December 6, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “A Woman’s Work,” in this week’s issue, revisits one of his favourite artworks – Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916). Eight years ago, in a brilliant piece called “Shapes of Things” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2013), he described “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” as follows:

Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. 

That’s one of my all-time favourite ekphrases. In “A Woman’s Work,” Schjeldahl adds to his description. He says,

The work’s nubbly, asymmetrically structured bars and swatches in white, black, red, blue, gray, and two browns generate a seemingly effortless majesty. The execution secretes bits of fun that I hadn’t noticed before: a minuscule, eccentric off-colored shape in a brown field; an almost imperceptible checkerboard pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical stitches in a black area (prophetic of the black-on-black paintings of Ad Reinhardt); and a small lump of congested yarn that would seem to be a flaw if it did not so candidly emphasize the work’s tactility. No matter how committed she could be to geometric order, Taeuber-Arp communicated her freedom.

That noticing of the “small lump of congested yarn” is inspired! Schjeldahl’s new piece also dispels a mystery – a mystery to me, at least. When his “Shapes of Things” originally appeared, I devoured it, and immediately searched the Internet for a reproduction of Taeuber-Arp’s  “Vertical-Horizontal Composition.” I couldn’t find it. I found a work by her called “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” but it didn’t match Schjeldahl’s description. Well, the mystery is now solved. In “A Woman’s Work,” Schjeldahl points out that there is more than one Taeuber-Arp work titled “Vertical-Horizontal Composition.” He says,

Further embroideries and gouaches of hers, also entitled “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” develop a language of form so fluent that she could seem to have been born to it: intricately balanced, invariably surprising. 

And, to clinch the point, a reproduction of the “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” is included in his piece. Looking at it, I can see the “minuscule, eccentric off-colored shape in a brown field.” But the “almost imperceptible checkerboard pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical stitches in a black area” and the “small lump of congested yarn” elude my eye. So MoMA here I come! I want to see the original. I want to see the stitching. Most of all, I want to see that lump of congested yarn. 

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916)