Jean Arp studied at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School in Weimar, Germany from 1905 to 1907.
Jean Arp studied at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School in Weimar, Germany from 1905 to 1907.
1936
Paris, France
Wassily Kandinsky in Paris
Henri Matisse
Pablo Picasso
Amedeo Modigliani
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Ethnicity:
He was the son of a French mother and a German father.
Jean Arp (born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp) was born on September 16, 1886 in Strasbourg, France (then Alsace-Lorraine, the German Empire). He was the son of Pierre G. and Josephine (Koeberle) Arp.
Being the son of a French mother and a German father - thus he used the first name Jean in French-speaking countries and Hans in German-speaking countries.
Jean Arp studied at École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg till 1904, at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School in Weimar, Germany from 1905 to 1907 and at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1908.
Jean Arp participated in Moderne Bund's exhibitions from 1911 to 1913 in Lucerne, Switzerland.
He moved to Weggis, Switzerland, where he lived and worked in isolation. In 1912, after meeting Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Arp exhibited with the Blue Rider group. In Berlin in 1913, he exhibited in the first Autumn Salon and was taken up by Herwarth Walden, the dealer and magazine editor who was at that time one of the most powerful figures in the European avant-garde. The following year he met Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, under whose influence he began to work in a cubist vein, Amedeo Modigliani, and Max Ernst.
In 1915 Arp went to Zurich, Switzerland, where he remained until the end of World War I. Besides, Arp was one of the founders of the Dada group in 1916, which held its tumultuous meetings at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The Dadaists, reacting to the general disillusionment brought on by World War I, held up non-sense as the chief aesthetic value to be realized in art and literature. Arp, now a committed Dadaist, abandoned the cubist rigours of the previous 2 years for an art that was whimsical in spirit and biomorphic in form. At this time he constructed painted wooden reliefs, whose curved shapes vaguely call to mind clouds and lakes.
Among his Dadaist collages was a series in which bits of coloured paper were pasted on cardboard; these he titled "Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance" (circa 1917). But the bits of paper seemed to had been placed with a concern for the effectiveness of the design.
In 1919 and 1920 Arp and Max Ernst led a German Dada group in Cologne. Moving to Paris in 1922, Arp took part in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre.
In 1930 he produced his first wooden sculpture in the round and soon began working in plaster, bronze, and stone.
In addition, Arp visited the United States in 1949 for a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and would also be commissioned to do a mural at the UNESCO building in Paris.
In 1958, a retrospective of Arp's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962.
He died on June 7, 1966 in Basel, Switzerland and is buried at the Cimitero di Locarno in Locarno, Ticino, Switzerland.
Besides, there are three Arp foundations in Europe: The Fondation Arp in Clamart preserves the atelier where Arp lived and worked for most of his life; about 2,000 visitors tour the house each year. The Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach in Locarno, Switzerland, was founded by Arp’s second wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach. A foundation dedicated to Arp, named Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V., was established in 1977 by the dealer Johannes Wasmuth in consultation with Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach and owns the largest collection of works by Arp and holds the copyright of all his works. It has research centre and office in Berlin, and an office in Rolandseck, Germany.
Jean Arp was one of the leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of the 20th century. His most famous works were "Cloud Shepherd" (Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, 1953) and "Scrutant l'horizon" (The Hague, 1967), among others.
Arp's career was distinguished with many awards including the Grand Prize for sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the 1963 Grand Prix National des Arts, a sculpture prize at the 1964 Pittsburgh International, the 1964 Carnegie Prize, the 1965 Goethe Prize from the University of Hamburg, and then the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Automatic Drawing
Sun
Constellation with 5 White Forms & 2 Black
Untitled
Leafage and Drops
Hitler
Torso Preadamite
Human Concretion
According to the Laws of Chance
Geometric Forms
Not far from the sun, the moon and the stars
Overturned Blue Shoe With Two Heels Under a Black Vault
The Sun Recircled
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
The Sun Recircled
Evocation of a form: human, lunar, spectral
TORSE
Dance
Idole
Еgg Board
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Abstract Composition, Knossos
Growth
The Dream
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Head with mustache
Enak's Tears. Terrestrial Forms
Moondancer
Frond and navel
Hasard
Human Concretion
Danger of Death (T05007)
Moustaches
Terrestrial Forest Form
Torn-Up Woodcut
The Elements: Leaf transformed into a torso
Geometric Collage
Squares or Rectangles arranged according to Laws of Change
Shirt Front and Fork
Mustache Hat
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
The Star
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Constellation
Configuration
Rising Up (S'elevant)
Birds in Aquarium
Christ on the Cross II
Cloud Shepherd
Relief, Clock
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Before my Birth
Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance
Abstract Composition
Constellations
Illustration for Tristan Tzara's "Vingt-cinq poèmes"
Constellation According to the Laws of Chance
Tete Paysage
Man, mustache, navel
As one of the founders of Dada, and subsequently an active participant in Surrealism, his work forms a link between these two major movements of the early-20th century. His Dadaist art represented the fanciful and poetic, rather than the nihilistic and morbid, side of the movement.
