CATALOGUE D'EXPOSITION JEAN ARP 1968 AVEC PHOTOS UNIQUES GALERIE SIDNEY magasin JANIS

CATALOGUE D'EXPOSITION JEAN ARP 1968 AVEC PHOTOS UNIQUES GALERIE SIDNEY magasin JANIS

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Product Name: CATALOGUE D'EXPOSITION JEAN ARP 1968 AVEC PHOTOS UNIQUES GALERIE SIDNEY magasin JANIS

Sidney Janis Presents an Exhibition of Sculpture by Jean Arp

Arp, Jean

Published by Sidney Janis Gallery, 1968

Softcover staple bound, 24 pages, very good condition except for DISCOLORATION to cover

THERE ARE 4 VINTAGE PHOTOS FROM SIDNEY JANIS GALLERY BY VARIOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS ERIC POLLITZER, GEOFFREY CLEMENTS. 2 MEASURE 8X10 INCHES WHILE ONE IS APPROXIMATELY 7 3/4 X 8 INCHES, LAST IS APPROXIMATELY 7 1/4 X 10 INCHES

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as Dadaist and abstract artist.

Contents

1Early life

2Career

3Exhibitions

4Recognition

5Personal life and death

6Quotes

7Legacy

8Gallery

9References

10Further reading

11External links

Early life

Arp was born in Straßburg (now Strasbourg), the son of a French mother and a German father, during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after France had ceded it to Germany in 1871. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become "Jean". Arp would continue referring to himself as "Hans" when he spoke German.[1]

Career

In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Straßburg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, he studied at Kunstschule in Weimar, Germany, and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. Arp was a founder-member of the Moderne Bund in Lucerne, participating in their exhibitions from 1911 to 1913.[2]

In 1912 he went to Munich and called on Wassily Kandinsky, the influential Russian painter and art theorist. Arp was encouraged by him in his researches and exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter group.[3] Later that year, he took part in a major exhibition in Zürich, along with Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay and Kandinsky.[3] In Berlin in 1913, he 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.[3]

In 1915 he moved to Switzerland to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified to report to the German consulate in Zurich,[4] he pretended to be mentally ill in order to avoid being drafted into the German Army: after crossing himself whenever he saw a portrait of Paul von Hindenburg,[3] Arp was given paperwork on which he was told to write his date of birth on the first blank line. Accordingly, he wrote "16/9/87"; he then wrote "16/9/87" on every other line as well,[4] then drew one final line beneath them and, "without worrying too much about accuracy", calculated their sum.[5] Hans Richter, describing this story, noted that "they [the German authorities] believed him."[4]

Shirt Front and Fork, painted wood, 1922, National Gallery of Art

It was at an exhibition that year where he first met Sophie Taeuber, a dancer and artist; they married a few years later.

In 1916 Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire, which was to become the center of Dada activities in Zurich for a group that included Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and others.[6] In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. In 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galérie Pierre in Paris.[1]

In 1926 Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931 he broke with the Surrealist movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition. Beginning in the 1930s the artist expanded his efforts from collage and bas-relief to include bronze and stone sculptures.[7] He produced several small works made of multiple elements that the viewer could pick up, separate, and rearrange into new configurations.[8]

Cloud Shepherd, Jean Arp (1953), Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas

Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942 he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended.

Arp visited New York City 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. Arthur and Madeleine Lewja, of Galerie Chalette, who had known Arp in Europe, became his gallery representatives in New York in the late 1950s, and were instrumental in establishing his reputation on the American side of the Atlantic.[9]

Exhibitions

Scrutant lhorizon (The Hague, 1967)

In 1958, a retrospective of Arps work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National dArt Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962. In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased Jean Arps work from the Lejwas collection and a few works lent by Arps widow, Marguerite Arp. The exhibition was expanded and traveled as "Arp 1877–1966," first exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and then shown in seven museums in the United States and six in Australia.[10] Organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein of Stuttgart, a 150-piece exhibition titled "The Universe of Jean Arp" concluded an international six-city tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1986.[11]

The Musée dart moderne et contemporain of Strasbourg houses many of his paintings and sculptures.

