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

This unfairly relegated artist, who created visionary textiles and some of the first truly abstract images, almost gets the show she deserves

‘Sophie Taeuber with her Dada head’, 1920, by Nicolai Aluf (Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin)

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. Unless, of course, you’re a woman.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp had a far from minor role in the creation of Dada, the radical anti-art movement that exploded into being during the First World War and went on to influence everything from Pop Art to punk. 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” (as one viewer put it) 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.

Yet Taeuber-Arp, along with many other women artists from that seminal early modernist period, has found herself relegated in history after history to the role of tea-maker, squaw and worst of all help-meet to a more powerful male talent, in her case painter and sculptor Jean Arp. And Taeuber-Arp seems, in many ways, hardly to have helped herself: appending Arp’s name to her own when they married in 1921 and landing herself with a lumpily unmemorable brand name; smiling cheerfully in group photographs (never a good look for an edgy radical artist), and collaborating widely across a range of art forms, almost as though she wanted to sublimate her creative personality into those around her.