Associate Paper Conservator, Annie Wilker: Taeuber-Arp made these works during World War II.
Financially, things were pretty rough and resources were scarce generally.
Artist, Sophie Taeuber-Arp (read by curator, Walburga Krupp): Our life is rather monotonous but we’re in relatively good spirits. Most of my time is taken up with procuring food . . . For weeks, we’ve been promised half a pound of dried fruit and three jars of pickled eggs. . . . I made the trip to get them four times . . . and each time their delivery was postponed. Even so, I’ve finished . . . six small drawings.
Annie Wilker: I wonder how directly Taeuber-Arp's materials contributed to her creation of these works. They were made with relatively inexpensive and portable materials—paper, crayon, and colored pencil. The marks made by these drawing materials are just, naturally, lines. The lines themselves are curving and looping and wandering, and I've also been thinking about how they might relate to the literal wandering that Taeuber-Arp was doing, and how unsettled her life was at the time.
Taeuber-Arp has used her lines economically here. These compositions include a lot of blank paper and empty space. It might be reading too much into things, but this could also relate to her relative isolation in the south of France at the time.
Even though these drawings were carefully planned, I think they have a more chaotic look to them than works from any other time in her career. She's completely abandoned the structure of an underlying grid, which had previously been so important. Maybe she just didn't have access to graph paper anymore, or maybe that type of underlying structure just didn't resonate with her in the chaotic environment of war.