Recognition

Arps career was distinguished with many awards including the Grand Prize for sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, a sculpture prizes at the 1964 Pittsburgh International, the 1963 Grand Prix National des Arts, the 1964 Carnegie Prize, the 1965 Goethe Prize from the University of Hamburg, and then the Order of Merit with a Star of the German Republic.[12]

Personal life and death

Arp and his first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, became French nationals in 1926.[2] 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.[13] She died in Zürich in 1943 from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. After living in Zürich, Arp was to make Meudon his primary residence again in 1946.[14]

Arp married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach (1902–1994), his long-time companion, in 1959.[15] He died in 1966, in Basel, Switzerland.

Quotes

"I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word Dada. I was present with my twelve children, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada.." [from Arps Declaration, October 1921]

"Art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother.. .Reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things.. ..through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure.." [c. 1932]

"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." [c. 1941–42]

"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." [in Arp on Arp, 1958]

"I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it [Arp refers to automatic creation]. I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands. [1960s]

Legacy

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 Arps second wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach.[13] 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.[16]

s to what will be made of the now-imminent centenary of the birth of Jean Arp - sculptor, poet, maker of reliefs, collagist and for many years a discreet but animating force in the development of 20th-century art - the news has yet to come in. Fireworks crafted with Arp-like fancy may soar above the cathedral of his native Strasbourg. White wine from the Valais may spout from the fountains of Zurich, in which he spent some of his most creative years. In Meudon, not far from Paris, the birds, the butterflies and the hares for which he felt a watchful tenderness may flock to the garden of the house that he maintained for 40 years. Or, the world being what it is, and Arp having been the least pushy of men, there may be nothing much of anything. Either way, Sept. 16, 1886, is a date worth remembering.

As of the end of World War I, there can have been no doubt that although the name of Jean Arp was known to only a few well-informed observers he was a key figure in the European art world. His qualifications were obvious to all. In 1910 or 1911, according to his own account, he had begun to produce what is now called abstract art. In 1912, he went to Munich, called on Kandinsky, was encouraged by him in his researches and exhibited with the Blue Rider group. Later in 1912, he took part in a major exhibition in Zurich, along with Matisse, Robert Delaunay and Kandinsky. In Berlin in 1913, he was taken up by Herwarth Walden, the dealer, magazine editor and esthetic impresario who was at that time one of the most powerful figures in the European avant-garde. In Paris in 1914, he had his portrait drawn by Modigliani and came to know Picasso, Delaunay and others. Likewise in 1914, he went to Cologne, and was recognized as a kindred spirit by Max Ernst. At the out-break of World War I, Arp was in Continued on page 29 Paris, and quite happy to remain there. But as he was German by birth, it became more and more risky for him to do so. Rather than return to Germany and be faced with military service, he made his way to Zurich, represented himself to the German consul as mentally defective and - thanks to feigned oddities of behavior - was exempted from military service. (The German consul could not believe that anyone who made the sign of the cross on seeing a portrait of Field Marshal Hindenburg could be good military material.) While in Zurich during World War I, Arp perfected the layered wooden reliefs- an adroit and poetical mix of painting, drawing and sculpture - that have ever since been part of the canon of modern art. As a founding member of the Zurich Dada group, he pioneered the acceptance of accident in art that for 50 or 60 years to come was one of the key notions of avant-garde art. (Chance is also a dream, he once said.) He was also a pioneer of the automatic writing and drawing that were to be fundamental to surrealism in the 1920s.

And, not least, he fell in love at first sight with a young painter called Sophie Taeuber, who later became his wife. Theirs was a marriage of equals, with never a hint of rivalry. When we look at the work that they produced jointly in Zurich, we find it impossible to say who did what, so perfectly did their imaginations meet and match. With her clear, bell-like laugh, her almost magical affinity with all living creatures and her never-failing sense of wonder, she was poetry personified.

By the time that he turned 30, in 1916, Arp had developed more than one of the modalities that have been an enduring part of 20th-century art. Deliberately, he took the stressful, body-building element out of art and made it look weightless, incorporeal and full of wit. Life is a puzzling puff of wind, he once wrote, and he liked to feel that his work had that kind of aerial energy.

During World War I, it had also a strong element of protest. As he and his colleagues saw it, language had been debased by the mendacious rhetoric of wartime, while art had become a matter of laborious, sanctified but finally quite pointless routine, with the recruiting poster and the war memorial as its allotted goal. He wanted, in its place, an art and a poetry that would start again from zero. From a sheet of paper torn up by chance and allowed to fall on the floor, or from a sentence picked at random from an advertisement in the days paper, magic could come.

