Arp, Jean

views updated

ARP, JEAN

(Also known as Hans Arp; 1886–1966), Alsace-born artist and poet.

Moving easily between the French and German languages, Jean Arp developed a cosmopolitan outlook from an early age through his contacts with the European avant-garde. A member of the expressionist generation, he was one of the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich and contributed to surrealism in the interwar years. Arp is considered a pioneer of abstract art and poetry who explored automatic composition through the idea of chance. Born out of an impersonal creative act, abstract art expressed spiritual truths by means of form alone and was thus in search of the absolute and the transcendent.

As a teenager Arp had been part of a Strasbourg avant-garde group, led by the writer RenéSchickele, that sought to rejuvenate Alsatian culture through international modernist styles. Having attended art schools in Weimar and Paris, Arp moved to Switzerland in 1909 to become a founder-member of the Moderne Bund in Lucerne. Largely drawing on the human figure, his paintings and woodcuts of this period are executed in a swift style, thick colors and black silhouettes giving them an expressive quality. Arp exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich and contributed to Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc's Blaue Reiter almanac (1913), sharing their interest in primitivism and Romanticism. His view that modern art should reject naturalism and express higher truths by means of form, line, and color alone links him with many expressionists. Like the Blaue Reiter, Arp saw abstract art as holding the key to the spiritual awakening and renewal of humankind. At the same time, influenced also by cubism and futurism, he contributed to the expressionist periodical Der Sturm and began to create collages on paper and fabric, some of which he exhibited in Zurich in late 1915. It was at this exhibition that he met the Swiss artist and dancer Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943), who was to become his lifelong partner. Inspired by Taeuber's abstract pictures, he began collaborating with her on collages using cutout squares to create vertical-horizontal compositions modulated only by the nonsymmetrical use of dark colors.

From Dada's beginnings in Zurich in early 1916, Arp became its principal visual artist, producing collages, woodcuts, paintings, lithographs and three-dimensional reliefs. He also participated in performances and contributed artwork and texts to publications. For Arp, Dada was not just "against art" but "for nature and life," suggesting that Dada's nihilistic anti-art stance be transformed into an ethics of creativity.

Arp's typical style emerged during the Dada years. Resolutely abstract, his art continued to be characterized by simple geometrical forms, as in his collage Squares Arranged According to the Law of Chance (1917), where Arp dropped pieces of paper onto a mount and fixed them where they landed. For Arp, the law of chance was a creative principle, inscrutable to humans and only to be experienced by completely surrendering to the unconscious. Chance was also closely linked to nature. Hence at the other pole of Arp's creativity was biomorphic abstraction, exemplified by his painted wood reliefs. These incorporate materials and shapes from nature, while their infinitely variable appearance suggests constant metamorphosis.

From the Dada years onward, Arp wrote poetry attempting to emulate the effects of abstraction in language. His poems, too, follow the "law of chance," integrating in dreamlike fashion contrary styles and meanings. Like his art, Arp's abstract poetry represents a radical break with symbolic language to explore prerational expressiveness.

From 1918, Arp collaborated with other Dada artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann, as well as forging important links with German-based constructivists such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky. Through Ernst, Arp was introduced to the circle around André Breton, who in 1924 launched the surrealist movement. Arp exhibited and published with the surrealists, but this allegiance did not alter his style or his outlook. While continuing to work in ink, paper, and wood, Arp also explored new materials such as plaster and stone. Moving on from his Dada biomorphism, he produced distinctive sculptures utilizing more solid curvilinear shapes. Arp's art and poetry came to be seen as an example of surrealist "automatism," although his radical submission to chance had little to do with the psychoanalytic framing of automatism propagated by the surrealists.

Throughout this period, Arp was in contact with artists and groups that preferred geometric abstraction, such as Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) in Paris, formed around his friend Michel Seuphor. In 1928 Arp, Taeuber, and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg collaborated in creating a modernist interior design for the Strasbourg Café de l'Aubette. From the early 1930s onward, Arp produced numerous sculptures he called Concretions that suggest a return to the human figure while also incorporating organic forms and resisting facile naturalism.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Dada; Modernism; Painting, Avant-Garde.