Dada Head and Powder Box: Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MoMA

In 1916, Sophie Taeuber-Arp began living an artistic double life: by day, she taught textile design and embroidery at the Zurich Trade School, and by night, she took part in Dada antics at the Cabaret Voltaire as a member of the city’s radical avant-garde. Yet her resulting oeuvre—comprehensively surveyed in the Museum of Modern Art retrospective “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction,” co-organized with Kunstmuseum Basel and Tate Modern in London—makes clear that