Jean Arp

gigatos | May 28, 2022

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Summary

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, also Jean Arp († June 7, 1966 in Basel) was a German-French painter, graphic artist, sculptor and lyricist.

He moved in the artistic circles of the Constructivists and the Parisian Surrealists, co-founding Dadaism in Zurich in 1916 as a literary and artistic movement in response to World War I and against its social conventions. Arp worked particularly closely with his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp and at times with other artists, such as the Constructivist El Lissitzky, Max Ernst, and Kurt Schwitters. In 1930 he became a member of the group Cercle et Carré and a year later co-founder of the new abstract Parisian artists” group Abstraction-Création.

Arp”s oeuvre is characterized by the Dadaist principle of chance and, from the 1920s on, by an “object language” of the everyday. Particularly characteristic is his preoccupation with “biomorphic,” natural, rounded forms that make his work unmistakable to this day.

Family

Hans Arp came from a Huguenot family from the Probstei in Holstein on his father”s side and from an Alsatian-French family on his mother”s side. His father Jürgen Peter Wilhelm Arp, born in Kiel in 1853, moved to Strasbourg, then part of the German Reich, in 1877, where he married Marie Joséphine Koeberlé in 1880. “Joe,” daughter of an upholsterer from Oberschäffolsheim, was born in Strasbourg in 1857; her maternal family came from Tournus in Burgundy. Hans”s father owned a prosperous cigar factory – early on Hans became acquainted with the round shapes in the form of puffs of smoke, which are highly characteristic of his art. His mother was a talented pianist and singer. Hans and his brother Wilhelm Franz Philipp, called Willie, born in 1891, grew up trilingual; they spoke French with their mother, German with their father and at school, and Alsatian in everyday life outside and inside the home, with the Alsatian accent rubbing off on the other two languages as well. In his youth, Hans was particularly interested in the poets of German Romanticism, such as Novalis, Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Tieck, as well as French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Comte de Lautréamont.

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1904 till 1914

From 1904 to 1908, Arp studied fine arts at the Weimar Art School and at the Académie Julian in Paris, which he left disappointed because of its conventional teaching methods. From 1909 he lived in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, as his father had moved his factory to nearby Weggis in 1907. In 1911 he became a co-founder of the artists” association Moderner Bund. He met Wassily Kandinsky and through him made contact with the group Der Blaue Reiter.

1915 till 1932

In 1915, Arp”s abstract works were exhibited for the first time in Zurich. In 1916 he illustrated Tristan Tzara”s volume of poetry 25 Gedichte. Through Tzara he met Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck, with whom he founded Dadaism in Zurich in 1916. From 1916 he was friends with the artist and textile designer Sophie Taeuber. They began to exchange ideas and collaborate regarding the renewal of art. Arp introduced Taeuber to the circle of Dadaists, in whose events she actively participated. In 1919 Hans Arp moved to Cologne and became friends with Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld. With them he founded Cologne Dadaism; together they published the Marxist-oriented journal Der Ventilator. In 1920 Arp participated in the First International Dada Fair at the Otto Burchard Gallery in Berlin and, through the mediation of Kurt Schwitters, published the poetry collection Die Wolkenpumpe, whose poems Arp described as text collages. In them, chance was an essential design principle.

In 1922 Arp married Sophie Taeuber. Individually and together they created many works. In 1923 Arp began a closer collaboration with Schwitters. In 1923 Hans Arp participated in a group exhibition of the Surrealists in Paris. In 1925 he rented a studio in Paris, which Sophie Taeuber-Arp also sometimes used. The Arps became members of the artist movement Cercle et Carré, and later of the successor organization Abstraction-Création. Arp had close contact with international avant-gardists such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Malevich gave him several prints as gifts. Together with Lissitzky, he published the book Die Kunstismen in 1925.

In 1926, the Arps moved to Strasbourg. They invited the Dutch artist and architect Theo van Doesburg to collaborate on the Aubette project in Strasbourg – it involved designing the interior decoration of a large venue with a bar, café, salon, and so on. Also, the Arp couple exerted an important influence on the style of Hard Edge. The abstract American artist Ellsworth Kelly had visited them very often in Paris and the two of them significantly influenced his early development of wanting to make impersonal, non-individual art. That same year, the Arps moved to Meudon, near Paris, where they took French citizenship on July 20, 1926. Originally a painter and graphic artist, Arp increasingly emerged as a sculptor from 1930.

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1933 till 1954

Arp”s works were considered “degenerate” by the Nazis. In 1937, a drawing by Arp (“Composition”) was confiscated from the Provinzialmuseum Hannover in the Nazi campaign “Degenerate Art” and subsequently destroyed.

