Jean Arp
"Art
is a fruit that grows in man, like
a fruit on a plant, or a child in its
mother's womb," once commented Jean
Arp--a remarkable twentieth-century
sculptor, painter and poet associated
with and a forefather of the Dada and
Surrealist movements. The
avant-garde artist was born on September 16, 1887 in
Strasbourg, France,
where he studied at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers. In 1905,
he transferred to
the Weimar Academy and then to Paris at the Académie Julian
in 1908, and
subsequent to graduation resumed his painting in Weggis,
Switzerland in
isolation. By 1912, Jean Arp had become associated with the Blaue
Reiter,
or Blue Rider, a group of Expressionist artists in Munich, where he
exhibited
"semi-figurative" drawings and became well-acquainted with fellow
artist
Wassily Kandinsky. In 1913, he exhibited with another group
of
Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon--or Autumn Salon, an art
exhibition--in
Berlin. Aware of the developments within the French
avant-garde through his
contacts with such artists as Apollinaire, Max Jacob
and Sonia and Robert
Delaunay in 1914, Arp presented his first abstracts
and paper cutouts in Zürich
in 1915 and arranged his first shallow wooden
reliefs and compositions of string
nailed to canvas. In 1915, the art of Jean
Arp consisted of abstract and
angularly patterned tapestries and drawings,
but soon matured as he became the
co-founder of the revolutionary Dadaist
school of artists in Zürich,
Switzerland with Tristan Tzara and Hugo
Ball. His familiar abstract and
curvilinear forms debuted in 1917, and in
1919 he continued his Dadaist
portrayals with Ernst in Cologne before
participating in the Berlin Dada
exhibition of 1920. Jean Arp married Sophie
Tauber in 1922, during a period
where he was most notable for his painted
wooden bas-reliefs and humorous
cut-cardboard constructions. He settled with
his wife at Meudon in 1927, when he
participated in the Surrealist movement
and had his first one-man exhibition at
the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris. He
then parted with Surrealism to become a
co-founder of Abstraction-Creation in
1931, when his characteristic organic
forms became more severe and
geometrical. In the 1930s, Jean Arp began to work
in freestanding sculpture,
carving and molding a variety of substances. An
example of his smooth,
biomorphic forms is the marble Human Concretion, 1935,
located in the Musée
National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Arp was tenacious in
correcting art critics
as to the nature of his sculptures; he insisted that his
pieces were
"concrete" rather than "abstract", since they occupied
space, and that art
was a natural generation of form--"a fruit that grows in
man", as he had
stated. Jean Arp visited the United States in 1949 and 1950 to
finish a
monumental wood and metal relief for Harvard University; in 1958, he
composed
a mural relief for the UNESCO Building in Paris. He was awarded
the
international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and the
1964
Pittsburgh International. Arp died on June 7, 1966 in Solduno,
Switzerland,
survived by his second wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach. A
dominant personality
within abstract art, Dada and Surrealism, his reliefs
and sculptures have had a
decisive influence upon the sculpture of this
century.
Bibliography
www.artcyclopedia.com
www.artchive.com