Sophie Taeuber-Arp: The Rule of Curves

Edited with an essay by art historian Briony Fer, The Rule of Curves examines the work of leading 20th-century artist and designer Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Taeuber-Arp defied categorization during her brief career through her work as a painter, sculptor, architect, performer, choreographer, teacher, writer and designer of textiles, stage sets and interiors. Reconciling extremes with confidence—Dada and Geometric Abstraction, fine art and utilitarian objects—Taeuber-Arp's works boldly engaged with the intellectual context of international modernism.

This bilingual clothbound volume is thematically driven, focusing on the formal logic that drove her innovative and wide-ranging creative production while revealing how working between mediums both expanded and crystallized her aesthetic. It particularly traces Taeuber-Arp's incorporation of curves into her geometric abstractions—a motif that elaborated upon Jean (Hans) Arp's biomorphic visual language. Alongside Fer's new critical insights into Taeuber-Arp's work, an essay by scholar Jenny Nachtigall explores the artist's "environments" and how notions of gravity, motion and the cinematic offer keys to understanding the artist's kinaesthetic sensibility.