Like an echo of her dual practice of dance and painting, Composition à formes de “S” plays on a balance between the spontaneous and the planned, the sign and the line, movement and stasis: two S-shapes dance on an irregular chequered pattern—a recurring motif in her work, which presents a deliberately anonymous style.

At that time, Sophie Taeuber-Arp was questioning her compositions by moving away from grids that she had mostly been drawing horizontally and vertically. In this gouache, the delimited areas are independent of one another (rendered with a different tone or halftone), while at the same time maintaining relationships of contiguity. It radiates a forceful poetic abstraction based on geometric shapes arranged into a visual rhythm that gives the composition its tone. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s pictorial material is based on those simple cuts.

The link established between the shapes and the background recalls the quality of the decorative environments she created on various sites during those same years in Strasbourg. A similar structural and mural dimension is recognisable in both types of works.