Dressing for Abstraction

John Haber
in New York City

Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Dorothea Tanning

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was among the most rigorous and prolific abstract artists ever, when she found the time. Even now, after a massive retrospective one can only wonder how she did it—and why she has not received this kind of attention all along. One might say the same about a woman in another of the last century's great art movements, Dorothea Tanning.

Taeuber-Arp worked in photography, fashion, and furniture. She worked on paper, on canvas, and in low relief. The exhibition has roughly three hundred objects in a vain effort to keep up. The Museum of Modern Art calls it "Living Abstraction," and if this be abstraction, she was living it every day. It raises questions about what counts as rigor and about the roots of modern art. Yet I shall always remember her from a photograph, in what might look at first like down time, dressing up.

An encounter with Surrealism changed Tanning once and for all. Well, make that twice, and the second time it allowed her to let go of any movement in art but her own. An exhibition of her later work makes the case for a world maker—a lush world, barely able to contain its flowing, streaming, full-bodied women. They seem as confident on a balcony in Paris as up in the clouds, which have their own elusive presence as well. The show may instead diminish her, leaving a painter of cotton candy and vague delights. But then, like Taeuber-Arp at MoMA, it may help New York discover alternatives within modern art.

The beauty in Dada

Sophie Taeuber-Arp made the most even of down time. She wears pants with loose bottoms like a harlequin's, as if she could not be bothered for more—or is that, too, only a pose? Is she a fashion designer, a performer, or just a woman breaking into the male circle of Zurich Dada during World War I? In her life, she was them all, and bodies in motion played no small role in her abstraction as well. She stands looking up and away from the camera at a party, but in the spirit of King Stag, a puppet show of her own making and one of her earliest adult creations. It plays out in near darkness, in a room off to the side, to recreate the atmosphere of Galerie Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire.

Was Voltaire the very emblem of Enlightenment theater? That is precisely why Dada took him as a namesake and a target. The Zurich scene included a stern advocate of anti-art in Tristan Tzara, and the cabaret's founder, Hugo Ball, posed much like Taeuber-Arp in a white suit and tall hat that makes him look like a robot. In the crowded puppet show, she and the marionettes keep crashing to the ground as if running out of hope or gas. And then they get up again, and you can ask where that leaves her. As curators, Anne Umland, Walburga Krupp, Eva Reifert of the Kunstmuseum Basel, and Natalia Sidlina of Tate Modern speak of her art as "pedagogy and process"—but just what are its lessons?

The show's first room introduces abstraction with works on paper and in fabric, but also with beaded necklaces and handbags. They all alternate colors in a dense grid that one might trace to the demands of wearable objects or a loom. Taeuber-Arp's painting by weaving anticipates a trend for hangings (without, of course, a puppet's strings) and the handmade in art now, with renewed attention to women and folk art. At the same time, she often began with daubs of paint on graph paper, while titles speak of geometric forms, elementary forms, diverse elements, dense strokes, free rhythms, and (most often) vertical-horizontal compositions. She could be looking for the very elements of, equally, craft or painting. If one influences the other, the influence runs both ways.

The next room turns to other functional and decorative objects, including rugs with Native American influences, tablecloths, and pillowcases. It introduces other "abstract motifs" as well, including boats, knights, and birds. She had met Jean Arp in Zurich, although they did not marry until 1922, when she was in her thirties. They were independent abstract artists, for all their mutual influence. He has remained at the forefront as she has not since her death, and their approaches to composition may help explain why. Those grids sure sound rigorous, but just what counts as rigor in art?

You may know Arp (Hans Arp when he was speaking German, which was often) for curved forms in spare works. They might seem to have landed there by chance, and they do look back to chance elements in Dada—most notably 3 Standard Stoppages by Marcel Duchamp, who let threads a meter long fall where they may and called it drawing. Taeuber-Arp, in contrast, may seem busy and arbitrary. Much of prewar abstraction fell out of fashion for the same reason. Abstract Expressionism and then Minimalism and conceptual art put an end to that, right? For some time, critics like Clement Greenberg were sure.

Art was supposed to be pure painting, and her mix of "genres, disciplines, and creative roles," as the curators call it, was decidedly impure. It also had room for beauty. That and Dada must seem a contradiction in terms, but beauty, she said, is a "deep and primeval urge," and she kept returning to both beauty and life. She designed Dada Cups, like incense burners in black painted wood. Still, by the end she returned to abstraction, in predominantly curved forms. Arp's biomorphism may finally have won out over the grids, but so has rigor.

Artistry on the move

They have, that is, if one overlooks the speed at which she worked. Just a record of the couple's movements is dizzying. She was from Switzerland and studied art in Germany. Arp was from today's Strasbourg, in the long-disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine, with one German and one French parent. He and Taeuber-Arp moved there together after Zurich, but with time in Paris and later a home in the south of France, where they hoped and failed to stay safe from the Nazis. They traveled widely along the way, with such friends as Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch from Dada and, from Orphism's concentric colors, Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

Their travels were beginning to enter her art as well. She photographed dense housing set into unstable landscapes, and that, too, shaped her formal compositions. She did not return to the puppet show, but she did sculpt and paint Dada Heads akin to African art, including one of her husband. She also broadened her interest in interior design. Her cabinets from the late 1920s are straightforward enough, but she still meant art as beauty to be used. And then she abandoned that very goal, in favor of abstraction.

