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Arp, Hans (Jean)
born: 1886 Strassbourg died: 1966 Basel
Hans Arp is considered one of the major sculptors of the classical modern
period. He was trained in art in Weimar (1905-1907) and in Paris, at the
Academie Julian (1908). In 1916, with Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and others,
he founded the Cabaret Voltaire - the first mani- festation of Dada. During
the 1920s, which he spent mostly in Paris, Arp figured as one of the leading
protagonists of French Surrealism, alongside Andre Breton and Max Ernst.
In 193o Arp began working on free-standing sculptures, producing a series
of pieces in which human, animal and plant forms were reduced to quintessential
organic volumes. His Female Torso with its burnished, snow-white marble
skin and swelling curves recalls some fertility idal from an archaic past.
Arp favared roundness as a sculptural equivalent to natural, organic growth.
The same formal idiom was employed in his animal or vegetable- based configurations,
such as Aloa aux griffes, Garland of Buds 11, or Serpentine Motion fl,
as well as in hybrid creatures like Cobra-Centaur. Arp even envisioned
a reverse metamorphosis, of art into nature, as evoked in his notes on
the sculpture Torso-Leaf "Out of a billowing celestial fleece rises a leaf.
The leaf changes into a vase. An enormous navel appears. ft grows, it becomes
larger. The billowing celestial fleece dissolves in it." Apart from organic
form, Arp's works often rely on a reinterpretation of the Surrealist principle
of the dialectic relationship between formal develapment and thematic association.
Examples are Relief Nadir I, in which the firmament with its heavenly bodies
is projected onto the plane, or The Little Theater, in which the stage,
as scene of world events, is reduced to the microcosm of a peep-show whose
actors appear as schematic silhouettes against a bottomless gulf.
PBLICATIONS:
- W. SANDBERG, H. L. C. JAFFE "Ein Museum für moderne
Kunst: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Köln 1962, Nr. 729 f. - C.
GIEDION-WELCKER,
M. HAGENBACH ,"Hans Arp", Stuttgart 1957. - H. ARP "On my way. Poetry and
essays 7912-7947,<, New York 1948. - A. BRETON "Le surrealisme et la
peinturerc, Paris 1928, S. 69 f. - EL LISSlTZKY, H. ARP Die Kunstismen
, Erlenbach- Zürich, München und Leipzig 1925. - H. ARP "Der
Pyramiden- rock", Erlenbach-Zürich und München 1924. H. Read
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