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Lot Essay
The title of this sculpture–Croissance (“Growth”)–proclaims the very essence of Arp’s art. The rising, mounting forms, each length evolving into the next shape swelling above it–like a plant from a tuber, or an ever-extending, flowering vine–only appear to terminate at the crown of the sculpture. There two protuberances suggest buds again ready to burst open, inferring that this process of metamorphosis and expansion may continue indefinitely, just as Brancusi implied–albeit by means of more uniformly repeating sections–in his Endless Column.
Carola Giedion-Welcker described Arp’s conception of nature as “An immense vital process, both extraordinarily simple and complex, a cycle evolving between birth and death, constantly changing and growing, and hence to be grasped only dynamically, never statically in the field of art... We detect in Arp the profound experience of life, which conceives of creation as an eternal process, as permanent transformation and growth... This is why Arp’s initial forms strike us as being so ready to be transmuted, so filled with inner organic tension” (op. cit., 1957, pp. xxvii and xxviii).
In the Torse and Concrétions humaines series of the early 1930s, Arp adapted the irregular, biomorphic shapes–at once human and vegetal–he had employed in his Dada and surrealist wall reliefs to the creation of free-standing sculpture. “By the middle and later 1930s,” James Thrall Soby noted, “Arp had reached his full stature as a sculptor in the round” (Arp, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 10). “The most distinctive piece of this decade is perhaps the Growth of 1938,” Herbert Read stated. “This is a subtler variation of the embodiment of energy already noted in the Crown of Buds [Couronne de bourgeons, 1936]: the energy no longer turns in on itself in endless repetition, but thrusts upwards into the light in rhythmic curves” (op. cit., 1968, p. 94).
Arp’s position in the European art world of the 1920s and 1930s transcended partisanship–he had been a Dadaist, a Surrealist, and by 1930 had become a beacon to those artists who were exploring non-representational painting as an alternative to Surrealism. The biomorphism of Arp’s imagery was appealing, moreover, to those artists who had become disillusioned with the austere geometric constructivism of Mondrian’s De Stijl and Kandinsky’s Bauhaus practice. Arp believed that art and nature were inseparable in the shared process of creation. “We don’t want to copy nature,” he stipulated, however. “We don’t want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce like a plant produces a fruit, and not reproduce. We want to produce directly and not by way of any intermediary. Since this art doesn’t have the slightest trace of abstraction, we name it: concrete art” (M. Jean, ed., Jean Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1974, p. 139).
“What one of [Arp’s sculptures] has attained in completeness or greater perfection it passes on to the next,” Eduard Trier has written. “All these transmutations, transitions, pupations are not definitives. The forms remain fluid. They move on the road of one meaning to another... This is his syntax and it has imprinted itself on our minds by its modified repetition and underlying permanence. At an early stage Arp tapped a source that continually reaffirms its inexhaustibility” (Jean Arp Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1957, pp. xii and xiv). This perpetually unfolding process served Arp as the wellspring of his art for remaining three decades of his career.
Carola Giedion-Welcker described Arp’s conception of nature as “An immense vital process, both extraordinarily simple and complex, a cycle evolving between birth and death, constantly changing and growing, and hence to be grasped only dynamically, never statically in the field of art... We detect in Arp the profound experience of life, which conceives of creation as an eternal process, as permanent transformation and growth... This is why Arp’s initial forms strike us as being so ready to be transmuted, so filled with inner organic tension” (op. cit., 1957, pp. xxvii and xxviii).
In the Torse and Concrétions humaines series of the early 1930s, Arp adapted the irregular, biomorphic shapes–at once human and vegetal–he had employed in his Dada and surrealist wall reliefs to the creation of free-standing sculpture. “By the middle and later 1930s,” James Thrall Soby noted, “Arp had reached his full stature as a sculptor in the round” (Arp, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 10). “The most distinctive piece of this decade is perhaps the Growth of 1938,” Herbert Read stated. “This is a subtler variation of the embodiment of energy already noted in the Crown of Buds [Couronne de bourgeons, 1936]: the energy no longer turns in on itself in endless repetition, but thrusts upwards into the light in rhythmic curves” (op. cit., 1968, p. 94).
Arp’s position in the European art world of the 1920s and 1930s transcended partisanship–he had been a Dadaist, a Surrealist, and by 1930 had become a beacon to those artists who were exploring non-representational painting as an alternative to Surrealism. The biomorphism of Arp’s imagery was appealing, moreover, to those artists who had become disillusioned with the austere geometric constructivism of Mondrian’s De Stijl and Kandinsky’s Bauhaus practice. Arp believed that art and nature were inseparable in the shared process of creation. “We don’t want to copy nature,” he stipulated, however. “We don’t want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce like a plant produces a fruit, and not reproduce. We want to produce directly and not by way of any intermediary. Since this art doesn’t have the slightest trace of abstraction, we name it: concrete art” (M. Jean, ed., Jean Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1974, p. 139).
“What one of [Arp’s sculptures] has attained in completeness or greater perfection it passes on to the next,” Eduard Trier has written. “All these transmutations, transitions, pupations are not definitives. The forms remain fluid. They move on the road of one meaning to another... This is his syntax and it has imprinted itself on our minds by its modified repetition and underlying permanence. At an early stage Arp tapped a source that continually reaffirms its inexhaustibility” (Jean Arp Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1957, pp. xii and xiv). This perpetually unfolding process served Arp as the wellspring of his art for remaining three decades of his career.