Sophie Taeuber-Arp – Bewegtes Kreisbild (Animated Circle Picture), 1934 | Giclée Print

Seventeen circles of exactly the same size float on an off-white ground: six grey, three black, three dark blue, five light blue. Most of them gather in a loose block in the upper middle, packed so tightly that some just touch; the rest drift off on their own – a pair to the left, one to the right, three near the bottom edge. Sophie Taeuber-Arp painted it in oil in 1934 and, according to her friend Max Bill, called it a «Päng-Bild» – a bang picture.

Bill, who wrote about it in 1943, saw first a cheerful hovering, like a juggler's balls or a gambler's dice, and then an order: groups that move together like a chorus, and the clear space between them.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the museum's own photograph of the painting. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 100 × 72.5 cm — oil on canvas

• 70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.59× original. Image 58.80 × 42.60 cm.
• 100 × 70 cm / 39.4 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.82× original. Image 81.75 × 59.22 cm.

Why this size. The painting is a metre wide. The museum's photograph holds enough detail for 81.75 cm of image at 300 dpi, the floor we print to, so the large sheet reproduces it pixel for pixel at a little over four fifths of its size. The small sheet prints it at three fifths. We do not enlarge files artificially: an upscaled file adds detail Taeuber-Arp never painted, which is why there is no 1:1 sheet.

Not available in the United States. Sophie Taeuber-Arp died in 1943, so the painting is in the public domain in Switzerland, the European Union and the United Kingdom. In the United States a work first published after 1930 can stay protected for 95 years from publication, and this one may still be protected there. We therefore do not ship this print to US addresses.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre, with a small Museartis wordmark in the lower left margin. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889–1943), Bewegtes Kreisbild (Animated Circle Picture), 1934, oil on canvas.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger