New Truth

In New Truth we celebrate travel. Carrying this wallet is a reminder and spur to engage in travel, to glean all the benefits it brings; new sights, sounds, new perspectives - new truths.

However, in this instance we aren’t referring to physical travel but to traveling somewhere new through perception - through trying on ‘new eyes’. In particular, we look to the artist (painters, writers, actors, directors...) to help us make these vital journeys.

New Truth’s words are a popular adaptation of a phrase which comes from Marcel Proust’s celebrated masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time. They encapsulate Prousts thinking on art and also his core philosophy on how best to live life - a key theme emergent throughout the novel.

The passage where these words are from goes on to state that with great artists ‘we really do fly from star to star’.

For Proust the artist helps us tear through the stifling veil of habit and familiarity which block our appreciation of beauty, people - all that’s around us. Proust was influenced by John Ruskin and he saw the artist's responsibility was to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp worked prolifically on this idea of creating ‘New Eyes’ and sweeping away old habit and norms. She played key roles in many of the Avant-Garde movements of the early 20th century. Her work uniquely crossed disciplinary boundaries, opening new perspectives and possibilities. She was dedicated to the development of the language of abstraction, in particular through the Contructivist, Concrete and Geometric Art movements.

In this painting, Gradation In Colours, she communicates her inter-disciplinary influence from textile design and subtle understanding of the interplay between colour and form. The symmetry combined with the undulating, incrementally shifting curved shapes give a sense of playful purpose, momentum and energy. She speaks eloquently and profoundly with a new language here - there is no 'real world' represenation in this work. In what it is and what it achieves it expresses what Taeuber-Arp spent her whole life doing - communicating New Truth.

Gradation In Colours

Sophie Taeuber-Arp 1939

Sophie Taeuber-Arp traversed disciplines, challenging, cross-fertilizing and reinventing them as she went. Gradation In Colour beautifully expresses her inter-disciplinary influence and subtle understanding of the interplay between colour and form. The symmetry combined with the undulating, incrementally shifting curved shapes give a sense of playful purpose, momentum and energy.

In this work we can identify influence from textile design and also another facet of her artistic exploration - her work as a dancer. Gradation In Colour seems to be animated by its own internal energy source. There is a choreographic dimensions to it and like dance it has a rhythmic harmony. Also like dance its elements have unique, eccentric shapes and colour and like much of Taeuber-Arp’s work achieves an effortless ‘nonregular regularity’ - conformity with eccentricity combined.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

1889 - 1943

Sophie Taebur-Arp was an artist at the forefront of many of the avant-garde art movements of the last century. Her prolific, pioneering creativity uniquely crossed disciplines. She worked as a textile designer, painter, sculptor, dancer, writer, interior designer, stage set creator, fashion designer, writer, puppet builder and teacher. The language of abstraction, and her focus on destabilizing and re-drawing fixed conceptions and norms, unite all her work.

Born in Switzerland in 1889 Taeuber-Arp taught weaving and other textile arts at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (now Zurich University of the Arts) from 1916 to 1929. Her textile and graphic work early in this period, along with Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Melevich, are among the earliest constructivist works. In Zurich she met, and in 1922, married, fellow artist Jean Arp whom she collaborated with often. Taebur was friends with celebrated surrealist artist Max Ernst and a core member of the Zurich Dada movement, centred on Cabaret Voltaire. The movement celebrated the conceptual approach to making art, often involving unorthodox materials used in abstract, unusual compositions.

The Dadaists blamed rational society for the ills of their present day, specifically the brutality of WW1 and the 10 million lives it claimed. Absurdity and nonsense were a tool to challenge and subvert established conventions and open up the new. Taeuber-Arp took part in Dada-inspired performances as a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer also designing sets, costumes and puppets.

Moving to Strasbourg in 1926 Taeuber-Arp received numerous interior design commissions which included her creation of the radically Constructivist interior for the Café de l'Aubette. She was later joined by Jean Arp and the founder of ‘De Stijl’ art, Theo Van Doesburg on the project. The cafe has been described as ‘the Sistine Chapel of abstract art’.

From the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp lived mainly in Paris and continued experimenting with design, which included her being the first to use polka dots in fine art. She moved with her husband out of Paris, ahead of Nazi occupation in 1940, to create an art colony in Vichy but had to flee to Switzerland at the end of 1942. She died in a sudden tragic accident in early 1943, poisened by carbon monoxide due to a malfunctioning stove at the house of Bauhaus legend Max Bill.

