ID 1400951
Лот 18 | Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943)
Оценочная стоимость
€ 1 900 000 – 2 500 000
Relief rond en quatre hauteurs, éléments courbes, coupant(s), cassant(s)
avec le cachet de l'atelier (au revers)
relief en bois peint
Diamètre: 60 cm.
Exécuté en 1936; cette œuvre est unique
with the studio stamp (on the reverse)
painted wood relief
Diameter: 23 5/8 in.
Executed in 1936; this work is unique
Provenance
Atelier de l'artiste.
Jean (Hans) Arp, Meudon (par succession).
Marguerite Arp, France (par succession).
Michel Seuphor, Paris (don de celle-ci en 1967).
Don de celui-ci en mai 1987.
Puis par descendance aux propriétaires actuels.
Literature
E. Jolas, éd., Transition, Tenth Anniversary, Paris, avril-mai 1938, No. 27, p. 272 (illustré; titré 'Sculpture'; daté '1937').
G. Schmidt, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bâle, 1948, p. 140, no. 1936/11.
Exhibited
Bâle, Kunsthalle, Konstruktivisten, janvier-février 1937, p. 20, no. 162, 163 ou 164.
Bâle, Kunsthalle, Neue Kunst in der Schweiz Abt, janvier-février 1938, p. 9, no. 2 ou 3.
Londres, Guggenheim Jeune Gallery, Contemporary Sculpture, avril-mai 1938, no. 35 ou 36.
Londres, Galerie Delcourt, 1938 (illustré sur le carton d'invitation).
Oslo, Kunstnerforbundet, International Nutidskunst. Konstruktivisme, Neoplasticisme, Abstrakt Kunst, Surrealisme, septembre-octobre 1938, p. 11, no. 48 (titré 'Trærelief').
Paris, Galerie Denise René, Arp-Taeuber-Arp, 1950, no. 9.
Saint-Étienne, Musée d'Art et d'Industrie, Art abstrait, Les Premières Générations (1910-1939), avril-juin 1957, p. 35, no. 150 (illustré, fig. 48).
Paris, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, avril-juin 1964, p. 35, no. 102.
Strasbourg, Musée d'Art Moderne, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, mars-juin 1977, p. 44, no. 139 (illustré).
Les Sables-d'Olonne, Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Le Tondo, de Monet à nos jours, juin-septembre 1979, no. 49.
Bâle, Kunstmuseum; Londres, Tate Modern et New York, Museum of Modern Art, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Living Abstraction, mars 2021-mars 2022, p. 333, no. 293 (illustré en couleurs, p. 238).
Bruxelles, Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, Hans/Jean Arp & Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Friends, Lovers, Partners, septembre 2024-janvier 2025, p. 279, no. 116 (illustré en couleurs; daté '1937').
Further Details
La Fondation Arp, Clamart, a confirmé l’authenticité de cette œuvre.
Created in 1936, Relief rond en quatre hauteurs is an arresting example of the elegance and dynamism of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s mature painted reliefs. Never before seen at auction, this rare, circular three-dimensional work is constructed using four separate, hand-painted wooden panels, which are carefully combined to create a delicately balanced, multi-layered pattern. The resulting composition is a testament to Taeuber-Arp’s intriguing visual poetry during this period of her career, marrying strict geometry with a fluid, abstract biomorphism that reveals the continued spirit of innovation and experimentation that underpinned her work. Together, the individual planes interlink and overlap, conjuring a rich interplay of positive and negative space, light and shadow, the varying segments of bright colour and neutral tones emphasising the differences between each element. To our knowledge, Taeuber-Arp made just ten examples of these circular reliefs, the majority of which are now held in museum and institutional collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, and the Stiftung Arp e. V, Berlin/Rolandswerth; Relief rond en quatre hauteurs is among the last examples of these reliefs to remain in private hands.
