is a Artiste, painter and sculptor Suisse.

Sophie Taeuber studies the applied arts to Munich and Hamburg and thanks to his/her friend Mary Wigman, it discovers the dance of expression. It will take courses under the direction of the Chorégraphe Rudolf van Laban.

It settles by the force of the things with Zurich in 1915 and its talent of Danseuse will open to him the doors of the Cabaret Voltaire. However it will have to use a Pseudonyme and to dance masked, because the dances full with inventions, whims and bizareries which it offers in spectacle, are not in agreement with the school of decorative arts of Zurich, in which it teaches (between 1916 and 1929).

The year of its arrival in Zurich, in 1915, it meets Jean Arp with the gallery Tanner and Marie with him the October 20th 1922. Both are implied in the movement Dada.

As of the end of the Years 1920, it lives with Paris. It continues to try out the Design but does not dance any more in public (the adventure hobby-horse being completed in Zurich). Its Peinture, directly inspired by its formation in Art déco will constitute the premises of the geometrical abstract art (known as also concrete Art). Its art, it is the research of the essential character of the flowers, the trees, the animals and the rocks ; a manner according to it of being able to enrich our knowledge by nature.

Between 1926 and 1928, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp and Theo van Doesburg, will be invited to transform part of the Aubette of Strasbourg into a kind of complex of leisures and restoration. The construction and the decoration of this brewery-dance hall are a project which they carry in them. Indeed, alliance between art and the daily life refer to the principles of the Werkbund to which Sophie had adhered with enthusiasm at the time of her years of training.

In the Years 1930, it sympathizes with the movement constructivist. It publishes also its own newspaper constructivist entitled Plastique .

In 1940, it and her husband take refuge in the Dordogne then on the Riviera. And in 1941 it creates with Sonia Delaunay and others a Colonie of art to Grasse in the south of France which will be active until in 1943.

She dies in Zurich poisoned by the Carbon monoxide emitted by a defective gaz radiator the January 13rd 1943.

The banknote of 50 Swiss francs, in circulation since 1995, represents the artist.

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