Sensuous Abstraction
Jean Arp
“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.” — Jean Arp
One of the most versatile creative minds of the early twentieth century, Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (1886-1996), better known as Jean Arp, was something of a one man movement, a restless thinker and nomad, a poet, painter and sculptor, who could (and did) make anything into art. Probably best known for his sensuous biomorphic sculptures — often referred to as organic abstraction — he was indisputably one of the most innovative and inexhaustible artists of his time. Despite the myriad of mediums in which he worked, his approach to form was remarkably consistent: the sensuous, organic shapes for which he is best known are suggestive of plants, body parts and other natural motifs, while remaining entirely abstract. Arp was such a prodigious talent that Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), who in the 1930s herself produced a superb series of biomorphs, called him “extraordinary” and said that “seeing Jean Arp’s work for the first time freed me of inhibitions”. Born in Strasbourg to a French mother and German father (during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine), Arp learned to speak the native languages of his parents, as well as the Alsatian dialect distinctive to the region; with a trilingual upbringing, neither one nationality nor the other, he would assume the name “Jean Arp” for his French audience, and “Hans Arp” for his German equivalent. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, and in 1908 went to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1909, he moved to Switzerland and in 1911 was a founder of the Moderner Bund group there. The following year, he travelled to Paris where he met artists Robert (1885-1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), who offered valuable introductions to the city’s enlightened avant-garde circle, dominated at the time by figures such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), and Max Jacob (1876-1944). Fleeing the horrors of the First World War, Arp moved to the neutral city of Zürich, which marked a critical shift in his career, when he began to create many of the collages and tapestries unique to his repertoire, often in collaboration with his future wife Sophie Taeuber (1889-1943). Bourgeois Zurich soon became a hub for anti-war artists and bohemians and in February 1916 German writer and performer Hugo Ball (1886-1927), and his lover and future wife, professional cabaret singer, and poet, Emmy Hennings (1885-1948) opened the Cabaret Voltaire; named for the eighteenth-century French philosopher and aggressive social reformer, who, in his satirical novel Candide, derided the religious and philosophical optimism of the time. Conceived, on the one hand, as a modern ‘‘Candide’’, or stage on which to protest, and on the other, as a Künstlerkneipe (“artists local”) (and in essence, a gathering place for artists and writers, who would recite nonsensical poetry, perform experimental music and exhibit art), it became the centre of Dada activities in Zürich for a group that included Marcel Janco (1895-1984), Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974) and Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), as well as Arp and Taeuber.
Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-17), by Jean Arp, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
New York 1 (1949) by Jean Arp, a wonderful example of the artists wooden bas-reliefs, previously in the personal collection of Andy Warhol
This new, irrational art movement got its name, according to Huelsenbeck, when he and Ball came upon the word in a French-German dictionary. To Ball, it fit. “Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking horse’ and ‘hobby horse’ in French,” he noted in his diary. As Arp Proclaimed, “dissolution was the ultimate in everything that Dada represented. Philosophically and morally; everything must be pulled apart, not a screw left in its customary place … the total negation of everything that had existed before … the role of chance, not as an extension of the scope of art, but as a principle of dissolution and anarchy. In art, anti-art.” Arp felt that he could incorporate chance into artistic production — comparing the role of the artist to a plant bearing fruit — thereby giving physical form to this revolutionary notion of “anti-art”. Around 1918, in what would become a catchphrase of Dada, Arp claimed to have discovered la loi du hasard (“the law of chance”) which proved to be a watershed; and with Taeuber’s help, he would go on to produce a landmark set of collages known as Papiers Dechirés, or “chance collages”, which, according to his contemporaries, he created by tearing paper into pieces, dropping those pieces at random onto a larger sheet of paper, and gluing each scrap where it happened to land. Rather than ordering the page according to his own design, he ceded control to the random hand of gravity (For an example see Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance) (1916-17), in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Arp argued for this kind of chance abstraction as a way to rid art of any subjectivity, entirely removing human intervention, so that the visual practices were exposed to chaos and randomization — key tenets of the Dadaist movement.
Torse des Pyrénées (1959), bronze, by Jean Arp, an illustration of the artist’s transformative shift towards a greater level of abstraction
Of course, looking at these works, what are the “chances” pieces of paper would fall this way? They are, after all, relatively evenly spaced and aligned within the frame, forming an overall harmonious composition. Although Arp denied it, many people believe the artist moved the papers around as he made the collage. However, in terms of visual arts, even if Arp was not entirely willing to relinquish control over the process, this was still a radical break from tradition; as up until that point artists had always striven for a high level of technical skill and control. This was one of the first attempts to engage chance in a work of art, demonstrating Arp’s commitment to the Dadaist ideal of chaos. Like Arp himself, the movement was international and interdisciplinary, and in a similar vein, the artist would go on to experiment with automatic drawing, a technique pioneered by French painter André-Aimé-René Masson (1896-1987) as a means of expressing the subconscious. One of the major contributions of the Zürich Dada group to modern and contemporary art, it is implied that one should draw randomly across a paper, without any rational thinking, thereby “putting” psyche onto surface. This period of Arp’s work had a profound effect on the Surrealists and their exploration and use of automatism; and to that extent the artist was not only a formative figure within the landscape of modern art, but a critical link between the Dadaists and the Surrealists (it was also an approach that would later influence Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and the Abstract Expressionists).
