Jean Arp

François Arp Collection (acquired from the artist)
Private Collection

Giuseppe Marchiori, Arp, London, 1964, no. 134, illustration of another cast p. 149
Eduard Trier, Margeurite Arp-Hagenbach & Françoise Arp, Jean Arp, Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, no. 219a, illustration of another cast p. 113
Ionel Jianou, Jean Arp, Paris, 1973, no. 219a, cited p. 77
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jean Arp (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1972, no. 14, illustration of another cast

Rich golden brown patina. Work has been recently repatinated. Very light pitting along side of form is inherent to casting process. Otherwise fine, work is in excellent condition.
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Jean Arp summoned the words of the famed Greek philosopher Heraclitus when discussing the recent of works of Wassily Kandinsky: "It is always the same substance that is in all things: life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age. For, in changing this becomes that, and that, by changing becomes this again." Heraclitus' belief in the unity of opposites is clearly manifested in Arp's Sculpture d'une ombre. The undulating organic mass possesses passages of profound emptiness alongside assertive swells of strength.

Arp throughout his artistic process would lightly run his fingertips along seemingly invisible swells and compressions in a fanatical effort to materialize the beauty of opposing form. As Marcel Jean wrote of Arp's sculptures, "Space is as important as solid parts, the concave as the convex; the area surrounding the elements of a relief, a collage, or a drawing are equal in value to the elements themselves. Works of art usually assert themselves before nature, or smash into it, or use it as a backdrop when they are not simply imitating it; but a concretion, a sculpture by Arp, complements nature, which is like the space mold into which it was poured" (Marcel Jean, Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, Paris, 1969, p. 27).

Fig. 1:  Another view of the present work