Senior Curator, Anne Umland: We're looking at a book that was published soon after Taeuber-Arp's untimely death in 1943.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp had to leave the south of France, in November of 1942. The free zone where they were living was to be invaded by the German and Italian forces, and they ended up getting on an early morning bus and heading to Switzerland. And in Zurich, one evening, Taeuber-Arp went to sleep in a room with a wood burning stove and she did not realize that the flue was closed. And she died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her sleep just a few days short of her 54th birthday.
The book includes a moving letter written in memory of her by her dear friend, Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia.
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (read by actor): The imaginative work of creation happened in her not through an accumulation of motifs, but through a progressive paring down, which little by little, left her face to face with a naked line, a game of pure forms, through which she brought about the plastic rhythm of a picture.
I see her hunched over her worktable, her fingertips guiding the pencil that set these astonishingly precise and wilful lines; I see her again in her garden in Meudon, leaning over the flowers that she loved.
Anne Umland: As you look at these drawings, I think you can see that they look quite different from everything else that you have encountered so far in the exhibition.
Writer and Journalist, Amah-Rose Abrams: You just think, where would she have gone with this had she not died? It's just this big unanswered question at the end of the show, which I found really moving actually.
Anne Umland: We now can appreciate her career in all of its variety—textiles and bead work and architectural plans, furniture design, easel paintings—those are all made by the same creative force.
I really hope that one of the things you might leave the show with is just this sense that you've seen the career of one of the most vibrant and versatile artists of the 20th century.