Jean Arp

Edouard Jaguer, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owners in the late 1980s

Paris, Artcurial, Centre d'Art Plastique Contemporain, André Pieyre de Mandiargues et l'Art du XXème siècle, 1990, illustrated in the catalogue
Madrid, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Jean Arp, retrospectiva, 2006, no. 11, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Strasbourg, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Art is Arp, 2008, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Saint-Louis, Espace d'Art Contemporain Fernet-Branca, Chassé-croisé Dada-Surréaliste 1916-1969, 2012, no. 17, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Bernd Rau & Michel Seuphor, Hans Arp. Die Reliefs Œuvre-Katalog, Stuttgart, 1981, no. 93, illustrated p. 51
Serge Fauchereau, Arp, London, 1989, no. 151, illustrated in colour p. 108
Georges Sebbag, Memorabilia, Dada et Surréalisme, 1916-1970, Paris, 2010, illustrated p. 174

In 1925 Arp arrived in Paris and took a studio neighbouring those of Max Ernst and Joan Miró in the Villa des Fusains at 22 rue Tourlaque. The following year he created the present work, which is an exceptional example of the painted reliefs he executed amidst the avant-garde artists of Montmartre. Michel Seuphor suggests that whilst ‘Arp had at this point associated himself with the Surrealist movement’, it coincided with the moment when ‘his reliefs approached their most perfect’ (M. Seuphor, op. cit., Stuttgart, 1981, p. xxiv). In Paris Arp submersed himself in work, creating highly inventive reliefs that possessed a potent biomorphic visual idiom which had evolved from his earlier, Dadaist, imagery. The voluptuous white form, central to the present work, is a particularly important motif that frequently occurred in his reliefs from the 1920s. Arp sometimes defined this silhouette as a pair of lips or a moustache. In the present composition, overlapping contours and pools of colour transcend anatomical classification and embody Arp’s sensuous aesthetic.

Arp’s involvement with the Surrealist group had grown through his acquaintance with André Breton out of his association with the Zurich Dada group. Commenting on Arp’s position amongst these two important groups, Eric Robertson writes: ‘Arp was without doubt the most creative, and the most introspective, of the Zurich group. According to Huelsenbeck [the Dada poet], “he only cared about the revolutionary implications of our artistic activities and hence of art in general”. Of these “revolutionary implications”, perhaps the most significant was the rejection of traditional painting styles and techniques. Arp shunned not only figurative illusionism, but even the medium of oil on canvas, evolving instead at an early stage what became constants of his mature work: semi-abstract biomorphic drawings and painted wooden reliefs in a heavily restricted palette, inhabited by a personal cosmogony of bottles, navels, torsos and heads’ (E. Robertson, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, New Haven & London, 2006, pp. 70-71).