A radical innovator, Taeuber-Arp worked across multiple media and disciplines, from tapestry to dance, interior design to sculpture, painting and collage, to stage and costume design. She was heavily involved in the Zurich Dada movement during the First World War, embracing their spirit of playful absurdism, and taking part in the group’s daring, provocative performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. At the same time, she held a teaching position at the School of Applied Arts, an experience which granted her a sophisticated understanding of non-representational form, colour and pattern, and an appreciation for those artforms that were considered outside the bounds of traditional fine art practices. “Sophie’s work was always a stimulation to me,” the artist Hans Richter later wrote. “She had lectured at the [School of Applied Arts in Zurich] for years, and had by necessity acquired the skill of reducing the world of lines, surfaces, forms and colours to its simplest and most exact form” (quoted C. Lanchner, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981, p. 10). Through the late 1910s and early 1920s, she tested the boundaries and potential of a bold, non-representational visual language, exploring a form of abstraction that appeared to trace its roots back to the elementary, modular grids of her tapestry and textile designs.
In 1926 she and her husband Jean Arp were commissioned to work on the redesign of the Aubette building in Strasbourg, which the owners wanted to develop into a modernist entertainment complex. Given the scale of the project, the Arps asked the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg to join them, and the trio divided the spaces among themselves. Taeuber-Arp took charge of the design concept for the Five O’Clock Tea Room, the Aubette Bar and the Foyer Bar, creating an immersive, abstract environment, that used reflective surfaces, striking geometric shapes and colourful patterns to transform the space. The proceeds from this project granted Taeuber-Arp a new financial security, allowing her to move with Jean to Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, and the ensuing years were a period of rich artistic experimentation, fuelled in part by the friendships she and Jean shared with numerous avant-garde artists then living in the city. She joined the Cercle et Carré group in 1929, and was an active participant in the international artists’ association known as Abstraction-Création between 1931-1936. It was during these stimulating, highly productive years that Taeuber-Arp’s first painted reliefs emerged.
While her explorations of the expressive potentials of relief appear to have been born from a desire to translate her circle, or “ping” paintings from the early 1930s into three-dimensional form, they also appear to correspond to Jean’s parallel experimentations in this area. On a monochrome ground, typically painted dark blue, black or white, Taeuber-Arp arranged a constellation of geometric elements in a carefully considered configuration, their forms projecting outwards towards the viewer. Variously painted in bright, primary colours, or matching the tones of the background, these collections of circles, squares and rectangles would advance from the picture plane, their three-dimensional quality off-set by a series of opposing voids, cut into the wooden support. As the viewer’s position shifted and moved in front of the work, the true complexity of Taeuber-Arp’s designs were revealed—arranged so they appeared to sit at different levels, some components projected further out from the picture plane, while certain elements tapered inwards as they approached the base.
By the end of the 1930s, the circle had taken on a new prominence in her painting and designs, and many of the reliefs became rounded in themselves. Proceeding from a perfectly formed circular base, these works recall the artistic tradition of the circular canvas, or tondo, yet suggest a bold new form of artistic expression. For Taeuber-Arp, the circle represented an infinite shape, a form that could contain all others, and carried a profound, cosmic analogy, recalling the moon, the sun, the orbit of the planets. Her sketchbooks from this period contain a number of precise construction drawings centred on these circles, through which she tested and examined her ideas, searching for the final form. For Taeuber-Arp, the success of a design lay in its ability to be duplicated and reconfigured across different media—in the case of Relief rond en quatre hauteurs, this practice resulted in a closely related gouache dated to the following year, now held in the collections of the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, Lenox, Massachusetts.
