(1887-1966)
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(1887-1966)
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German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He
was born in Alsace and studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, at Weimar
(1905-7) and the Academie Julian, Paris (1908). 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 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 compositions 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 reliefs and sculptures have had a decisive influence upon the
sculpture of this century."- From "The Bulfinch Guide to Art History" |
