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Lot Essay
Cette œuvre est répertoriée dans les archives de la Fondation Arp, Clamart.
“My reliefs and my sculptures naturally adapt to nature. Yet when one looks at them closely, one notices that they are crafted by human hand…” (Jean Arp, quoted in, Hommage à Jean Arp, exhibition catalogue, Strasburg, 1967, p. 38).
With Dada’s declaration of the death of painting in 1915, Jean Arp gave up the medium. He would not adopt sculpture for another 15 years, and yet in the intervening years his artistic production would nevertheless be rich and original. Arp focused on the production of his ‘reliefs’, objects which occupied an intermediate space between painting and sculpture and as such best expressed his search for a different medium of expression. Unlike Duchamp who sought to elevate everyday objects to the status of Art, Arp remained an artist in the traditional sense, crafting his elegant objects with a restrained sensibility for composition and colour. As the artist explained, chance too played its part in their conception: “The natural beauty of these objects is as inherent as it is with a bunch of wild flowers picked by a child.” (ibid, p. 13).
These lyrical qualities are particularly successful in the present work, whose three floating forms create a visual poem which appears to oppose female and male qualities. The relief was gifted by the artist to the poet Louis Aragon who, together with André Breton and Philippe Soupault, had founded the Surrealist group in 1924.
“My reliefs and my sculptures naturally adapt to nature. Yet when one looks at them closely, one notices that they are crafted by human hand…” (Jean Arp, quoted in, Hommage à Jean Arp, exhibition catalogue, Strasburg, 1967, p. 38).
With Dada’s declaration of the death of painting in 1915, Jean Arp gave up the medium. He would not adopt sculpture for another 15 years, and yet in the intervening years his artistic production would nevertheless be rich and original. Arp focused on the production of his ‘reliefs’, objects which occupied an intermediate space between painting and sculpture and as such best expressed his search for a different medium of expression. Unlike Duchamp who sought to elevate everyday objects to the status of Art, Arp remained an artist in the traditional sense, crafting his elegant objects with a restrained sensibility for composition and colour. As the artist explained, chance too played its part in their conception: “The natural beauty of these objects is as inherent as it is with a bunch of wild flowers picked by a child.” (ibid, p. 13).
These lyrical qualities are particularly successful in the present work, whose three floating forms create a visual poem which appears to oppose female and male qualities. The relief was gifted by the artist to the poet Louis Aragon who, together with André Breton and Philippe Soupault, had founded the Surrealist group in 1924.