An intimate look at the life and career of the Dada hero known for the unique joy of her work across mediums, authored by her great-niece and buttressed with archival material Even when performing at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire during Dada's halcyon days, Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) stood out from the crowd: her choreography, paintings, sculptures, puppets and textiles were all infused with a unique joy that set her apart from her contemporaries. In this important new publication, Taeuber-Arp's great-niece pays homage to the artist's pioneering oeuvre and rich personal life. Silvia Boadella grew up with Taeuber-Arp's oeuvre to hand and draws from her memories, stories and family documents, as well as hitherto unpublished sources for this volume. Boadella provides readers for the first time with a portrait of Taeuber-Arp's personality, her private and artistic environment, connecting the phases of her life to her works, and, with the aid of numerous illustrations including photographs from the family archives, constructs a vivid experience for the reader.

A definitive survey on the Dada participant and pioneer of abstraction between art and craft, spanning her textiles, marionettes, stained glass, paintings and more Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp's work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstractionis a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist's innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design. This richly illustrated catalog explores the artist's interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings and relief sculptures. It also features 15 essays that examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp's career. Arranged into six chapters that follow the exhibition's sections, these essays trace the progression of Taeuber-Arp's creative production both chronologically and thematically. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay on Taeuber-Arp's materials and techniques, and an exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp's production. Sophie Taeuber-Arpwas born in 1889 in Davos, Switzerland, and trained at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School in Munich. In 1914, she began a successful applied arts practice in Zurich, where she also taught textile design and participated in the Dada movement. Starting in the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, most significantly the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. When she moved to Paris in 1929, she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the Nazi occupation, Taeuber-Arp spent her final years in the South of France, and died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.

A true pioneer of modern art Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was an artist but also a dancer, designer, puppet maker, architect, and editor. A true pioneer of modern art, for Taeuber-Arp, abstraction was never just an idea--it was her way of life. This lived abstraction plays a large part in the exhibition as the artwork on show, many together for the first time, explore how Taueber-Arp's subversive, dissident, and often revolutionary style radiated into every facet of her life and paved the way for modern artists to come. Taeuber-Arp became a teacher after studying art and dance and later taught others how to design patterns for textiles. In the terrible wake of the First World War, European civilization was on the brink of collapse, and a group of young people were rebelling from the world of destruction around them. They themselves defined themselves as nonsensical, cynical, savage, and abstract--the Dadaists. Responsible for cofounding the Dada art movement, Tauber-Arp's way with colors and shapes unlocked new possibilities in art, costume, and interior design. Liberated and yet ordered, radical yet structured, Taueber-Arp's work invites us to dance within a grid, to break boundaries by following her rules. Tied so closely with dance, poetry, and performance, Taueber-Arp created the perfect escapism from the troubled and violent society around her, making this publication a pertinent exploration of what it means to create ones own personal order in an increasingly unstable world.

A creative introduction to the works of Sophie Tauber-Arp, one of the founders of the Dada art movement Born in 1889, Sophie Taeuber-Arp was an artist, dancer, designer, puppet maker, architect, and editor. Enter into the radical and radiant world of Taeuber-Arp and create your own abstract modern art along the way! Bursting with inspiring activities, the revised and expanded Meet the Artist series of activity books introduces children to internationally renowned artists in a fun and engaging way. This activity book includes a brief introduction to the artist's life, including her role as one of the founders of the Dada art movement, followed by a series of activities, such as weaving and puppet making, that explore prominent themes and ideas in Taeuber-Arp's body of work. Featuring beautiful reproductions of key artwork, and illustrated by leading contemporary illustrator Lesley Barnes, Meet the Artist: Sophie Taeuber-Arp encourages children to use art as an avenue for exploring ideas and learning new techniques to express their own experiences through art-making.

A dancer, designer, puppet maker, sculptor and painter at the heart of the Zurich Dada movement, Taeuber-Arp made Head in the wake of World War I, during a time of profound political and cultural self-questioning. Almost a century later, her witty wooden figure has lost none of its punch as an investigation of art across aesthetic and material boundaries rather than within them.

“I loved this novel truly, madly, deeply.” —Nina George, bestselling author of The Book of Dreams and The Little Paris Bookshop In this international bestseller by the award-winning novelist Mariana Leky, a heartwarming story unfolds about a small town, a grandmother whose dreams foretell a coming death, and the young woman forever changed by these losses and her loving, endearingly oddball community On a beautiful spring day, a small village wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die. Luisa, Selma’s ten-year-old granddaughter, looks on as the predictable characters of her small world begin acting strangely. Though they claim not to be superstitious, each of her neighbors newly grapples with buried secrets and deferred decisions that have become urgent in the face of death. Luisa’s mother struggles to decide whether to end her marriage. An old family friend, known only as the optician, tries to find the courage to tell Selma he loves her. Only sad Marlies remains unchanged, still moping around her house and cooking terrible food. But when the prophesied death finally comes, the circumstances fall outside anyone’s expectations. The loss forever changes Luisa and shapes her for years to come, as she encounters life’s great questions alongside her devoted friends, young and old. A story about the absurdity of life and death, a bittersweet portrait of small towns and the wider world that beckons beyond, this charmer of a novel is also a thoughtful meditation on the way loss and love shape not just a person but a community. Mariana Leky’s What You Can See from Here is a moving tale of grief, first love, reluctant love, late love, and finding one’s place in the world, even if that place is right where you started.

The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.