Jean Arp

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above on March 6, 1959

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Arp, 1958, no. 109

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Collectors Exhibition, 1963

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles, University of California; Dallas Museum of Art; Kunsthaus, Zürich, Jean Arp, 1968, no. 111

When he was not residing in his hometown of Basel, Arp worked from his studio in the French town of Meudon, where he completed this large bronze in 1956. Created when he was seventy and at the peak of his mature career, it is one of his most important monumental sculptural works and a composite of many of the aesthetic themes that he had explored throughout his life. Arp began his artistic career as a member of the radical Dadaist group in Switzerland in 1916, formulating an artistic philosophy that would challenge most established forms of artistic representation for many years to come. When in 1917 he wrote that he wanted "to find another order, another value for man in nature," he heralded the credo that would govern his sculptures even more than fifty years later. Although this highly polished form demonstrates the sleek modernist aesthetic that had also been taken up by Brancusi and Henri Laurens, the amorphous and irregular shape of this modern-day Venus evidences some of the main themes of Arp's original manifesto. "All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure," he wrote as a young man. "I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man" (quoted in Serge Fauchereau, Hans Arp, Barcelona, 1988, p. 15).

Meudon Venus is the larger version of a similarly-titled sculpture that the artist created around 1956. This larger version was intended to be executed in bronze in an edition of three, but only two bronzes of this size were ever cast. The present work is the first of the edition, and was acquired by the present owner from Arp's New York dealer, Sidney Janis. The second cast, which has a darker patina, is currently in the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen.