It's a 15-minute walk from the Meudon-Val-Fleury train station. The landscape is pleasant. The buildings are low-rise, the houses are neat and tidy and there are trees everywhere. It's a comfortable, well-behaved suburb. And then, at 21, Rue des Châtaigniers, in Clamart, a southwestern Paris suburb, you find yourself in front of a building where the avant-garde of the early 20th century once thrived.
It was in this town of the Hauts-de-Seine region west of Paris that a couple of artists – Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp – settled in 1929. The former, born in 1886 in German-occupied Alsace, became French again after 1918. Sophie, three years his junior, was Swiss. In Zurich, a few years earlier, they were the emblematic couple of the Dada movement, where absolute artistic freedom prevailed in a downtown nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire.
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