My first-ever solid take on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the subject of a wonderful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, occurred nine years ago, by way of a survey, also at MOMA, of the genesis of abstract art, circa 1910-25. Until then, I had regarded the Swiss virtuoso of many crafts lightly. But on that occasion, which featured such heavy hitters of the aesthetic revolution as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, I kept coming back to a smallish wool embroidery of rectangular forms, “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), by Taeuber-Arp. Beautiful, utterly assured, and ineffably heartfelt, it made the artist’s associates, nearly all male, seem relative louts, worked up about innovations that were a breeze for her. That the medium was “woman’s work” by the standards of the time added to my startlement, upending…