Was it merely the pressure of artistry on the move? There is, after all, always time for drawing, but not always for manufacture and marketing. Yet art movements played a role, too. In Strasbourg, the couple helped create an entertainment complex, Aubette. And Taeuber-Arp did not take a back seat to her husband even in his home city. She painted the Café Aubette—with a ceiling that MoMA, quoting forgotten others, calls the Sistine Chapel of abstract art.

It is long since destroyed, but the couple had by then moved on. In Paris, Taeuber-Arp fell in with a group called Cercle et Carré ("circle and square") in 1929 and with Abstraction-Création in 1931. And guess what? She then embarked on simpler, sparer creations centered on circles, half circles, radial lines, and squares. Well after her time in Paris, they dominate her art against black or white backgrounds, although she continued to sketch the landscape from her travels. They also carry her into the third dimension.

She takes up painted wood reliefs, with circular borders containing circular forms. On paper and on the run, she falls back on Undulating Lines in colored pencil and colliding black circles in pencil, gouache, and ink. They could almost be designs for freestanding metal sculpture. And still she never stopped. She turned on the stove and died in her sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning while staying with another artist, Max Bill, in 1943. One might wonder whether she gave up in face of war and killed herself, but scholars put it down to a blocked or faulty flue.

Either way, it is a sad end to an invigorating story. It also foretells the sad decline in her fortunes after her death. That has a parallel in Hilma af Klint, nearly thirty years older and arguably the first abstract artist, and one might well compare the younger woman's compulsive shapes to the older artist's Symbolism. Will MoMA have turned her fortunes around or buried them in so exhausting a retrospective? I myself may have been looking for an escape when I retreated to the puppet show. And yet she left so many directions to follow—and so many hints of where they came together and where they diverged.

Ill forgotten

Dorothea Tanning shared her first encounter with Surrealism with plenty of others, and it changed their understanding of Modernism, too. Born in 1910 in Illinois, she had a home-grown education and a first start in Chicago before reaching New York in 1925. Two years later, an exhibition brought Surrealism to the Museum of Modern Art. She had found her calling, and in every sense she made it hers. She appears as the lone figure in the painted desert of a real or surreal America, for her Self-Portrait. In Birthday, she celebrates on her own as well.

She stands at full length, exposing her breasts, while her dress fills out the space to every side. A dragon at her feet might take flight at any moment, too. She supplies the only birthday presents, although I cannot swear just what she carries, and she commands unseen demons that may yet strike back. They may lurk behind door after door out of a murder mystery. Doors, ominous but now closed, return the next year in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, with two women in what might be a hotel corridor—and an overpowering yellow flower, another recurring motif, at the top of the stairs.

And then came her second encounter, the very year of Birthday, in 1942. She met Max Ernst at a party and was not too old to impress him as an artist and to fall in love. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with the leading American Surrealist, Man Ray. The current show picks her up a year later, but she was now ready to leave Surrealism behind. Was it Ernst, who leaned at times to abstract painting, or the tenor of her times? Or was it just her, unwilling to confine herself when art could be more suggestive still?

Tanning had success after success while remaining just outside the mainstream. She was the Midwesterner who quit art school and then the commercial artist in an art center that demanded more. (The art director at Macy's introduced her to a leading dealer, Julian Levy, suggesting the limits of all such distinctions, and he took her on right away.) She was the painter of women in Paris just when the scene was shifting to abstraction and New York. She had a Tate retrospective in 2019, but she turns up inevitably as the woman in Surrealism, along with Leonora Carrington, or the forgotten American, as in "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at the Met. Can a gallery change that story, and can she?

She may seem lost in the clouds, but the sweetness and light give way in a moment to darkness and ambition. It is not so easy to discover her or the moon on that balcony, in a tall painting only inches across. Other women ascend or descend a ladder, like angels for Jacob in the Bible, but when and where will they arrive? Larger paintings and troubled skies may recall Guercino in the Baroque, Tiepolo's Venice, or Abstract Expressionism itself. Regardless, they can barely contain their women, whose raw bodies overlap in mysterious circumstances. The gallery lacks her stuffed fabric, materials for Louise Bourgeois as well, but it does throw in a sculpture in bronze.

Will the show turn things around? She lived to over a hundred, when Modernism itself had to struggle to remain relevant. Late work has certain advantages, including market availability, but it cannot match the subtler, hard-edged narratives it leaves out. Still, there is no getting around the troubled joy of two girls reaching out across the break in a diptych. Who lurks in the background, and could they be the wilder humans and animals of her earlier Surrealism? They are, another title suggests, Ill Forgotten.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Sophie Taeuber-Arp ran at The Museum of Modern Art through March 12, 2022, Dorothea Tanning at Paul Kasmin through April 16.