POE'S LETTERS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
and passion, and make it the creative form of his work. He had through
long unhappy years of verbal self-justification become emotionally en–
meshed in the processes of reasoning itself.
Marius
Bewley
TAEUBER-ARP'S WORK
SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP. Edited by Georg Schmidt. Editions Holbein.
$6.50.
The career of Taeuber-Arp has been commemorated by an
impressive volume, which contains eighty-eight reproductions of her
work (six in color) and essays by ten artists and writers associated with
her in the abstract and constructivist movements. The writings (printed,
unhappily, only in German and French) are concerned with remini–
scences and appraisals of the artist's aesthetic contribution. As usual, the
paintings, drawings, and reliefs rather overshadow the text they embel–
lish; it is from these that we get our most intimate glimpse of this ar–
tist, who was surely the gentlest, yet one of the most determined, of her
contemporaries.
The biographical material is not uninteresting, however, for Mme.
Arp had many accomplishments. She began to paint when still a girl (it
is regrettable that none of her sensitive early work, derived from the
Japanese, appears in the book) . It was as a dancer that she first became
known to the public, with appearances in several ballet-companies, in–
cluding that of Mary Wigman. In 1916 she was married to Hans Arp,
then one of the founders of dada in Zurich, and it was not long before
her own plastic instincts-so different from his-began to emerge in
new paintings. Between the wars she and her husband moved to Paris,
and in the environs they built a modem house (from her designs),
where they lived until the Occupation. Perhaps her finest work was
produced at Grasse in 1942. Her accidental death, owing to a defective
gas stove, occurred the following year while on a visit to Switzerland.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp has remained almost unknown in America.
This cannot entirely be ascribed to her exceptional modesty, or even to
the fact that her work presents few of the qualities usually associated
with a 57th Street build-up.
It
stems rather from an opposition to the
dominant currents of abstract art in America. Kandinsky, in his con–
tribution to the volume, has demonstrated that Taeuber-Arp mastered
the "muted form"; he hastily adds that such a creative approach re-
103
