Task 2 – Dada and Sophie Arp Research

Dada:

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. While broadly based, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp:

Sophie Henriette Gertrude Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, and dancer. She is considered one of the most important artists of concrete art and geometric abstraction of the 20th century. In 1915, at an exhibition at the Tanner Gallery, she met the Dada artist Jean Arp, who had moved to Zurich in 1915 to avoid being drafted by the German Army during the First World War. They were to collaborate on numerous joint projects until her death in 1943. They married in 1922 and she changed her last name to Taeuber-Arp. Taeuber-Arp taught weaving and other textile arts at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule  1916 to 1929. Her textile and graphic works from around 1916 through the 1920s are among the earliest Constructivist works, along with those of Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich. These sophisticated geometric abstractions reflect a subtle understanding of the interplay between colour and form.

During this period, she was involved in the Zürich Dada movement, which centred on the Cabaret Voltaire.She took part in Dada-inspired performances as a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer, and she designed puppets, costumes and sets for performances at the Cabaret Voltaire as well as for other Swiss and French theatres. At the opening of the Galerie Dada in 1917, she danced to poetry by Hugo Ball whilst wearing a shamanic mask by Marcel Janco. A year later, she was a co-signer of the Zurich Dada Manifesto.

Taeuber-Arp is the only woman on the current series of Swiss banknotes in Switzerland; her portrait has been on the 50-franc note since 1995.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/dada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Taeuber-Arp