Aubette 113

Between 1926 and 1928, Sophie Taeuber-Arp collaborated with her husband Jean Arp and the De Stijl architect Theo van Doesburg on the interior decoration of the Aubette, an eighteenth-century building in the heart of Strasbourg that was being converted into a cinema-ballroom and café complex. The project was among the most ambitious attempts to realize a total Gesamtkunstwerk in the Constructivist and Concrete Art idiom; every surface (ceilings, walls, floors) was to be integrated into a single coherent color-and-form system. Taeuber-Arp was responsible for several rooms, and the numbered study series to which this work belongs documents her methodical translation of abstract principle into architectural scale. Van Doesburg famously insisted on orthogonal compositions for the shared spaces; Taeuber-Arp's decision to introduce the diagonal in her own rooms was an act of quiet but deliberate independence, and it is now regarded as one of the most sophisticated moves in the entire project. The Aubette interiors were painted over within a decade of completion and remained lost until a partial restoration began in the 1980s; the preparatory studies on paper and board therefore carry exceptional documentary and art-historical weight, preserving intentions that the built surfaces could not. This study is held in institutional collections and has been exhibited in major retrospectives of early twentieth-century abstraction, including surveys at the Museum of Modern Art and the Kunstmuseum Basel.