FRANCE (2021)- Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Artist- Abstract Painting

Major artist of the twentieth century art, Sophie Taeuber, daughter of a feminist before the open hour for the arts, trained in industrial design and craftsmanship in St. Gallen (Switzerland), then received training in Munich textile and woodworking. She develops her own abstract formal vocabulary from geometric shapes. It also decompartmentalizes the arts, putting arts and applied arts on the same level. In 1915, she met Hans Arp, who was impressed by his work. They get married and collaborate on several occasions. Sophie Taeuber-Arp's work then crosses all eras and mediums until her sudden death in 1943. Her refined abstraction remains imbued with movement and rhythm, influenced by her practice as a dancer in the mid-1910s. Part of her husband's, who nevertheless claimed her influence, her work met with posthumous recognition that began in the mid-1950s.

In Le Bateau, gouache on paper from 1917, an abstract checkerboard surrounds a window reserved for a few circular elements (boat, fireplace, smoke). This geometric stylization of the boat provides a playful counterpoint to the geometric rigor of the orthogonal grid, in a melodic composition with joyful and luminous colors. This is one of Taeuber-Arp's works in which figurative memories remain before it finally goes into abstraction."