FREE ESSAY ON JEAN ARP

JEAN ARP

"Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's
womb," once commented Jean Arp--a remarkable twentieth-century sculptor, painter and poet
associated with and a forefather of the Dada and Surrealist movements. The avant-garde
artist was born on September 16, 1887 in Strasbourg, France, where he studied at the
Ecole des Arts et Metiers. In 1905, he transferred to the Weimar Academy and then to
Paris at the Academie Julian in 1908, and subsequent to graduation resumed his painting
in Weggis, Switzerland in isolation.
By 1912, Jean Arp had become associated with the Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider, a group of
Expressionist artists in Munich, where he exhibited "semi-figurative" drawings and became
well-acquainted with fellow artist Wassily Kandinsky. In 1913, he exhibited with another
group of Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon--or Autumn Salon, an art exhibition--in
Berlin. Aware of the developments within the French avant-garde through his contacts with
such artists as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Sonia and Robert Delaunay in 1914, Arp
presented his first abstracts and paper cutouts in Zurich in 1915 and arranged his first
shallow wooden reliefs and compositions of string nailed to canvas.
In 1915, the art of Jean Arp consisted of abstract and angularly patterned tapestries and
drawings, but soon matured as he became the co-founder of the revolutionary Dadaist
school of artists in Zurich, Switzerland with Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. His familiar
abstract and curvilinear forms debuted in 1917, and in 1919 he continued his Dadaist
portrayals with Ernst in Cologne before participating in the Berlin Dada exhibition of
1920.
Jean Arp married Sophie Tauber in 1922, during a period where he was most notable for his
painted wooden bas-reliefs and humorous cut-cardboard constructions. He settled with his
wife at Meudon in 1927, when he participated in the Surrealist movement and had his first
one-man exhibition at the Galerie Surrealiste in Paris. He then parted with Surrealism to
become a co-founder of Abstraction-Creation in 1931, when his characteristic organic
forms became more severe and geometrical.
In the 1930s, Jean Arp began to work in freestanding sculpture, carving and molding a
variety of substances. An example of his smooth, biomorphic forms is the marble Human
Concretion, 1935, located in the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Arp was tenacious
in correcting art critics as to the nature of his sculptures; he insisted that his pieces
were "concrete" rather than "abstract", since they occupied space, and that art was a
natural generation of form--"a fruit that grows in man", as he had stated.
Jean Arp visited the United States in 1949 and 1950 to finish a monumental wood and metal
relief for Harvard University; in 1958, he composed a mural relief for the UNESCO
Building in Paris. He was awarded the international prize for sculpture at the Venice
Biennale in 1954 and the 1964 Pittsburgh International. Arp died on June 7, 1966 in
Solduno, Switzerland, survived by his second wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach. A dominant
personality within abstract art, Dada and Surrealism, his reliefs and sculptures have had
a decisive influence upon the sculpture of this century.
Bibliography
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