Composition 1930

Taeuber-Arp painted this work in 1930, the year after she and Jean Arp settled at their newly built house and studio in Meudon, France: a space she designed herself, applying the same formal intelligence she brought to the canvas. By this point she had already moved through Dada in Zurich, produced some of the earliest purely abstract textile and relief works in the European avant-garde, and co-founded the journal plastique. Composition 1930 reflects her deepening engagement with the Cercle et Carré group, the Paris-based circle that included Mondrian, Vantongerloo, and Kandinsky, and whose 1930 exhibition brought together the international concrete abstraction movement under one roof. Unlike the grid-bound rigor of De Stijl or the spiritual geometry of Kandinsky, Taeuber-Arp introduced a biomorphic ease into her hard-edged forms; the semicircle perpetually threatens to roll free of its bracket, lending the composition a latent sense of motion that distinguishes her work from any of her contemporaries. Art historians have increasingly recognized that her synthesis of craft, design, and painting anticipated the postwar concretism of Max Bill and the Zurich school by nearly two decades.