In the interwar period, the home of art-lovers and collectors Annie and Oskar Müller-Widmann in Basel was a meeting place for some of the most significant protagonists of modernism, including artists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The Müller-Widmanns soon became close friends of the couple and the first and foremost collectors of their works for many years.
This volume is the first to publish in English the letters and postcards that Sophie Taeuber-Arp wrote to the Müller-Widmanns between 1932 and 1943. Her correspondence revolves around her artistic work, exhibitions, and other projects, but also speaks of the private circumstances of the life of an artist in the period leading up to World War II. Preserved in its entirety, the collection is a core testimony to Taeuber-Arp’s life and work. Walburga Krupp, a leading expert on the artist and co-curator of the major retrospective Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction at Kunstmuseum Basel, London’s Tate Modern, and the MoMA in New York in 2021–22, has annotated the transcribed and translated letters with insightful commentary and picks up on significant topics of this correspondence in an introductory essay. The book is illustrated with facsimile images of numerous postcards and letters as well as with works by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp.
