Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tate Modern, review: Unforced minimal cool… but the Dada moment is glossed over

If you can get your name attached to a pivotal cultural moment – and in however minor a role – you’re pretty much guaranteed a place in the history books. Unless, of course, you’re a woman.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp had a far from minor role in the creation of Dada, the radical anti-art movement that exploded into being during the First World War and went on to influence everything from Pop Art to punk. A painter, credited with creating some of the first truly abstract images, a visionary textile designer, architect and not least dancer, she’s seen in one of the very few photographs of the group’s anarchic Zurich venue, the Cabaret Voltaire: a mysterious masked figure performing a wild “hundred-jointed” (as one viewer put it) improvised dance to the hurtling absurdist rhythms of dada poet Hugo Ball’s abstract sound-poem Gadji Beri Bimba – a work set to music 60 decades later by Talking Heads.

Yet Taeuber-Arp, along with many other women artists from that seminal early modernist period, has found herself relegated in history after history to the role of tea-maker, squaw and worst of all help-meet to a more powerful male talent, in her case painter and sculptor Jean Arp. And Taeuber-Arp seems, in many ways, hardly to have helped herself: appending Arp’s name to her own when they married in 1921 and landing herself with a lumpily unmemorable brand name; smiling cheerfully in group photographs (never a good look for an edgy radical artist), and collaborating widely across a range of art forms, almost as though she wanted to sublimate her creative personality into those around her.

This major exhibition at Tate Modern, produced in collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, sets out to rescue Taeuber-Arp from the role of talented bit-player by presenting her work in stark isolation, with a minimum of biographical information, contextual material or interpretation – an approach very much in line with current curatorial orthodoxy. The upside is that her surviving work is forced to stand on its own merits; the downside is that the baby is almost thrown out with the bathwater.

Coloured pencil drawings from 1915-16, produced shortly before her involvement with Dada, arrange rectangular forms in stark grid formations with bluntly matter of fact titles – Vertical-Horizontal Composition on White – with the slightly sugary pencil colours deftly harmonised. The gallery guide doesn’t attempt to explain how a 26-year-old teacher from the Swiss ski resort of Davos was able to produce such uncompromisingly abstract works at a time when modernist heavy hitters such as Mondrian and Malevich had barely given up on figurative imagery, except to note that textile weaving – in which Taeuber-Arp trained – lends itself to grid formats.

How this well-educated prodigy, who trained in Munich and Hamburg as well as in her native Switzerland, got involved with the Dada misfits isn’t explained, and the show’s insistence on actual works of art, leaving out exhibition fliers, magazines and other ephemera, means that the Dada moment – notionally Taeuber-Arp’s greatest claim – of which there’s little concrete evidence, is glossed over in a handful of objects. Her wooden Dada Heads, seen in photographs and in several of the actual sculptures, must have disconcerted at the time with their dehumanised machined forms and whimsical surface patterns. Yet in the absence of contextual imagery, it’s difficult to recreate that mood, and the exhibition seems unsure what to do with these objects beyond plonk them in a long vitrine.

A collection of puppets produced for the Swiss Marionette Theatre, resembling a collection of animated spinning tops, are certainly fun, but hardly likely to help bring down the bourgeois order. Yet Taeuber-Arp, as the show makes clear, was never an instinctive revolutionary: concerned less with tearing apart the bad old world, than creating a harmonious new order, and not least through functional objects. Tapestries, cushion covers and bags covered in painstakingly intricate glass-bead show a fantastic feel for pattern and rich colour, with a free interplay of folk imagery and constructivism – a heavily abstracted cockerel here, a “modular” figure reminiscent of the work of her contemporary Le Corbusier there.

While the wall texts note Taeuber-Arp’s exasperation at the way so-called applied art (often associated with women) was taken less seriously than painting and sculpture (invariably associated with men), the exhibition itself is guilty of a similar sin, in a back to front sort of way. The stark and sterile “art” presentation, with acres of empty white wall space, makes no attempt to evoke the way they were intended to be experienced, as part of everyday life.

open image in gallery

The show’s approach makes more sense, however, in rooms devoted to paintings produced in Paris during the Thirties, many of which appear startlingly ahead of their time.

Asked to date Animated Circle Picture, with its large dots in tastefully muted blues and greys distributed over a blank white canvas according to the laws of chance, I’d have said 1964, rather than 1934, the actual date. In Relief, from 1936, large white dots project from the black surface on cone-like stems, while other circular forms are cut into the background, disrupting the boundaries between the work and the surrounding wall. There’s an unforced minimal cool to these works that still feels incredibly fresh.

The last room of works on paper, overstretches some fairly slight material, though there are delights. Geometric and Undulating, 1941, in which an improvisation on the circle – the most universal of all forms – develops into an exhilarating flow of line and subtly subdued colour, feels like it could have been produced yesterday, rather than at the height of the Second World War – just two years before Taeuber-Arp’s horribly early death, aged just 53, from carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning stove.

That disclosure brings a sad end to a show that is all about a woman joyously seizing the possibilities of one of art’s great moments. Despite the show’s odd, and patently inaccurate, claim that “Taeuber-Arp always stood apart from other modernist artists”, this was an artist who knew “everyone” in that extraordinary period – a fact borne out in innumerable photographs. There’s a sense throughout the show of the clamour of big personalities and big events, just out of view. The show could have afforded to let a little more of that noise into the gallery, to help animate an experience that persuades of Taeuber’s relevance to now, while leaving us feeling we’ve only had part of the story.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp is at the Tate Modern from 15 July to 17 October