The best way to end this brief intro to Sophie Taeuber’s life might be these two quotes. This first is from the titan of abstract art Wassily Kandinsky:

"Sophie Taeuber-Arp expressed herself by means of the 'colored relief,' especially in the last years of her life, using almost exclusively the simplest forms, geometric forms. The forms, by their sobriety, their silence, their way of being sufficient unto themselves, invite the hand, if it is skillful, to use the language that is suitable to it and which is often only a whisper; but often too the whisper is more expressive, more convincing, more persuasive, than the 'loud voice' that here and there lets itself burst out."

The second comes from the poet Claire Goll:

‘Arp and Sophie discovered the world anew, with new laws, new communicative possibilities [They were] the polar opposite of artists in tortured search of their own individuality, creeping in to a prison so as not to endanger themselves’.

The Prisoner (adapted)

Marcel Proust 1913

The words that make up New Truth stem from Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search Of Lost Time. Specifically, they are from the fifth of the seven volume work titled The Prisoner. The words on New Truth are actually a popular variation of the specific phrase written by Proust. We chose them because they convey his meaning in a nicely distilled and immediate way. Here is a fuller excerpt of the original passage from The Prisoner:

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Ch. II: "The Verdurins Quarrel with M. de Charlus"

These words take us to the core of Proust’s philosophy on life and art. They also reflect the eventual discovery of the narrator of In Search Of Lost Time in his long search for happiness. He finds that shifting our perception, re-discovering beauty, the world and our lives, is key. Art and also small moments, like Proust’s famous eating of a madeleine which floods the narrator with rich memories and emotions, can help us achieve this.

Marcel Proust

1871 - 1922

The French novelist, critic and essayist Marcel Proust’s achievements as a writer stand alone, in the vastness of their scope, and the intricacy of their detail.

His great, defining work is In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). It is truly voluminous (comprising seven volumes) variously published between 1913-1927. Only the first four were published in his lifetime, the rest were revised and proofed by his brother.

Most academics and critics consider In Search to be a definitive masterpiece of European modernist writing – with the works of Joyce, Woolf and Mann. It marks a paradigm shift in the history of prose writing and the study of human consciousness. It is labyrinthine in its complexity. The narrative meanders, digresses and schisms across time and location, involving over 2000 characters, to create a meticulous, semi-encyclopaedic vista of human experience and understanding.

Proust can be be described as ‘in-between centuries’, a bridge spanning the proto-modernism of Flaubert and Baudelaire, and the high-modernity that shook all artistic conventions between the wars.

Born in 1871, Proust was a contemporary of Einstein, Freud, Stravinsky and Picasso – all figures who radically changed perceptions of art, science and society in the early 20th century.

Of a nervous, sensitive nature and frail constitution, he still moved in distinguished circles of French society into his 30s. But following his parents’ deaths in 1903 and 1905, he began to withdraw to work on his novels, until his death in 1922.

He slept by day, and wrote by night. These reclusive tendencies led him to entirely encase his bedroom in cork, in order to soundproof it against the noise of the city streets.

When Proust and James Joyce met in 1922, it’s said these two great men of letters hardly exchanged a word, due to the Frenchman’s inverted body-clock. Joyce later recalled..."Of course the situation was impossible. Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end."

Sophie Taeuber-Arp | Quotes

"The intrinsic decorative urge should not be eradicated. It is one of humankind's deep-rooted, primordial urges. Primitive people decorated their implements and cult objects with a desire to beautify and enhance....it is a sense emanating from the urge for perfection and creative accomplishment."

"The wish to produce beautiful things — when that wish is true and profound — falls together with [man's] striving for perfection."

"All around her is the radiance of the sun... She is full of invention, caprice, fantasy. . . . It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting, and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. The figures of her dance are at once mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic."

Hugo Ball, on Taeuber-Arp dancing to his sound poems in 1917

"It is not possible for us to take ourselves back to the exact circumstances of those in a past era, attempting to create art in the style of the past is always inauthentic"

Marcel Proust | Quotes

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Time Regained

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― In Search of Lost Time

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
―

"It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions." Ch. I: Madame Swann at Home

"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us." IV: Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls

"We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become." Ch. I: Grief and Oblivion

"By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished."

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
― Marcel Proust

“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”
― Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion”
― Marcel Proust

“These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.”
― Swann's Way

“A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain”
― Swann's Way

“Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.”
― Marcel Proust

“in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.”
― Pleasure and Regrets

the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.”
― Marcel Proust

“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust