Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Lost Lines on Chaotic Background  1939

oil on canvas

In Taeuber-Arp’s drawings and paintings, basic geometric shapes were increasingly replaced by freehand lines from the mid-1930s onward. The oil paintings she created in 1939 while still in her Paris studio seem to reflect her attempt to come to terms with the outbreak of World War II. While Lost Lines on Chaotic Background renders the omnipresent threat tangible, the light, delicate colored-pencil drawings she would create soon thereafter while in exile in the South of France evince the relaxed atmosphere of a place that was, for the moment, far from the fighting.