- 44
Jean Arp
Description
- Jean Arp
- Torse
- white marble
- height (not including base): 61cm.
- 24in.
Provenance
Anja Petzold-Müller, Basel (by descent from the above after 1955)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013
Exhibited
Literature
George Schmidt, In memoriam Oskar Müller-Widmann 1887–1956, Basel, 1956, listed (as dating from 1932)
Michel Seuphor, Arp, Paris, 1957, illustrated p. 27
Carola Giedion-Welcker, Hans Arp, Stuttgart, 1957, no. 8, illustrated pp. 86 & 87
Ernst Scheidegger (ed.), Zweiklang. Sophie Taeuber-Arp/Hans Arp, Zurich, 1960, illustrated in a photograph of the artist's studio p. 66
Michel Sephor, Petite encyclopedie de l’art, New York, 1964, no. 6, illustrated
Herbert Read, Arp, London, 1968, no. 90, illustrated p. 86 (with incorrect measurements)
Ionel Jianou, Jean Arp, Paris, 1973, no. 8, catalogued p. 66
Stefanie Poley, Hans Arp. Die Formensprache im plastischen Werk, Stuttgart, 1978, plaster version illustrated p. 77
Margherita Andreotti, The Early Sculpture of Jean Arp, London, 1989, no. 21, illustrated figs. 69 & 70
Arie Hartog & Kai Fischer, Hans Arp. Sculptures. A Critical Survey, Ostfildern, 2012, no. 8, illustrated p. 67
Catalogue Note
The art of randomness was essential to Arp at this time: he saw ‘chance’ as his active collaborator. This in itself was a progressive concept in art, for artists had long striven for a connoisseurial level of control. Arp, however, would generate his shapes first, and title them post-completion, thus eliminating as far as possible the interference of the conscious mind, something which his fellow Surrealist artists also experimented with. As such, Arp created forms of unique distinction, clearly inspired by the natural shapes around him but succeeding in transcending the restrictions of the tangible. Alfred Barr in 1958 described Arp as a ‘one-man laboratory for the discovery of the new form’ (quoted in Arp (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 7).
While essentially abstract, Torse alludes to the human body, whose undulating form conjuring a slim waist and delicate curve of the back expresses a distinctly feminine aesthetic; the marble material accentuates the smooth and sinuous contours. The allusion to the female nude perhaps derives from Arp’s early drawings of this subject, which date to well before his execution of biomorphic shapes. Without extremities or any literal articulation of detail, however, Torse succeeds in expressing Arp’s passionate sense of the female body in the suggestions of its curves and fold: its wholeness lies in its power to evoke. Eduard Trier observed: ‘Arp knows only the torso, but not as a fragment of something originally whole. The torso becomes an independent complete form’ (E. Trier, Jean Arp: Sculpture, 1957-66, London, 1968, p. XI).