While some of her reliefs from the late 1930s are entirely white, in the present work Taeuber-Arp incorporates a vivid play of colour, using subtly variegated tones of grey and black to create a shifting sense of depth and space within the relief. Most notably, she deploys passages of bright, sunshine yellow, imbuing the entire composition with a bold sense of energy. Taueber-Arp was interested in the effect colour had on the experience of the viewer, how the intensity of a particular hue could alter our perception of a form. “A strong, discriminating sense of colour is a constant source of joy,” she wrote. “An unsuspected wealth of experience with colour is opened up when we devote ourselves, on a purely emotional level, to a single colour for a period of time, when we allow the colour in all its nuances of light and dark to have its effect on us and observe how it changes when it is placed in relation to other colours. Entirely new colour combinations emerge, and colours that we regarded as impossible to combine reveal the beauty of their subtlety of shades and proportions” (‘Anleitung zum Unterricht’, 8; quoted in W. Rotzler, ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the Interrelation of the Arts’, in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 1993, vol. 19, p. 89). Here, the yellow immediately draws the eye, disrupting the visual power of the darker tones surrounding them in such a way that the subtle nuances between their colours is brought into sharper focus.
Wassily Kandinsky, who encountered Taeuber-Arp’s reliefs following his move to Paris in 1933, proclaimed that looking at these works was like hearing “a resounding voice, a fugue” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1981, p. 17). The Belgian writer, art historian and cofounder of the group Cercle et Carré, Michel Seuphor, also found a musical correlation to the reliefs, writing in his 1953 book Mission spirituelle de l’art: “We have before our eyes fugues and contrapuntal patterns addressed not to the ear, but to the eye. That which Bach and Mozart gave us two hundred years ago, is now perpetuated by the visual arts. From this point of view, Sophie Taeuber’s work can be regarded as exemplary” (quoted in W. Rotzler, op. cit., 1993, p. 91). Relief rond en quatre hauteurs is built on a vivid play of contrasts and dynamism, and yet there is a distinctive internal harmony to the relief. The strict geometry of the overall circular form is contrasted by the irregular patterns and sinuous, curving lines of the multiple panels it contains. Nevertheless, there is a powerful sense of equilibrium within the disparate elements of the composition, the interlocking panels and overlapping segments interacting and playing off one another in a manner that suggests a unified whole.
Shortly after its completion, Taeuber-Arp sent Relief rond en quatre hauteurs to an exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Basel, due to take place between January and February 1937. Titled “Konstruktivisten,” this was perhaps the most important show of Taeuber-Arp’s lifetime—featuring twenty-four artworks that covered the different facets of her multi-disciplinary practice, the exhibition positioned her at the very forefront of the avant-garde. Indeed, she was represented by more works than László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg, or Piet Mondrian, and in his speech at the opening of the exhibition, the co-curator Georg Schmidt singled her work out for praise, describing it as “so clear and so serene… so precise and so exuberant” (quoted in A. Umland and W. Krupp, eds., Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Living Abstraction, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021, p. 177). Taeuber-Arp herself recognised the importance of the show, noting how rare an opportunity it was to be able to show so many works together, and proudly writing to her sister “my colleagues told me that the greatest surprise of the exhibition was my hall. It really means something when a colleague says something like that, and what’s more, to a woman” (ibid.).
The following year, Marcel Duchamp selected Relief rond en quatre hauteurs for inclusion in the exhibition “Contemporary Sculpture” at Peggy Guggenheim’s ground-breaking London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune. This was Guggenheim’s first public foray into the art world, and she had reportedly been encouraged in the endeavour by Samuel Beckett, who urged her to show contemporary art because it was “a living thing” (quoted in P. Rylands, ‘The Story of a Museum Collection’, in Peggy Guggenheim Collection, New York, 2003, p. 10). Securing premises at a former pawnbroker’s shop at 30 Cork Street, Guggenheim opened her gallery in January 1938 with an exhibition dedicated to Jean Cocteau, and would go on to launch new shows every four weeks. During the eighteen months the Guggenheim Jeune was in operation, it hosted no fewer than 20 exhibitions, including Wassily Kandinsky’s inaugural solo-exhibition in London, and a show dedicated to Yves Tanguy’s mysterious, mercurial Surrealist landscapes.