Jean Arp was born Hans Arp on September 16, 1886, in Strassburg. In 1904, after leaving the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, Strasbourg, he visited Paris and published his poetry for the first time. 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 met Robert and Sonia Delaunay in Paris and Vasily Kandinsky in Munich. Arp participated in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon in 1913 at the gallery Der Sturm, Berlin. After returning to Paris in 1914, he became acquainted with Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. In 1915, he moved to Zurich, where he executed collages and tapestries, often in collaboration with his future wife Sophie Taeuber (who became known as Sophie Taeuber-Arp after they married in 1922).

In 1916, Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire, which was to become the center of Dada activities in Zurich for a group that included Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and others. Arp continued his involvement with Dada after moving to Cologne in 1919. In 1922, he participated in the Kongress der Konstruktivisten in Weimar and the Exposition Internationale Dada at Galerie Montaigne in Paris. Soon thereafter, he began contributing to magazines such as Merz, Mécano, De Stijl, and later to La Révolution surréaliste. Arp's work appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre, Paris, in 1925. In 1926, he settled in Meudon, France.

In 1931, Arp was associated with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical Transition. Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he continued to write and publish poetry and essays. In 1942, he fled Meudon for Zurich; he was to make Meudon his primary residence again in 1946. The artist visited New York in 1949 on the occasion of his solo show at Curt Valentin's Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1954, Arp received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. A retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958, followed by another at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962. Arp died June 7, 1966, in Basel.

About Jean (Hans) Arp

Artist Jean (Hans) Arp was born in 1886 in Strasbourg, the capital city of Alsace. This

region was claimed alternately by Germany and France because of changing borders

caused by World War I and World War II. Arp's given name was Hans, but he later chose

to go by the French equivalent, “Jean,” reflecting the shifting cultural and personal

identity he experienced in his lifetime.

 Think about a time in your life when you shifted between two identities. How did

that experience shape how you think about and express yourself?

Arp was a pioneer in making abstract artwork. He was a founder of the Dada movement

and later explored Surrealism and other art movements of the early 20th century. Creating

sculptures, reliefs, collages, drawings, textiles, and writings throughout his lifetime (d. 1966), Arp challenged art

traditions and introduced chance, humor, and collaboration in his artistic process. Arp influenced fellow artists as

well as the generations of artists that followed. Among them are Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Barbara Hepworth,

Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg and Alexander Calder, whose works can be seen at the Nasher in

Foundations: The Nature of Arp.

Nature

we do not want to copy nature. we do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. we want to produce like a

plant that produces a fruit and not to reproduce. we want to produce directly and not through representation.

– Jean (Hans) Arp

After witnessing what he called “the ugliness of man” during the war, Arp

turned to nature for inspiration. The result was a body of work that featured

organic shapes and fluid forms. Human and animal parts like torsos and navels,

plant buds, branches and pistils were common components of Arp's work that

lent themselves to a range of interpretations. A form called a torso in one work

might be called a bottle, vase or mandolin in others.

 Go outdoors and observe four natural objects. Make simple shape sketches

of these life fragments (leaf, branch, grass, cone, cloud, etc.). Combine two

or more of these to make your own biomorphic creation.

Arp wanted to capture the “immediate and direct production” he observed in

nature's repeated and varied cycles—buds growing on a tree, leaves falling on the ground, a stone breaking away

from a cliff—so he often followed nature's operations of growth, decay and gravity in his work.

 Sketch one of Arp's nature-inspired sculptures. Now imagine that artwork has grown to a later stage of

development. Add these thoughts to your original sketch.

Jean (Hans) Arp with Navel-Monocle,

c. 1926

Lunar Fruit, 1936. Duralumin, (1/1; cast 1958).

41 3/4 x 57 x 44 7/8 in. (106 x 145 x 114 cm).

Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno.

Chance

i was born in nature. i draw things that recline, magasin drift, ripen, fall. – Jean (Hans) Arp

Arp sometimes made art by tearing paper, closing his eyes and dropping the torn pieces,

allowing the law of chance and gravity to control the composition's outcome.

 How does this process change the artist's role in making art?

 How do you think these abstract collages reflected his thoughts about nature's

processes?