In 1925 Arp and Taeuber relocated to Paris, where they bought a piece of land in the suburb of Clamart, in the city’s south-west, and built a house at the edge of the forest; designed by Taeuber, and heavily influenced by the Bauhaus, as well as the work of Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), it was where Arp would live and work for the remainder of his life. Shortly thereafter the artist’s work appeared alongside that of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Man Ray (1890-1976), André Masson (1896-1987) and Joan Miró (1893-1983) in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre, Paris, and in 1926 one of his reliefs was illustrated in La Révolution surréaliste. Arp’s work in the mid-to-late 1920’s was largely dominated by wooden bas-reliefs; assemblages of wooden pieces screwed together, and sometimes painted in hues of grey, blue, black and white. Still guided largely by intuition, his two-dimensional paper collages were effectively transformed into tangible three-dimensional forms — illustrating the development of Arp’s complex visual language of Abstract Expressionism. Their biomorphic, organic shapes, in irregular compositional arrangements are remindful of the natural world and human anatomy. In the conclusion to his seminal 1928 essay Surrealism and Painting — perhaps the most important statement ever written on surrealist art — André Breton discusses Arp’s bas-reliefs, and their ability to transcend their objectiveness: “[They] represent for me the most effective summing-up of the degree to which particular things can achieve generality and permit me to place a very low value indeed of the variant.” The fluidity of meaning his bas-reliefs provoked must have been fascinating to the Surrealists, and in turn the Surrealists ideas on the unconscious and dream imagery might very well have influenced, or at least enlivened, some of Arp’s bas-reliefs. La Femme amphore (“the woman Amphora”) for e.g. one of Arp’s final bas-reliefs, executed in 1929, straddles the realms of painting and sculpture. Arp directs our attention to the central element, a small relief with broad hips and four limbs, evocative of the body of a woman emerging, from what the title suggests, is an amphora. This osmosis between words and objects, abstract forms and meaning was at the very core of Arp’s so-called “Object-language”: an exploration of figures and faces, blurring the limits between their human aspect and the realm of objects and natural forms.
Growth, white marble (1938/1960) by Jean Arp © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Beginning in the 1930’s, the artist expanded his efforts from collage and bas-relief to include his most famous works: sensuous biomorphic sculptures in bronze and stone. While the wooden bas-reliefs form a significant part of Arp’s oeuvre, his fully three-dimensional, freestanding sculptures demonstrate a critical highlight of his career. Early in the decade he was developing works which, though abstract in effect, were intended as “concrete” expressions of natural properties and processes; this stemmed from his conviction that all things proliferating in nature could be seen as variations on a few basic forms — comparing his voluptuously rounded biomorphic shapes with fruit and children. The critic James Thrall Soby (1906-1979) noted that: “By the middle and later 1930s, Arp had reached his full stature as a sculptor in the round.” Executed in one of his most productive periods, Torse des Pyrénées (1959) is the perfect illustration of the artist’s transformative shift towards a greater level of abstraction. It’s elegant, elongated form, subtly reminiscent of a female torso, embodies the transcendent physical beauty that came to be expected of the artist at the height of his career. As critic and writer Stephanie Poley observed: “Arp was concerned with purity, with being free, being independent of everything unpleasant and limiting and with the active, constant emission of positive energy as well as its perception.”
In 1942 Taeuber died tragically of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The death of his wife plunged Arp into a deep depression from which he did not emerge until the end of the decade. He withdrew from the public and sought solace through reading ancient Tibetan and Christian mystic texts. When he returned to sculpture after the Second World War, it was similar in style to his previous work but, broadly speaking, even smoother and more lustrous. He continued to work with almost superhuman energy throughout the last decade of his life. By the mid-1950s, his fame was international. “Arp was one of the most innovative and inexhaustible artists of his time,” says Valérie Didier Hess, Specialist and Associate Director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s in Paris. “He invented — and re-invented — his artistic vocabulary constantly.” His final years were filled with prizes and recognition, including two momentous retrospectives of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1958. Arp died in 1966, aged 79. Celebrated and influential during his lifetime, Arp’s dynamic, multifaceted oeuvre speaks of an artist at the epicentre of the twentieth century’s most important artistic movements, from Dada and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism. His influence extended far and wide: from Hepworth, Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) to the American minimalists of the 1960s and 70s. The organic beauty of Arp’s sculptures, unencumbered by formal constraints, transcend conventional boundaries, allowing for almost any given interpretation. Despite what was, in essence, a highly abstract visual language, Arp was able to create a connection between these irregular, biomorphic shapes and the natural world, thus revealing the mysterious and poetic elements of everyday forms. “All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure,” Arp explained, “I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man.”