Among the shows planned for the spring of 1938 was Duchamp’s “Contemporary Sculpture,” which intended to showcase the many different creative strands and approaches to form that were occupying sculptors during this period. It featured works by an international roster of artists, including Alexander Calder, Henri Laurens, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, as well as the Arps. However, a scandal erupted in the run-up to the exhibition’s opening that April, when Guggenheim attempted to import a number of the sculptures from Paris. To avoid paying high import duties and pass through customs successfully, the pieces needed to be officially designated as artworks. The director of the Tate gallery, James B. Manson, was the art expert for the authorities at the time and was required to attest to their merit before they could be released. Manson, however, declined to certify the sculptures, claiming they did not carry the necessary artistic value to qualify—ticking the box marked “non-art,” the sculptures were instead deemed “manufactured goods.”
Guggenheim was shocked and incensed by the decision. Wyn Henderson, who worked with Peggy at Guggenheim Jeune, spread the word among her contacts and a contingent of forward-thinking critics and champions of the avant-garde in London rallied around Guggenheim, writing vocal complaints in the press about the decision, with some likening the incident to the recent Entartete Kunst exhibitions that had taken place in Nazi Germany. When the case was raised in Parliament, Guggenheim argued that modern art needed to be recognised and appreciated on the same level as any Old Master painting in a museum. Thankfully, Manson was deemed to have gone too far with his decree, and the artworks were released from customs in time for the show’s opening. The scandal and ensuing press coverage ensured the exhibition was well attended throughout its run, and the incident played a key role in advancing the understanding and appreciation of modern sculpture in Britain. The work remained with Jean Arp following Taeuber-Arp’s untimely death in 1943, and was later acquired by Michel Seuphor. Relief rond en quatre hauteurs was gifted to Lise and Roland Funck-Brentano in 1987, and has remained a treasured part of their collection ever since.
| Автор: | Софи Таубер-Арп (1889 - 1943) |
|---|---|
| Техника исполнения: | Масло, Расписанный |
| Категория аукционного дома: | Картины, Акварели, Рисунки, Картины |
| Автор: | Софи Таубер-Арп (1889 - 1943) |
|---|---|
| Техника исполнения: | Масло, Расписанный |
| Категория аукционного дома: | Картины, Акварели, Рисунки, Картины |
| Адрес торгов |
CHRISTIE'S 9 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris Франция | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Предосмотр |
| ||||||||||||||
| Телефон | +33 (0)1 40 76 85 85 | ||||||||||||||
| Факс | +33 (0)1 40 76 85 86 | ||||||||||||||
| Условия использования | Условия использования | ||||||||||||||
| Транспортировка |
Почтовая служба Курьерская служба Самовывоз | ||||||||||||||
| Способы оплаты |
Банковский перевод | ||||||||||||||
| Часы работы | Часы работы
|
Связанные термины
Сделать ставку
Ставка по телефону Ставка
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
Ваша ставка: € 1 900 000
Телефоны для связи:
+34827387, +232346832
Это Ваша максимальная ставка, которая будет отослана в аукционный дом. Если максимальная ставка больше чем лимит цены на лот, аукционист будет делать ставки за Вас пока максимальная сумма, заданная Вами, не будет исчерпана.
Это Ваша максимальная ставка, которая будет отослана в аукционный дом. Если максимальная ставка больше чем минимальная цена на лот, аукционист будет делать ставки за Вас пока максимальная сумма, заданная Вами, не будет исчерпана.
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
Ошибка завершения ставки
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
Вы уже сделали ставку в € 40 000 и ставка принята аукционным домом. Если вы хотите ее уменьшить, то обратитесь напрямую в администрацию аукционного дома.
Ошибка завершения ставки
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
Вы не можете делать ставки в данном АД, т.к. были внесены в черный список.
Сделать ставку
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
Автобид подготовлен
| № лота | 18 |
|---|---|
| Аукционный дом | CHRISTIE'S |
| Дата аукциона | 08.04.2025 |