 In your classroom, create a class collage using drawings and torn, patterned, printed

or colored paper. As you work together, think about other ways you can involve

chance or gravity in this process.

Collaboration

Arp worked with his wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and other artist and writer friends on

collaborative drawings, collages and poetry. One type of collaborative art-making popular

with the Surrealist group was called an “exquisite corpse.” This strange title came from a

Surrealist game in which each person in a group contributed random words to form an

absurd sentence—an early example of which produced the phrase, “the exquisite corpse

shall drink the new wine.” Arp and other artists also used this process to create

collaborative drawings on folded where each person was unaware of others'

contributions until the work was unfolded.

 Create your own “exquisite corpse” with your classmates. First divide into groups of

2 – 4 people. Fold a piece of paper horizontally with one section for each person in

your group.

 Have the first person draw in the top section, making marks just over the edge of the

fold to show the next person where their drawing should connect.

 The first person should fold their drawing over so it is hidden, then pass the paper to the next person. Repeat

until all sections are filled.

 Unfold the composition to enjoy everyone's contribution to the whole.

Object-Language

Many of Arp's reliefs and two-dimensional drawings

include objects and symbols that he used over and over,

often combining them into new forms as one might

combine two nouns into a compound word. These works

combined body fragments such as torsos, noses, and

navels as well as things objects like mustaches,

shirtfronts, monocles, watches and hammers.

 Sketch a few things you have, wear or use every day

that symbolize you? Create a title that personalizes

your suite of things.

Arp stacked layers of wood, cut by carpenters, joined them with screws and painted them with defined areas of

color. He often took them apart and reconfigured them. Hung in orientations high and low to expose their

thickness and grain, the subjects of the works were hybrids of things that gave them an absurd twist of humor,

much like his poetry.

First Papier déchiré, 1932. Tornpaper collage, 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (30

x 23.8 cm). Fondazione Marguerite

Arp, Locarno.

LEFT: Mustache Hat, Merz 5: 7 Arpaden by Hans Arp. Second Portfolio of the Merz

Publisher, 1923. Made for the fifth issue of Kurt Schwitters's journal Merz. Lithograph.

Each sheet approx. 17 11/16 × 13 ¾ in. (45 × 35 cm). Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of

the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier. RIGHT: Shirtfront and Fork, 1922. Painted wood, 23 x

27 9/16 x 2 3/8 in. (58.4 x 70 x 6.1 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon

Bruce Fund 1983.3.1.

Exquisite Corpse, 1937.

Collaborative work by (from top to

bottom) Marcel Jean, Oscar

Dominguez, Jean (Hans) Arp, Sophie

Taeuber-Arp. Collage, 12 x 9 3/8 in.

(31.4 x 23.6 cm). Stiftung Arp e.V.,

Berlin / Rolandswerth.

Fragmentation

Arp started making plaster sculptures in the 1930s. Often making

multiple casts, he would slice them apart for new works, stacking

fragments together, conjoining them with fresh plaster, then

filing, sanding and painting them to become an entirely new

sculpture. In the remaking of the sculpture Ptolemy I, Arp used a

saw to slice the work to create Daphne, a woman in Greek

mythology who turned into a tree to escape the god Apollo.

 How does Arp's process of transforming one sculpture into

another reflect the story of Daphne?

 How does the sculpture Daphne resemble a tree fragment?

Glossary

Biomorphic – an abstract form or image that refers to or evokes a living form, such as a plant or the human body.

Dada – an art movement started in response to World War I that challenged traditional art and societal norms

through humor, absurdity and mockery.

Relief – a sculpture with raised elements attached to a flat background plane.

Surrealism – an art movement founded in the early 1920s that focused on the subconscious mind and the

importance of dreams.

Additional Resources

 The Nature of Arp exhibition page

 Jean (Hans) Arp biography at the Guggenheim Museum

 Summary of the events of World War I and World War II

 Jean (Hans) Arp lesson plans from the Turner Contemporary

Jean Arp, also known as Hans Arp,

1 was a French-German sculptor, poet, painter, and collagist2 who

participated in multiple modern art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Abstraction-Creation. While a

student, the accepted ideas about art that were reinforced at the prominent academies disenchanted Arp. He

recalled, “By the time I was 16 the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers at the Strasbourg

School of Applied Art not only poisoned drawing for me but destroyed my taste for all artistic activity. I took

refuge in poetry.”3 Arp gradually developed his own artistic approach which his teachers discouraged: “I tried to

be natural in other words the exact opposite of what drawing teachers call ‘faithful to nature.' I made my first

experiments with free form.”

