Jean Arp

Artist Biography

Jean Arp was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was born in Alsace and studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, at Weimar and the Academie Julian, Paris. In 1912 he went to Munich where he knew Kandinsky and exhibited semi-figurative drawings at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, and 1913 he exhibited his art, prints and posters with the Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon (Autumn Salon) in Berlin. Aware of the developments within the French avant-garde through his contacts with such figures as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Robert Delaunay in 1914, Arp exhibited his first abstracts and paper cutouts in Zurich in 1915, and began making shallow wooden reliefs and compositions of string nailed to canvas. In 1916 he was a founder member of Dada in Zurich, he participated in the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920, and in 1923 he visited Schwitters in Hanover.

In Paris, Arp began to evolve his personal style of abstract art, prints and posters through an organic morphology, frequently sensuous in form, and began to experiment with automatic composition (automatism). In 1925, he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, before breaking with Surrealism to become a founder member of Abstraction-Creation in 1931, when his characteristic organic forms became more severe and geometrical. At a time when he began to turn towards full 3-D sculptures, Arp insisted that his sculpture was concrete rather than abstract, since it occupied space, and that art was a natural generation of form: "a fruit that grows in man”, as he put it.

Arp visited the USA in 1949 and 1950, and completed a monumental wood and metal relief for Harvard University, and a mural relief for the UNESCO Building in Paris in 1958. He won the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1954. A dominant personality within Dada, Surrealism and abstract art, his art, prints, posters and sculptures have had a decisive influence upon the sculpture of this century.

Jean Arp Art, Prints and Posters Collection