The Arp couple moved to the unoccupied part of France, to Grasse. He now wrote poems mainly in French. He had no studio and, as a painter and sculptor, was forced to work with light, portable and cheap materials. Thus he created the dessins aux doigts (finger drawings) and the papiers froissés (crumpled papers). Arps were kept afloat with donations from Maja Sacher, Erika Schlegel and other patrons. At the end of 1942, they fled to Switzerland to escape the advancing German Wehrmacht.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Max Bill”s house in Zurich on the night of January 13, 1943. Arp took years to recover from this loss and dedicated many of his works to Sophie. Together with Georg Schmidt, he worked on a monograph about her work. In 1949, Arp traveled to the United States, where his art was enjoying increasing success thanks to the help of gallery owner Curt Valentin. Since the majority of his buyers now lived there, Arp considered emigrating; however, he decided against it in the end.

From 1950 Arp designed several large sculptures for the universities of Harvard and Caracas and the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1952 Arp traveled to Rome and Greece, where he received new inspiration for sculptural works (for example, Cobra-Centaur), for which he received the International Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale.

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1955 till 1966

The first comprehensive monograph was dedicated to Arp, now an internationally successful artist, in 1957. In the same year he became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. In 1958, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a comprehensive retrospective. Arp was a participant in documenta 1 in 1955, documenta II in 1959, and documenta III in 1964, and his art was now in such demand that he was able to employ staff.

In 1959 Hans Arp married his longtime girlfriend Marguerite Hagenbach (1902-1994). He died in Basel in 1966 at the age of 79. His grave is located at the Cimitero di Santa Maria in Selva in Locarno, Canton Ticino. The Museo comunale Casa Rusca of Locarno houses the estate donated by Arp”s second wife. In addition to works by the artist himself, the estate also includes Arp”s private art collection.

As German art historian Johannes Jahn writes, Arp”s works “move in a peculiar world between Dadaism, Surrealism, and abstraction. In its sculptural formations, it strives to represent the primordial germination of organic forms from within.” Art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker, in turn, emphasizes the relevance of that vision of nature in the 1930s, identifying it in Arp as “making visible an invisible, the search for an optical language capable of grasping the spiritual spheres, beyond the world of appearances.” Arp”s “biomorphism” thus found in vegetative forms the emblematic code for the spiritual in art. Juri Steiner further explains, “Arp”s sculptural concretions in white marble, wood, plaster, and bronze refer to the solidification of mass in stone, in plant, in animal, in human. Coagulation, hardening, thickening, growing together are symbols of the eternal transformation in nature. Arp called the forces of these processes ”tension de sol” or ”ground tension”, in reference to the incessant cycles of nature. Thus Arp, too, produced ever new constellations, drawing the insight for his ”moving ovals” not only from observation of nature, but also from philosophical texts by Lao Tse or Jakob Boehme. From the bipolarization of man and woman – Adam and Eve – Arp, as with Constantin Brancusi, developed the examination of the egg as the symbol of procreation par excellence. The intention was to restore man to his rightful place within creation. In doing so, Arp brought together the dominant art movements of the interwar period, Surrealism and Constructivism.

The Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck is run by the Landes-Stiftung Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, based in Remagen-Rolandseck. Opened on September 29, 2007, it presents works by Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp owned by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and special exhibitions by other artists in the Rolandseck train station building and in a new building designed by Richard Meier.

Before the opening of the museum, there were heated discussions, since some of the objects on display in the museum, which came from the holdings of the association Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e. V., were disputed as to whether they were works authorized by Arp himself or later replicas and replicas.

The state of Rhineland-Palatinate also accused the association of breach of contract because it had sold some works that were intended for exhibition. In the summer of 2008, the state terminated the cooperation.

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Fondation Arp

The Fondation Arp is located in the former studio house of the Arps in Clamart, designed by Sophie Taeuber in 1929. Sophie Taeuber lived in this studio house until the end of her life.

The house with a rich collection of works by Hans Arp and Sophie Taueber is a foundation of Marguerite Hagenbach from 1976, and over the years the collection has been expanded by other donations. Of note is Arp”s studio, where he made the plaster for the casts to be made. On display there are 114 sculptures and 32 reliefs, confiscated by French customs in 1996.After a first exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, this collection has been kept at Clamart since December 2006. The Fondation Arp includes a library.

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Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach

The Foundation, based in Hans Arp”s former residence and studio Ronco dei Fiori in Locarno-Solduno, was founded in 1988 by Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach. Since 2000, the Fondazione has been cooperating with the Liner Foundation in Appenzell. The aim of the collaboration is to preserve the Fondazione Arp in its present form, to hold regular exhibitions of the works of Arp and Sophie Taeuber in Appenzell, and to promote their works worldwide. The house includes a sculpture garden.

Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp Foundation e. V.

The Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp Foundation is still organized as an association for the time being. It looks after parts of the estate of Hans Arp, in particular the rights to bronze sculptures. It was originally based in Remagen-Rolandseck, but moved to Berlin in 2013. She published an inventory of all sculptures in 2012. This list also answers the question of the legitimacy of posthumous recasts with a 1977 casting rights list signed by Arp”s second wife Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach.

Conflicts over the re-casting rights had led to the cessation of international exhibition activity with Arp”s works between 2008 and 2015, as the rights to the sculptures were not considered secure.

Edition of the poems

Sources