4 Arp sculptures can be described as biomorphic, modeling artistic design

elements after shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. While these forms are abstract, they refer to,

or evoke, living forms.

An explanation of Arp's rejection of traditional art was published in a 1932 Transition magazine under the title

“Notes From a Dada Diary.” Arp wrote (in lowercase letters), “art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a

plant like the child out of the mother. while the fruit of the plant grows independent forms and never resembles a

balloon or a president in a cutaway suit the artistic fruit of man shows for the most part a ridiculous resemblance

to the appearance of other things. reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things.

thus man thinks he is able to live and to create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions. through

reason man became a tragic and ugly figure. i dare say he would create even his children in the form of vases

with umbilical cords if he could do so. reason has cut man off from nature.”5

Hans Arp's late work after 1945 can only be understood in the context of

the horrific three decades that preceded it. The First World War, the catastrophe of the century, and the Second World War that followed shortly thereafter, were finally over. Thirty years of fearing for his life and living in dread

of persecution were finally over.

It is therefore no surprise that the artist's speechlessness at the beginning

of World War I was manifest in Dada poetry, which at the time was a new

form of expression, having developed in response to Europe's dreadful launch

into modernity. In Germany, there was only a short respite, which was characterized by hope for a new democratic future. What followed was the horrifying recognition that what were thought to have been the ghosts of the

past were returning with still more disastrous consequences for the continent.

As everyone knows, World War II wrought yet greater destruction.

After Arp's beloved wife and colleague Sophie accidentally died from

carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943, Arp became so paralyzed that it is

astonishing he could continue his work at all after 1945.

Since our primary responsibility is to promote Arp's artistic legacy and

that of his first wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, we dedicated the Stiftung Arp's

biannual conference in 2017 to this late body of work, which has found little

resonance within the scholarly community. We are pleased to present the

findings in this volume. Our hope is not only to share new research, but also

to provide further stimulus for our fellowship program. Established in 2014,

it supports research by both emerging as well as established scholars on the

work of Hans and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the wider context surrounding it.

Director's Foreword

Engelbert Büning

On behalf of the Stiftung Arp e.V., I extend special thanks to the conference participants, who now present their conclusions and insights to a wider public in

our series, the Stiftung Arp e.V. Papers. Our heartfelt thanks go to our conference host, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, and especially

to its Director Lisette Pelsers, who placed its stunning rooms at our disposal,

and to her team members Renske Cohen Tervaert, Jannet de Goede, Wanda

Vermeulen, and Lies Boelrijk. We also thank the Cultural Affairs Department at the German Embassy in The Hague for its generous support, which

extended beyond financial backing. Last but not least, we are grateful to

Loretta Würtenberger and our former Curator Maike Steinkamp for organizing the conference.

The central aim of the Stiftung Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V.'s biannual conference is to bring together researchers and interested parties from

around the world to reflect on Hans Arp's work together, and to discuss

specific facets thereof which have received all too little attention, despite their

importance. In 2017, the conference was dedicated to the theme of “The Art

of Arp after 1945” and focused on aspects of Hans Arp's late works.

Created during the period between 1945 and the artist's death in 1966,

the late work is breathtaking in its resilience. It responds to the artistic currents of its time, while simultaneously continuing to pursue and fully realize

themes of the pre-war years. And it does all of this in a manner true to Arp's

beloved process of nature, which repeats annually, yet is perpetually and

masterfully renewed. Arp reaped the rewards of outward success during

these years. However, he did not stagnate, but rather—with Marguerite

Hagenbach-Arp at his side from 1953—he increasingly took the latitude to

develop his oeuvre further. It culminated in the Threshold Sculptures, surprisingly contemporary works in which the artist, who was then over sixty,

developed an entirely new formal language. It was also a period marked by

extensive travel, both in the literal sense to Greece, Mexico, and the United

States, and in the figurative sense to the mysticism of the Middle Ages and

to Asian philosophy.

