Jean Arp

Galerie Artcurial, Paris

Edouard Loeb, Paris

Feingarten Galleries, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above on 21 April 1978 by the present owner

Musée des Beaux-Arts du Havre, Jean Arp, 1973 (not in catalogue)

Eduard Trier, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach and François Arp, Jean Arp: Sculpture, His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, no. 355, p. 128, illustration of another cast; p. 129

Exh. Cat., Madrid, Museo Español de arte contemporáneo, Jean Arp, [1886-1966]: Esculturas/ Relieves/Obra Sobre Papel/Tapices, 1985, no. 59, p. 134, illustration of another cast

Claude Weil-Seigeot and Renaud Ego, Atelier Jean Arp et Sophie Taeuber, Paris, 2012, pp. 18 and 24, illustration in color of another cast (in photographs of Fondation Arp’s sculpture garden); p. 198, illustration in color of another cast

Arie Hartog and Kai Fischer, Hans Arp: Sculptures–A Critical Survey, Ostfildern, 2012, no. 355, pp. 194 and 215, illustration of another cast

A totem to the evolution of sculpture and the enduring inspiration of the human figure, Torse enjoué stands among the most dynamic works of Jean Arp’s late oeuvre. In 1954, Arp received the Grand Prix for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. This crowning achievement of his career was shortly followed by a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This newfound fame and financial stability at last afforded Arp the opportunity to see many of his earlier plaster forms cast in bronze and carved in marble. In this process, Arp would look back to his earlier sculptures for inspiration, including many of his Torse forms. Such renown and retrospective reflection did not stifle the artist’s creative ambition. As Serge Fauchereau writes, “Arp was not the kind of man who would feel as if he had ‘made it.’ He was to take his study of form even further to develop those forms he had discovered” (Serge Fauchereau, Arp, Barcelona, 1988, p. 26). The decade that followed—the last of his life—would reveal an artist continually striving for innovation and one working with undiminished vitality in the pursuit of new formal solutions.

Arp’s travels in the late 1950s and early 1960s—to North America, Mexico, Egypt, the Middle East and Germany—provided the artist with an ever-expanding visual vocabulary. Exposure to Pre-Columbian sculpture, monumental statues of Egypt and Assyria, Renaissance limewood carvings, Cycladic and classical Greek forms deeply enriched his formal repertoire (see fig. 2). Steeped in these historical precedents, Arp incorporated the essence and fragmentation of such forms, integrating them into his unique sculptural language. In Torse enjoué, the human torso is abstracted and transformed, simultaneously evoking nature while defying literal representation. This dialogue with ancient simplicity also finds kinship in the work of Constantin Brancusi, whose pursuit of the “essence of things” profoundly influenced 20th-century sculpture. Arp’s smooth, organic surfaces echo Brancusi’s polished marble and bronze forms, yet diverge in temperament—where Brancusi seeks the sublime and eternal, Arp embraces a sense of playful metamorphosis, aligned with the Surrealist spirit of chance and transformation. His “joyful torso” does not merely symbolize the body; it becomes a poetic game between abstraction and figuration, between conscious form and the spontaneous emergence of shape.

Well known and lauded for his lyrical, biomorphic forms, Arp in the 1960s endowed many of his favored motifs with increased angularity and juxtapositions of shape. Within this context, Torse enjoué emerged. Whereas Arp’s first Torse from 1930 was clearly extrapolated from the bodily form, conveying the undulations of shoulders, back and buttocks, the artist’s mature variations on the theme witness a greater liberation of form. Though still rooted in the human figure, the swelling curves of Arp’s Torse enjoué are at turns punctuated by rectilinear planes, conjuring forms that transcend mere corporeality. Through this contrast of carefully composed angles and arcs, Arp compels the viewer to move around the sculpture in order to fully engage with its dimensionality and behold its spatial presence.

Torse enjoué presents a culmination of Arp’s remarkable oeuvre, bridging the playful experimentation of his Dada reliefs and the geometry of his early collage with the formal sophistication of his late work to create a dynamic synthesis of figure and abstraction.

In Torse enjoué, Arp achieves a harmonious convergence of the figurative and the organic, seamlessly integrating the human torso with biomorphic forms. The sculpture transforms the body into a site of metamorphosis, where natural and anthropocentric elements coexist in dynamic interplay. Held in the Pritzker Collection for nearly fifty years, this work represents the sole example of Torse enjoué to appear at auction in nearly as long. Another cast of this form belongs to the collection of the Fondation Arp in Clamart, France.