Tête Dada

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) was a Swiss-born artist associated with Dada, Constructivism and Concrete Art. Trained in textile design and applied arts in St. Gallen, Munich and Hamburg, she combined craftsmanship with abstraction throughout her career. From 1916 onward, she was active in Zurich’s Dada circle, centred on the Cabaret Voltaire, where she participated as dancer, designer, and visual artist.^[1]

Between 1918 and 1920, Taeuber-Arp produced a series of abstract wooden sculptures that exemplify her synthesis of fine art, craft, and design. Commonly referred to as the Dada Heads in English, these works coincided with her involvement in Dada performances and her teaching at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich. Created in the context of Zurich Dada, the heads reflect Dada’s irreverent engagement with tradition while maintaining a rigorous formal clarity that anticipated later developments in Concrete art.^[2] In 1920, Taeubner-Arp selected a staged photograph of her own head, partially obscured by Tête Dada in the foreground, for Tristan Tzara's 1920 anthology Dadaglobe about the Dada movement.^{[3][4]: 27–29, 32}

Tête Dada is closely related to five other heads produced by Taeuber-Arp during this period, such as a wooden sculpture of an abstract head known as Portrait [HA], said to be a portrait of her future husband Jean Arp.^{[4]: 20–24} A third sculpture known as Head, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, shows an oval head with beaded glass accessories on either side.^[4]: 2–8 Together, these sculptures form a coherent group exploring modular geometry in three dimensions. The heads also anticipate the artist’s later reliefs, paintings and architectural projects, in which simple geometric forms are organized into balanced, non-hierarchical compositions. Her Tête Dada represents an early articulation of principles that would define her mature work.^{[4]: 20–27}

Taeuber-Arp’s involvement in Dada extended beyond sculpture: she performed choreographed dances in abstract costumes and masks, integrating bodily movement with non-figurative form. Art historians have interpreted the Dada Heads as sculptural counterparts to these performances — objects that function simultaneously as ironic portraits, ritual masks and formal experiments.^[6][7]

Description

Tête Dada is a polychromed wooden sculpture of 29,43 cm height and a diametre of 14 cm, created in 1919 or 1920.^{[note 1][8]} The sculpture consists of a vertically oriented, lathe-turned wooden form resembling a stylized human head mounted on a cylindrical base. This base carries the inscription sht, referring to the artist's birth name Sophie Henriette Taeuber. Further, the year 1920 and the word DADA are inscribed on the head.^[8]

The abstract head is painted in geometric zones of colour, including muted pastels, primary colours and sharply defined linear elements. Facial features are reduced to abstract signs: circles, bands, and lines replace naturalistic eyes, nose, and mouth.^[9] The work’s smooth, symmetrical shaping reflects the mechanical precision of woodturning, while the painted surfaces introduce planar abstraction. The resulting object oscillates between anthropomorphic presence and autonomous geometric structure.^{[10]: 18–19}

Tête Dada has been presented as part of the following exhibitions and corresponding exhibition catalogues:^[15]

• Elles font l’abstraction/Women in Abstraction. Centre Pompidou, Paris / Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2021

• Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Living Abstraction. Kunstmuseum Basel / Tate Modern, London / The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021

• Dadaglobe Reconstructed. Kunsthaus Zürich / Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016

• Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Gestalterin, Architektin, Tänzerin. Museum Bellerive, Zurich, 2007

• Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. / Centre Pompidou, Paris / The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005

• DADA. Kunsthaus Zürich / Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1966

• Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936.

Although Taeuber-Arp’s contribution to Dada was long overshadowed by that of her husband, Jean Arp, scholarship and major retrospectives, such as those in 2021-2022 at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, established her as a central figure of classical modernism.^[16][17] As one of the artist's most appreciated works,^[4]: 2 Tête Dada has been called an "outstanding feature of her Dada oeuvre" within the Zurich Dada movement and an important early example of abstract sculpture by a woman artist in the European avant-garde.^[13] It has been attributed a significant role in contemporary reassessments of gender, craft, and abstraction in modern art history.^[18][19][20] In the 2020 French book 1000 Sculptures, an image of Tête Dada was included along with a short biography of Taeuber-Arp.^[21]

In his introduction to an exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus art museum, the show's curator was quoted:^[22]

What appears light and spontaneous, direct, and without frills, be it a pillow, a dance performance, or a line drawing, is always a composition that unites within it precision and sensation, constructed and spontaneous elements. Art-historical writings, on the contrary, urge an unambiguous categorization of individual works and of the entire oeuvre. The methods employed ... are stylistic assignments, genre-historical analyses, and biographical explanatory patterns. However, these do not do justice to Taeuber-Arp’s production, which virtually defies established categorizations.

Photographs of the artist and her Dada Head

A 2019 article in an art-historical journal discussed three similar black-and-white staged photographs taken in 1920 of Taeuber-Arp with her Tête Dada. Explaining this selection, the author wrote: "A good example of a dominant image with a long and interesting social biography is that of 'Sophie Taeuber with Dada Head.'" Included in numerous books, catalogues and articles, Taeuber-Arp's photographs with the Tête Dada were found to be the most frequent illustrations of the artist's work.^[23] One of these pictures, showing the artist behind her Dada head, was part of an installation in the 2021/2022 touring exhibition Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction^[24]: 180and the accompanying catalogue.^[12]