Jean Arp

Arp, Hans [or Jean Arp] [from OCWA](1886–1966). German-born artist and poet, celebrated for his ‘biomorphic’ abstraction. Native to Strasbourg, at the intersection of French and German culture, Arp studied art in both countries but found academic training deeply dissatisfying. He persevered alone, and around 1910 began to explore abstraction. That year he co-founded the Moderne Bund, which later collaborated with the Blaue Reiter group after Arp met Kandinsky in 1912. At the outbreak of war he fled to Paris and moved in a circle which included Apollinaire, Modigliani, and Picasso. Expelled from France, he arrived in Zurich in 1915 where he met his future wife, the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943). Her influence on his work was profound, and their careers were entangled thereafter. Arp was a founder member of Zurich Dada in 1916, and later befriended German Dadaists, including Ernst and Schwitters. In the 1920s he developed his ‘biomorphic’ vocabulary—abstract forms of organic inspiration (e.g. Navel-Torso, about 1924–6; Clamart, Fondation Arp), in contrast to earlier geometric abstraction—and was involved with Surrealism. The Arps began construction of a studio at Meudon in 1928, to Taeuber's design. During the early 1930s they participated in the Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création groups, and Arp began producing his now best-known work: sensuous, biomorphic sculpture in stone, plaster, or bronze (e.g. Human Concretion, 1934; Clamart, Fondation Arp). The war years were spent first at Grasse and then in Switzerland, where Taeuber died. The post-war period was marked by eminent public commissions, honours, and retrospectives.BIBLIOGRAPHYRead, H., arp (1968).Andrew AyersBirth: 9/16/1887.A dominant personality within Dada, Surrealism and abstract art, his reliefs and sculptures have had a decisive influence upon the sculpture of this century.German-French sculptor, painter and poet. Jean Arp (also called Hans Arp) was born in Alsace and studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, at Weimar (1905-7) and the Academie Julian, Paris (1908). In 1912 he went to Munich where he knew Kandinsky and exhibited semi-figurative drawings at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, and 1913 he exhibited with the Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon (Autumn Salon) in Berlin. Aware of the developments within the French avant-garde through his contacts with such figures as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Robert Delaunay in 1914, Arp exhibited his first abstracts and paper cutouts in Zurich in 1915, and began making shallow wooden reliefs and compositions of string nailed to canvas. In 1916 he was a founder member of Dada in Zurich, he participated in the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920, and in 1923 he visited Schwitters in Hanover. In Paris, Arp began to evolve his personal style of abstract compositions through an organic morphology, frequently sensuous in form, and began to experiment with automatic composition (automatism). In 1925, he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, before breaking with Surrealism to become a founder member of Abstraction-Creation in 1931, when his characteristic organic forms became more severe and geometrical. At a time when he began to turn towards full 3-D sculptures, Arp insisted that his sculpture was 'concrete' rather than 'abstract', since it occupied space, and that art was a natural generation of form: 'a fruit that grows in man', as he put it.Arp visited the USA in 1949 and 1950, and completed a monumental wood and metal relief for Harvard University, and a mural relief for the UNESCO Building in Paris in 1958. He won the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1954