At once static yet sensual, organic but alien, familiar while abstract, Torse-gerbe is an extraordinary example of Jean Arp’s singular ability to absorb and transfigure the forms of the natural world within the gleaming visual vernacular of Modern sculpture. Transcending the realm of the tangible, the sinuous silhouette of the present work achieves an immediate and irresistible allure; the viewer is compelled to admire Torse-gerbe from innumerable angles as the sculpture shifts and shimmers before our eyes. The biomorphic qualities of this sculpture are further enhanced by its title, which suggests both the anthropomorphic, rooted in the human form, and the more botanical, recalling the golden sheaves of a harvested wheat field. Writing about his life in 1958, Arp began his essay entitled Looking with the following: "To open my eyes, to see, to look, to contemplate the world, to watch clouds and trees, to behold cities and buildings, to look works of art in the eye, to look men in the eye, to see, to look—ever since my childhood this has been my greatest joy" (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Arp, 1958, p. 12).

Exemplified in Torse-gerbe, Arp’s sculptures invite the viewer to join him in admiring with fresh eyes the world around us: objects and forms which, when examined anew, increasingly resemble the fascinating landscape of our own subconscious. Conceived in 1958 and cast in 1960, the present work has been held in the same prestigious collection for over four decades, emerging today as a singular testament to the endless visual appeal captured in the very best of Arp’s celebrated sculptural practice.

Cast in the final decade of the artist’s life, Torse-gerbe exemplifies the union between human consciousness and the natural world which lies at the heart of Arp’s oeuvre. The legendary art historian and museum director Alfred Barr described Jean Arp as a “one-man laboratory for the discovery of new form” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Arp, 1958, p. 7). In its undulating curves and insistent abstraction, the silhouette of Torse-gerbe powerfully recalls the swooping cliffs and shifting cloudscapes which fill the horizons of Salvador Dalí’s famed Surrealist dreamscapes. Like the fascinating creatures of those paintings, the present work’s elegant, elongated form is subtly reminiscent of a human figure—a suggestion echoed in the title—while its simplicity and smooth, polished surface transform the viewer’s experience into something more evocative and subjective. In the spirit of Arp’s Dadaist heritage, Torse-gerbe resists any kind of fixed state, appearing instead to be in constant metamorphosis: as if continually becoming itself. Speaking in terms highly reminiscent of the present work, Henry Geldzahler reflects:

“His genius gave the world a new family of forms that parallels, comments on and competes successfully with nature. All this Arp achieved within the new syntax of twentieth-century art. His respect for the natural and his profound understanding of the modernist tradition were never in conflict. His triumph was to affect a new synthesis of the familiar and the invented” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jean Arp from the Collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, 1972, n.p.).

While Arp himself was a figurehead of both Dadaism and Surrealism, the formal qualities of Torse-gerbe speak to the influence of the most legendary painters and sculptors of the previous generation upon his oeuvre and practice. Here, the bold materiality of Auguste Rodin, the quiet, grounded classicism of Aristide Maillol, the lithe lines of Henri Matisse, and the purified forms of Constantin Brancusi are all legible; within Torse-gerbe, Arp transfigures the disparate threads from each of these earlier masters into something entirely avant-garde. In its formal purity yet abstract, even ethereal aura, the present work bears the strongest stylistic, technical and poetic affinity to the work of Brancusi. Yet despite their formal parity, Arp’s approach to sculpture bears radical differences to that of his predecessor: while Brancusi sought indisputable perfection within his sculpture, fastidiously limiting his artistic vernacular to select forms, Arp valued spontaneity, exploring an exhilarating and diverse visual vocabulary within his sculptural oeuvre. As scholar Stephanie Poley observed: “Arp was concerned with purity, with being free, being independent of everything unpleasant and limiting, and with the active, constant emission of positive energy as well as its perception” (Exh Cat., Minneapolis Museum of Art, Arp, 1987, p. 229).

In this way, his art relates to that of another famed, twentieth-century sculptor: Alexander Calder, whose work similarly sought to capture to movement and vitality of our world. Each explorers and experimenters within their era, both Arp and Calder forged an artistic vernacular thrillingly and indisputably their own: a language which finds elegant and ultimate summation in the gleaming, golden silhouette of Torse-gerbe.