Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Four Spaces with Broken Cross, 1932

gouache on paper

For Taeuber-Arp, the design of living spaces was a fundamental theme and an activity that went far beyond her many commissions for architectural and interior design.

As an expressionist dancer in the orbit of Rudolf von Laban, she had already begun dealing with the relationship between the figure and space in the 1910s. Beginning in 1932, her Space Pictures constituted an entirely new direction in her artistic work. In clear compositions in which shape and color enter into a coexistence in which both are equal in strength, she divided the picture’s surface to create two-dimensional spaces that provided an abstract stage for basic geometric elements such as circles and diagonally composed planes.