Jean Arp

Jean Arp (born September 16, 1887, Strassburg, Germany [now Strasbourg, France]—died June 7, 1966, Basel, Switzerland) was a French sculptor, painter, and poet who was one of the leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of the 20th century.

Arp was of French Alsatian and German ancestry, and, thus, his parents gave him both French and German names. He began training as an artist in 1900 in his native Strasbourg and later studied in Weimar, Germany, and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He went to Switzerland in 1909, and in 1911 in Weggis, near Lucerne, he cofounded Der Moderne Bund (“The Modern Alliance”), an association of artists dedicated to modern art. Arp traveled to Munich in 1912, where he met Wassily Kandinsky and through him became briefly associated with the Expressionist artists’ group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”). He also connected with Der Sturm in Berlin and exhibited with them in 1913. Arp returned to Paris in 1914 and befriended Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, and Robert Delaunay, as well as the writer Max Jacob.

During World War I, Arp took refuge in Zürich, where he became one of the founders of the Dada movement in early 1916. Soon after arriving in Zürich, he met artist Sophie Taeuber, who became his primary collaborator and whom he married in 1922. The two artists worked with nontraditional media and together created nonrepresentational collages (called Duo-Collages) and embroidered pieces. During that period Arp also began creating painted wooden reliefs—layers of unusual shapes inspired by forms found in nature.

After the war he and Taeuber-Arp lived in Germany and later settled near Paris in the town of Meudon in 1926. During the 1920s he was associated with the Surrealists, and in 1930 he briefly joined the short-lived abstract artists’ Cercle et Carré (“Circle and Square”) group. That was also the year in which he made his first papiers déchirés (“torn papers”), works of art created according to the Surrealist dictate of leaving creation to chance. In 1931 he participated in the Abstraction-Création movement, which absorbed the members of Cercle et Carré. Those associations connected Arp to Constructivism, a movement that emphasized a more rational and ordered art than Surrealism. Arp’s art began at that time to incorporate harder edges, sharper angles, and straighter lines.

During World War II Arp returned to Zürich, where his wife died in 1943 from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. While in Switzerland he did his first papiers froissés (“crumpled papers”). After the war Arp returned to Meudon, where he continued his experiments with abstract form and color in two and three dimensions and wrote essays and poetry, many of which were dedicated to his wife. Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories by Jean Arp (1972) and Arp’s Collected French Writings (1974) were edited by the Surrealist artist and writer Marcel Jean. Arp enjoyed many successes in his last decades, including Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, a commission for the UNESCO building (UNESCO Constellation, 1958) in Paris, and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962.