Unrolling the intellectual map of these developments and tracing the ways

Arp crisscrossed its territories was the great joy of the two-day conference in

Otterlo, The Netherlands, which the Stiftung Arp e.V. organized in grateful

cooperation with the Kröller-Müller Museum. Parallel to the conference,

the Kröller-Müller Museum held an exhibition devoted to Arp entitled The

Poetry of Form, which was accompanied by a catalogue of the same name.

Foreword

Jana Teuscher and Loretta Würtenberger

With its distinguished collection situated in one of Europe's most significant

sculpture parks, the Kröller-Müller Museum provided a rich framework

for the conference. We extend our special thanks to the Museum's Director,

Lisette Pelsers, and her team for their ongoing support and assistance with

logistics and organization.

The authors address a wide spectrum of topics. For example, Jan Giebel

and Simona Martinoli focus on the late works in their contributions to the

present volume. On the one hand, Jan Giebel is concerned with the so-called

Threshold Sculptures, which Hans Arp began after 1958. On the other, Simona Martinoli turns her attention to the Forest Wheels that Arp created a

few years later for his garden in Tessin. Rudolf Suter turns his attention to

Hans Arp's interest in mysticism and its influence on his artistic output. To

that end, he consulted the many books on mysticism in Arp's library, which

is largely preserved in the artist's former homes in Clamart, France and Locarno, Switzerland. Likewise, Isabella Ewig addresses the subject of Arp and

mysticism in her exploration of his connections to Camille Bryen and Abhumanism. In her essay on the Brazilian Lygia Clark, Heloisa Espada brings

our attention to an artist working outside of Europe, demonstrating Arp's

wide-ranging impact once more. Alternately, Marta Smolin´ska addresses the

avant-garde networks that had been established in the 1920s and 1930s, in

which artists from Eastern Europe established highly influential positions.

With this as her starting point, the art historian analyzes the neo-avant-garde

in Poland and its fascination with Arp's work. To complement these studies

on Hans Arp as a visual artist, Agathe Mareuge turns to Arp's poetry and

analyzes the parallel processes he used to create both forms of art. The two

final texts in this volume take up the subject of architecture, once again

showing how Arp's influence transcended genres. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen explores curvilinear lines in the work of Hans Arp and the architect Alvar Aalto,

tracing the connections and relationships between the two. Similarly, Dick

van Gameren illuminates Arp's overarching significance for architectural

form in the twentieth century. Overall, we hope that the essays in this publication will also lead to new scholarly engagement with the work and influence of Hans Arp.

Our third conference will be held in 2019, and once again we invite the

circle of Arp enthusiasts to follow our plans as they develop. In accordance

with our tradition of selecting a meaningful location, we have landed on

the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel. The conference planned by the

Stiftung Arp e.V. will be dedicated to Arp's contributions to the development

of the sculpture of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on Arp's work

and those of his contemporaries, we hope to articulate the radical change

that took place in sculpture over the course of the previous century.

We would like to thank the authors for sharing their insights. An international volume of conference proceedings that brings together scholarship by

authors from around the world requires not only engaging scholarship, but

also translations that are just as thorough and precise. We offer our heartfelt

thanks to Sarah McGavran for the translation from the German, Lynda

Stringer for translating the French passages, and Marcin Turski for the translation from the Polish. Not only did they translate these scholarly texts accurately, but they also transposed the words of the poet Hans Arp into English with great finesse. Last but not least, we thank Kai Fischer for his

assistance in finalizing this publication.

In March of 1954, the German art critic Will Grohmann wrote in a newspaper article: “Hans Arp is a phenomenon […]. He is a man for whom there

exist neither national borders nor intellectual and spiritual boundaries.”1

According to Grohmann, the artist was one of the freest citizens of the world.

What is more, he was one of the greatest contemporary sculptors, printmakers, and poets.

Indeed, Hans Arp (1886 – 1966) was a cosmopolitan whose oeuvre defies categorization in terms of both nationality as well as artistic style or

movement. The French-German artist was a founding member of Dada in

Zürich in 1916. By the mid-1920s, he was mingling with the Surrealists in

Paris, and in the early 1930s he joined the Paris artists' groups Cercle et

Carré and Abstraction Création, which were dedicated to non-objective

and geometric art. Arp was one of the major proponents of organic abstraction. Metamorphosis, or transformation and growth in nature, is a

unifying theme in his work. He neither recognized artistic categories, nor

did he limit his efforts to a single medium or genre. For Arp, poems, drawings, collages, reliefs, and from the early 1930s, sculptures, too, stood in

close dialogue with one another.

