“Prolific in Invention”: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Ethnography, Labor

Long undervalued in accounts of European modernism, the multidisciplinary practice of Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) has rightly earned wider recognition in recent years, highlighted in a major retrospective, significant publications and exhibitions, and exploratory engagements by contemporary artist Mai-Thu Perret. Focused especially on Taeuber-Arp’s work with textiles and related techniques, this overdue attention has left some contradictory and fraught dimensions of the artist’s oeuvre largely unquestioned, in particular her relationship to European primitivism. Based on new archival research, this talk will think together two underexamined aspects of Taeuber-Arp’s textile practice: on the one hand, her emulation of motifs and forms from indigenous and non-European cultural production, encountered by the artist in ethnographic museums and publications; on the other, her frequent reliance on the labor of others for producing her textiles. Taeuber-Arp was “so prolific in invention,” wrote one commentator in the 1920s, “that by necessity she leaves the execution to other hands in order to devote herself entirely to design.” Rather than industrial production, this labor involved an intimate circle comprising the artist’s students and co-worker at the Gewerbeschule Zürich as well as her own sister. By examining specific textiles alongside the artist’s writings and letters, I argue that Taeuber- Arp’s ethnographic interests and delegation of labor were constitutive for her textile production and conception of design. Accordingly, taking these dimensions of her practice seriously requires positioning Taeuber-Arp’s work in dialogue with recent critiques of the coloniality of modernist notions of “invention.”