Muscheln und Schirme. Zeichnungen von Sophie Taeuber. Typographie von Jan Tschichold
Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise): [privately printed], 1939. First edition. [40] pp. Unprinted heavy wrappers, folded and string-sewn. A bit of surface wear to the wrappers, contents clean.
Despite previous periods of intense collaboration dating back to their initial meeting decades earlier during the flowering of Zurich Dada, this is the first book published jointly by Hans and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. As Renée Riese Hubert wrote in her article “Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp: A Community of Two,” “Each partner implicitly looked upon the other simultaneously as a disciple and guide, even when the two worked on the same project.... [The artists] confront one another... as a visual versus a verbal creator.” Tschichold’s austere type design functions together with the text and drawings to create a harmonious and compelling whole.
“Sophie had within herself a limpid sky filled with purified forms. Everything received amid this sky was recast and transmuted into purity. A fire reigned in her, both severe and gentle. Although surrounded by the humming and the radiance of the world, she was precise and willful in her work. She would never muddle a composition with contradictory or ambiguous elements. She never used literary devices in her painting. She simplified her compositions to the utmost; and in the purity of her superspatial, supertemporal paintings, her dreams wove spiritual objects for the inner eye. Like medieval limners, she painted angelic script with a calm and silent modesty. This angelic script is in communication with the hand that we feel in every object, big or small. The tiniest particle is protected and sheltered by that hand. The hand is at work everywhere. It watches over form and the evolution of form, it watches over stones, plants, beasts, over man and all the invisible forces. It has at its command the light and the darkness in our lives. Sophie readily followed the hand’s guidance. The hand guided her brush, and thus even her smallest paintings grew large and bright. They attest to and sing the praises of the infinite without neglecting the silent and flowery deepness of the earth, where the bees drone and one bell of flowers is joined with the next, beneath the endless and flaming
bouquet of celestial blossoms and suns.” (Arp on Arp). Item #2606
Price: $2,500.00