Arp's work from the Dada period and his stylistic development and ties

to the international avant-garde during the 1920s and 1930s are well documented. By contrast, his late work has received relatively little scholarly attention.2

This is surprising because Arp attained his international breakthrough as a sculptor only after 1945, when he began to receive numerous

commissions for public works and was awarded multiple prizes. For instance,

he produced two large-scale reliefs for Harvard University in Cambridge in

1950 (fig. 1). A commission for a sculpture at the university complex designed by Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Caracas between

1940 and 1960 followed in 1954. On the campus of the University City of

The Art of Hans Arp after 1945

Maike Steinkamp

An Introduction

Caracas, there is a close interplay between architecture, city planning, and

visual art. Many artists, including Miguel Arroyo, Alexander Calder, Fernand

Léger, and Henri Laurens participated in the project. Arp contributed the

large-scale sculpture, which stands on the covered plaza in front of an untitled ceramic relief by Matteo Manaure (fig. 2). In general, during this period,

Arp's works increased in scale and expanded even further into the public

sphere. This proves true for the bronze relief he designed for UNESCO in

Paris and the multi-part aluminum relief on the façade of the Technical University in Braunschweig (fig. 3). As was the case with the commissions, Arp

did not have to wait long after the end of the Second World War and his first

successes in the United States for international recognition.3

At the 1954

Venice Biennale, he received the Grand Prize for Sculpture (fig. 4). Ten years

later, in 1964, he was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix National des Arts

in France.

Arp's sculptures and reliefs were featured prominently at the first documenta in Kassel in 1955. Its organizer Arnold Bode wrote that the aim of

this first major international exhibition to take place in Germany after the

demise of National Socialism was to: “uncover the roots of contemporary

art in all its manifestations.”4

On view were primarily works by artists who

Fig. 1 Hans Arp: Constellations, 1950, Rau 397, American Redwood, Harvard Graduate Center, Harvard University,

Cambridge, Mass., Archive Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth

Fig. 2 Hans Arp: Shepherd of Clouds, 1954, Giedion-Welcker 122, Bronze, 330 × 123 × 230 cm, in front of

Matteo Manaure's untitled mural, University City of Caracas, Caracas

had begun their careers in the first half of the twentieth century and whose

art was denigrated by the National Socialists. Documenta presented their

work as both retrospective and as anticipatory of future artistic movements

and styles. Within this framework, Arp's work was understood as a signpost

for subsequent generations of artists. His sculpture Pagoda Fruit (1949, GiedionWelcker 97), which was not displayed on a base, was located at the entrance

to the sculpture gallery at the Fridericianum. Centered along the main axis

of this major exhibition space within the first documenta, it served as a pendant to Henry Moore's King and Queen (1952–1953). The gallery was lined

with additional sculptures by Arp and by artists such as Alexander Calder,

Barbara Hepworth, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Berto Lardera (fig. 5).

Arp's work was also well represented at the documenta exhibition that followed in 1959. Fifteen works by Arp were showcased there (fig. 6).

By the end of the 1950s, Arp ranked among the Olympians of the international art world. While his participation in documenta certainly played a

role, major institutional recognition accounts for his newfound status: in

1958, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an Arp retrospective,

Fig. 3 View of the wall relief by Arp for the Auditorium Maximum of Braunschweig Technical University,

taken in November 1960

Fig. 4 Hans Arp with Ptolemy I, 1950, Giedion-Welcker 128, Bronze or painted plaster, Venice, 1954

and a few years later, in 1962, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris

featured a survey of his work.

Arp's significance after 1945 is not limited to international institutional

recognition, as this phase in his career is also marked by his numerous artistic innovations. He created new series, including the so-called Threshold

Sculptures. In these sculptures that resemble reliefs, Arp used clearly delineated planes and angles to create a constructive counterpoint to the soft

organic forms for which he had become so well-known. Moreover, his use

of negative space establishes a dialogue with the works' surroundings. The

sculptural group Forest Wheels, which Arp created between 1961 and 1964

at his last home in Locarno, mark an intensification of this integration of

art and nature.