One of the first artists to make randomness and chance part of the work, Arp saw chance as a collaborator in his process. This was a game-changer in the visual arts. Until then, Western artists had striven for a skilled level of control.
Rather than beginning with a subject, as artists had done for years, Arp generated the form first, and titled his works after they were completed. In this way, he sought to minimize the intervention of the conscious mind.
Quotations:
"Structures of lines, surfaces, forms, colours. They try to approach the eternal, the inexpressible above men. They are a denial of human egotism. They are the hatred of human immodesty, the hatred of images, of paintings.. Wisdom is the feeling for the coming reality, the mystical, the definite indefinite, the greatest definite."
"I met Sophie Taeuber in Zurich in 1915. Even then she already knew how to give direct and palpable shape to her inner reality. In those days this kind of art was called 'abstract art'. Now it is known as 'concrete art,' for nothing is more concrete than the psychic reality it expresses. Like music this art is tangible inner reality she was already dividing the surface of a watercolor into squares and rectangles which she juxtaposed horizontally and perpendicularly. She constructed her painting like a work of masonry. The colors are luminous, going from rawest yellow to deep red or blue."
"Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled 'Laocoon and Sons' to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. Dadaism has reduced positive and negative to utter nonsense. It has been destructive in order to achieve indifference."
"Concretion signifies the material process of condensation, hardening, coagulating, thickening, growing together. Concretion designates the solidification of a mass. Concretion designates curdling, the curdling of the earth and the heavenly bodies. Concretion designates solidification, the mass of the stone, the plant, the animal, the man. Concretion is something that has grown. I want my work to find it."
"Art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother."
"Art urges man to identify himself with nature."
"Sculpture should walk on the tips of its toes, unostentatious, unpretentious, and light as the spoor of an animal in snow. Art should melt into and even merge with nature itself. This is obviously contrary to painting and sculpture based on nature. By so doing, art will rid itself more and more of self-centredness, virtuosity and absurdity."
"I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man."
"I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature."
"To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing."
“A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone. But it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.”
"These paintings, these sculptures - these objects - should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages."
Arp was a founder-member of the Moderne Bund in Lucerne, participating in their exhibitions from 1911 to 1913. He was also a founding member of Dadaism. In addition, Arp engaged himself with the French surrealists in Paris, but broke with them in 1931.
Jean Arp pretended to be mentally ill in order to avoid being drafted into the German Army.
Quotes from others about the person
Leo Castelli: "Arp, yes, was one of the artists that I was interested in. And that reminds me of a friend of those times, Frederick Kiesler, who was an architect and painter, a man of all trades, and who said this word about Arp: "This is Arp, not art."
Marcel Duchamp: "Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma... Arp's carvings between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti- rationalistic era... Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense."
Andre Munier: "Mr. Arp hated shiny sculptures. He hated that. Because if it's shiny, you can't appreciate the form. It creates reflections."
Jean Arp met his first wife, the painter Sophie Taeuber, in Zurich in 1915. They married in 1921 and became French nationals in 1926. In the 1930s, they bought a piece of land in Clamart and built a house at the edge of a forest. Influenced by the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, Taeuber designed it. Sophie Taeuber died in Zürich in 1943. After living in Zürich, Jean Arp was to make Meudon his primary residence again in 1946.
Later, Arp married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach (1902-1994), his long-time companion, in 1959.
Andre Munier was Arp's personal assistant from 1958 to 1966.
