Signposts

     The exhibit that took place in the Tanner Gallery in Zurich in
November 1915 turned out to be the most important event of my life.
It was there that I first met Sophie Taeuber.
     The show, in which Otto van Rees and A. C. van Rees-Dutilh took part,
consisted largely of tapestries, embroideries, and collages.  The catalogue
contained reproductions of a collage by Otto van Rees, a woolen tapestry of
mine, and a silk embroidery by A. C. van Rees-Dutilh.  I had written a short
introduction to this catalogue in which I came out against illusion, fame,
artifice, copying or plagarism, spectacle, tightrope walking; I advocated
reality, the precision of the indefinable, and utmost precision.  All my
works were "abstract" according to the term used at the time.  But the
essential feature of this exhibit was the fact that the artists, all dis-
gusted with oil painting, were looking for new materials.  These works-- 
one of the most important of which, the embroidery by A. C. van Rees-Dutilh,
is now in Marguerite Hagenbach's collection in Basel, while one of my
tapestries belongs to my brother in Paris-- are the first documents per-
taining to that search.
     In the works that she showed my shortly after we met, Sophie Taeuber
had also used wool, silk, cloth, and paper.  There still exist still lifes
and portraits going back to her very early artistic activity.  But by then
she had already destroyed most of her works because she was looking for new
solutions in art.  Her spiritual purity, her love for her craft led to a
maximum simplification of the forms she created in her very first abstract
compositions.
     The adulated machine which will soon devour the universe and infinity,
and the atrocious lunatic zeal to which man coolly devotes himself, have
both led him to the point of no longer recognizing beauty.  The serenity
of Sophie Taeuber's œuvre is inaccessible to those devoid of any soul and
who live in confusion.  Her works have sometimes been referred to as applied
art.  Both stupidity and wickedness are at the root of this appellation.
Art can just as easily express itself in wool, paper, ivory, ceramics, or
glass as in painting, stone, wood, or clay.  A stained-glass window, a Coptic
fabric, the Bayeux tapestry, or a Greek amphora do not fall under the head
of decorative art.  I know of objects sculpted by peasants that have a live
plastic reality as great as that of an ancient torso.  Art is always free,
and frees the object it is applied to.
     The limpid calm emanating from Sophie Taeuber's vertical and horizontal
compositions influenced the baroque treatment and diagonal structure of my
abstract "configurations."  A profound and serene silence filled her con-
structions of colors and surfaces.  Her exclusive use of horizontal and
vertical rectangular planes in art exerted a decisive influence on my own
works.  I found, stripped down to the utmost, the essential elements of all
earthly construction: the spurting, the soaring of lines and planes toward
the sky; the verticality of clear life; and the vast balance, the pure
horizontality of peace extended into dream.  Her work was a symbol for me
of the "divinely constructed work" that the vanity of men has destroyed
and sullied.
     Sophie Taeuber and I decided to completely renounce the use of oil colors
in our compositions.  We wanted to avoid any reminiscence of canvas painting,
which we regarded as characteristic of a pretentious and conceited world.
In 1916 Sophie Taeuber and I began to collaborate on large compositions in
cloth and in paper.
     With Sophie Taeuber's help, I embroidered a series of vertical and hori-
zontal configurations.  From 1916 to 1919 I experimented in many different
ways, and the same problems still preoccupy me today.  Thus for a while I
concentrated on works based on symmetry.  Some of them were published in
Richard Huelsenbeck's Phantastische Gebete (1916) and in the first issue
of the review Dada (1917).  That same year, 1917, I abandoned the problem
of symmetry in woodcuts and embroideries.  A short time later I found decisive
forms.  In Ascona I did India ink drawings of broken branches, roots, grass,
and stones that the lake had thrown up on the shore.  Finally, I simplified
these forms and united their essences in fluid ovals, symbols of the meta-
morphosis and development of bodies.  The wood relief Earthly Forms, repro-
duced by Picabia in his magazine 391, dates from that time; it initiated a
long series on which I still haven't stopped working.  It is forms of this
kind that inspired the woodcuts I did for Tristan Tzara's books Vingt-cinq
poèmes and Cinéma Calendrier du cœur abstrait.  The first appeared in Zurich
in 1918 and the second in Paris in 1920.