Arp's work from this period, however, was not limited to sculpture. After

1945, his oeuvre is also characterized by a multitude of new approaches and

media. For example, his découpages—forms cut from black and colored paper

and cardboard—had artistic merit as components of collages and as models

for reliefs and sculptures. The way that Arp repurposed and varied découpage

forms bespeaks the principle of transformation, which had been foundational

to his art from the very beginning. Furthermore, he expressed anew his desire

for the transgression and comingling of artistic genres in his papiers dechirées

and papiers froisses. During this period of Arp's increasing renown, materials

such as brass, duralumin, and Belgium black limestone also entered his oeuvre,

reflecting editions produced in greater numbers and works in increasingly

large formats. Across all media, Arp maintained an emphasis on a highly

distilled visual language, which he explored in ever-changing formal and thematic constellations. In an article of 1952, Carola Giedion-Welcker wrote of

a “formal elementariness” (formaler Elementarismus) in Arp's work that

leaned towards the absolute, the simplified, and the essential, and whereby

playfulness, clarity, order, and precision played important roles.5

After his first

wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp died in 1943 and the end of the Second World War

in 1945, Arp's inclination towards the absolute led him to antiquity, the mysticism of the late Middle Ages, and non-Western cultures.

After 1945, Arp's poetic work came into sharper focus as well. It is significant that in the review quoted above, Grohmann praised Arp's poems

alongside Arp's visual art. In the 1950s, he published multiple volumes of

poetry in both German and French. In the process, Arp alternated between

the two languages just as easily as he moved across artistic genres.

Fig. 5 Hans Arp: Pagoda Fruit, 1949, Giedion-Welcker 97, Bronze (2/3, cast 1954)

and Mirr, 1949, Giedion-Welcker 98, Granit (1/1), displayed with works by Henry Moore,

Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Berto Lardera

at the documenta in Kassel, 1955

In addition to these artistic achievements, Arp's late work also resonated with

other artists during his late period. Many painters and sculptors of the

younger generation, including the American artist Ellsworth Kelly, the French

artist and poet Camille Bryen, who was a major proponent of Art Informel,

and the German painters Günther Fruhtrunk and Karl Otto Götz were inspired by his work. It is significant that Arp's work was fascinating to proponents of Art Informel and of geometric abstraction alike. The latter group

included Kelly, Fruhtrunk, and the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, who referred

to him in a letter as “mon Maître.” Indeed, Arp's significance for the development of Concrete art in South America cannot be underestimated.6

Many

Polish artists were either intrigued by Arp's work or directly influenced by it,

as was Maria Papa Rostkowska.7

At the same time, Arp drew inspiration

from the movements of the 1950s, keeping abreast of the development of

Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, and Tachisme while remaining true to

his artistic roots.8

After 1945, he also maintained close contact with his artist

friends and colleagues from before the War, including Hans Richter, Richard

Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Frederick Kiesler, and Michel Seuphor. Importantly, in this way he also became an intermediary between the artists of

the pre- and post-war periods.

Fig. 6 Hans Arp: Shepherd of Clouds, 1953, Giedion-Welcker 123, Bronze

(1/1), 152 × 74 × 60 cm, with works by Henri Laurens displayed at the

Orangerie, documenta 2, Kassel 1959

Arp's work also transcended and unified these generations, which is likely

what fueled his popularity and international success after 1945. To be sure,

after 1945, Arp's organic forms had become a cipher for modern art. They

reverberated throughout the organic architecture of Le Corbusier, Hans

Scharoun, and Alvar Aalto, and in the industrial design of the 1950s, which

included the ever-popular kidney table. In her essay “Urelement und Gegenwart in der Kunst von Hans Arp”, the art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker

wrote that Arp's “vegetal Constructivism” is characterized by its positive

resonance within the most divergent of artistic movements.9 She also noted:

“Enriched by irrational currents and at the same time disciplined by an alert

formal sensibility, these fantastic formations [of his art] seem to strike a

balance between chance and rules, between the awakening of form and the

deliberate coinage of a modern aesthetic conscience.”10 The balance that

Giedion-Welcker describes is likely the reason that Hans Arp's multi-faceted

and seemingly boundless creativity left its mark on so many different artists,

writers, architects, and designers. His work resonates to this day, and there

is ample room left to explore its impact.

CATALOGUE D'EXPOSITION JEAN ARP 1968 AVEC PHOTOS UNIQUES GALERIE SIDNEY magasin JANIS

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