Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tate Modern, review: Unforced minimal cool… but the Dada moment is glossed over

If you can get your name attached to a pivotal cultural moment – and in however minor a role – you’re pretty much guaranteed a place in the history books. A painter, credited with creating some of the first truly abstract images, a visionary textile designer, architect and not least dancer, she’s seen in one of the very few photographs of the group’s anarchic Zurich venue, the Cabaret Voltaire: a mysterious masked figure performing a wild “hundred-jointed” improvised dance to the hurtling absurdist rhythms of dada poet Hugo Ball’s abstract sound-poem Gadji Beri Bimba – a work set to music 60 decades later by Talking Heads. This major exhibition at Tate Modern, produced in collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, sets out to rescue Taeuber-Arp from the role of talented bit-player by presenting her work in stark isolation, with a minimum of biographical information, contextual material or interpretation – an approach very much in line with current curatorial orthodoxy. How this well-educated prodigy, who trained in Munich and Hamburg as well as in her native Switzerland, got involved with the Dada misfits isn’t explained, and the show’s insistence on actual works of art, leaving out exhibition fliers, magazines and other ephemera, means that the Dada moment – notionally Taeuber-Arp’s greatest claim – of which there’s little concrete evidence, is glossed over in a handful of objects. Geometric and Undulating, 1941, in which an improvisation on the circle – the most universal of all forms – develops into an exhilarating flow of line and subtly subdued colour, feels like it could have been produced yesterday, rather than at the height of the Second World War – just two years before Taeuber-Arp’s horribly early death, aged just 53, from carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning stove.