     Around that time Sophie Taeuber and I were collaborating on collages,
some of which, dating from 1918, still exist.  As early as 1916 Sophie
Taeuber had been doing colored-pencil drawings which anticipated collages.
After long and impassioned discussions, the rules for the construction of
our mural painting took shape.  Horizontal and vertical configurations and
the use of new matierials had become for me the alpha and omega of plastic
art.  It was only with great reluctance that I took part in exhibitions, for
I didn't regard my works as quite ready.  This was why I destroyed the major
part of my works.  The few pieces still in existence were salvaged by my
brother and my friends, who refused to give them to me to be destroyed.  I
even stole a collage from my friend Tristan Tzara's hotel room in order to
rip it up.  My brother often reminds me of the winter evening in Zurich 
when I burned so many of my works that the heat finally made the china
stove crack.
     The years during which we worked exclusively with the new materials,
turning out embroideries and configurations in paper or cloth, affected
us like a purification, like spiritual exercises, so that we finally 
rediscovered painting in its original purity.
     In those years Sophie used colored pencils.  She returned to this
technique toward the end of her life, in Grasse in 1941 and 1942.  From
1916 to 1918 she composed her first abstract water colors.  In 1918 she
painted a triptych, once again using oil colors as well as different
gildings.  This technique, which the development of naturalist trends
in painting had eclipsed during the last century, was taken up again by
Sophie, who was stimulated by Byzantine and medieval painting.  Around
that time I also did two oil paintings which are still in existence.
     Sophie judged her works with a more rigorous critical spirit than
I did my own.  She was always reluctant about showing them to anyone
and never wanted to have them exhibited or reproduced.  She was one of
the most modest people I have ever met.
     For a while dancing was her chief occupation; she preferred it to her
other artistic activities.  In Die Flucht aus der Zeit and in a Berne news-
paper, Hugo Ball said admirable things about her dancing.  In Dada, no. 1,
Tristan Tzara wrote: "Mademoiselle S. Taeuber delirious oddity in the spider
of the hand vibrates rhythm rapidly rising to the paroxysm of a bantering
capricious beautiful insanity.  Costume by H. Arp."  Sophie Taeuber was an
instructor at the School of Decorative Arts in Zurich.  She taught compo-
sition and the technique of weaving and embroidery.  She had been forced to
do so by the necessities of material life.  Her teaching permitted both of
us to freely devote ourselves to essential work.  I must remind the reader
that those were the days of the dada period and that the dadaists delighted
in their terrible reputation.  Thus the directors of the School of Decorative
Arts told Sophie to avoid any participation in the dadaist manifestations,
otherwise she would lose her job.  She was consequently forced to adopt a
stage name and to wear a mask when she danced.
     Sophie Taeuber also engaged in plastic works, in wood, "turning" and
fashioning fantastic sculptures.  The marionettes and sets that she had been
commissioned to do for Gozzi's play King Stag were a very great success.
In the dadaist review Der Zeltweg (1919), we published a reproduction of the
"magician."  In accordance with Lissitzky's wishes, Die Kunstismen published
a reproduction of one of those marionettes which represented both a soldier
and an army.  It was probably El Lissitzky's interest in the theater and in
figurines that influenced his wishes.  I, personally, would have preferred to
see a reproduction of a tapestry or a water color.  One may say in regard to
Sophie Taeuber's marionettes, rather arbitrarily using Kleist's statement:
their souls are not only in their elbows.  "But paradise is locked up and the
cherubim behind us; we have to travel around the world and see if there is
some entrance in the back."  This trip, which Kleist speaks about in his
essay on the puppet theater, is the one Sophie Taeuber took.
     Until 1920 we were unaware of the importance of our experiments.  When
the first international publications came to our attention after the war, we
were quite surprised to see that identical attempts had been made throughout
the rest of the world.  Mondrian's and van Doesburg's works especially, with
their great influence on Dutch and international contemporary painting, elicited
our admiration.  At the same time we were amused by the fact that everyone who
had drawn a square felt compelled to emit a shriek of euphoria.  Nevertheless,
we decided to patent our squares.  Our static investigations actually were the
product of intentions essentially different from those of most "constructivists."
We foresaw paintings of meditations, mandalas, signposts.  Our signposts of light
were meant to point out the roads to space, depth, infinity.

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