76
jokes, turns round, hops away, flaps her arms like a bird’s wings, turns round
again and comes towards me. Another time she offers me a large bunch of
grapes; the grapes are weeping eyes. With clear eyes she meets my muddled
gaze. She had dreams that she never wanted to tell me about. She hid them
from me behind exaggerated, boisterous jokes. She went round in a circle and
imitated a trumpeter blowing with all his might yet producing no sound, and
nothing could persuade her to tell me her dream.
Am I dreaming when I see Sophie bright and silent in the depths of a white
blossom of a pure white star? Am I dreaming when I hear Sophie speaking
and we converse? Am I dreaming when I see Sophie as a dead woman lovely
and living? Memory and dream flow together like mighty streams. What hap
pens in them is eternal. But what happens in the unreal world of the day, is
full of rude snares and is transitory. And that is why Sophie behaved with
severity and determination in this world. She never lost herself in the snares
of unreality. The world of memory and dream is the real world. It is related
to art, which is fashioned at the edge of earthly unreality, [illustration 19]
And so the circle closed
Between 1908 and 1910 I made my first attempts to transcend inherited art
forms, inherited prejudices. This was a time of torment. I was living in soli
tude between Weggis and Greppen in Switzerland, at the foot of the Rigi.
In winter I saw no one for months. I read, sketched and looked out of the
window of my little room into the mountains immersed in snowclouds. It
was an abstract landscape that surrounded me. I had leisure for philosophiz
ing. In December 1915 in Zurich, I met Sophie Taeuber, who had already
liberated herself from traditional art. In our work, we first suppressed the
playful and the charming. We also regarded the personal as burdensome and
useless, since it had grown in a rigid lifeless world. We searched for new
materials, which were not weighted down with tradition. Individually and
in common we embroidered, wove, painted, pasted geometric, static pictures.
Impersonal, severe structures of surfaces and colors arose. All accident was
excluded. No spots, tears, fibres, imprécisions, should disturb the clarity of
our work. For our paper pictures we even discarded the scissors with which
we had at first cut them out, since they too readily betrayed the life of the
hand. From this time on we used a paper-cutting machine. In the embroi
deries, woven fabrics, paintings, collages that we did together, we humbly
strove to approach the pure radiance of reality. I should like to call these works
the art of silence. This art turns from the outward world of silence to inner
