Jean Arp

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp was born in Strasbourg, capital of Alsace, the French region that, together with Lorraine, was under German rule between 1870 and 1918. Arp had German nationality until 1926 when he acquired French citizenship and began to use the name Jean, by which he is also known. His father, owner of a small cigar manufacturing business, was German and his mother was Alsatian and French-speaking, so young Hans, although educated in German, became familiar from childhood with both languages, as well as the local dialect.
He soon showed artistic inclinations and enrolled in the School of Arts and Crafts in 1900, where he showed as little taste for academic discipline as he had before at the Lycée; he must have benefited more from the drawing classes of local painter Georges Ritleng the following year. His interest in the arts was parallel to his passion for poetry—especially for German Romantics—which he began during his school years and practiced throughout his life in both his languages.
In 1903 he published his first poems and created an abundant pictorial and sculptural work of which there are barely any traces. In 1904 he spent a season in Paris, but his father preferred that he continue his studies in Weimar, where he enrolled at the Academy directed by Henry van de Velde at the end of that year. Through Van de Velde's mediation, he exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris with Matisse, Signac and Van Dongen in 1907 and, a year later, he enrolled at the Julian Academy and frequented the artistic circles of the French capital.
Arp's family had moved near Lucerne, so young Hans began to develop his activity in Switzerland. In 1911 he founded Der moderne Bund with Oscar Lüthy and Walter Helbig, a group of modern Swiss artists that, until 1913, exhibited in Lucerne, Zurich, Munich and at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, the main center of incipient German Expressionism. These exhibitions featured artists such as Friesz, Gauguin—already deceased—, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, combining the latest trends from the French and German spheres.
In 1912 he met Kandinsky in Munich, which reinforced his solitary choice for non-representational art that he had been practicing since the beginning of the decade. As a result of contact with Kandinsky, Arp participated in the almanac and the second exhibition of The Blue Rider and, in 1914, he also met August Macke and Max Ernst in Cologne. The beginning of World War I caught him in Paris, where he frequented Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Modigliani and Picasso. At that time he undertook the decoration based on collages of a theosophical temple on commission from René Schwaller; although they have not been preserved, these works are the immediate origin of his prolific contribution to the genre from then on. His complicated situation as a German citizen led him to move in 1915 to Zurich, where he met Sophie Taeuber, who soon became his inseparable romantic and artistic partner until her unfortunate death in 1943. A year later, poet Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire, where a good number of poets and artists fleeing the war gathered. The Arps, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter made Zurich the nucleus from which Dada expanded, the most radical and protean of the movements of the first avant-garde. Arp began to create collaborative works, especially with Sophie Taeuber—then more devoted to dance than to the plastic arts—but also with Tzara and Hülsenbeck; all participated in the performances of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada gallery, often characterized by a deliberately anti-artistic provocative nature.
With the end of the war, Dada spread to France and Germany. Arp participated in 1920 in the famous Dada exhibition in Cologne with Baargeld and Max Ernst—with whom he would collaborate on a series of collages generically called Fatagaga—as well as in the equally famous and celebrated Dada Fair in Berlin. That same year he met Breton, Soupault and Aragon, the poets who inherited the Dada legacy in Paris and to whom old acquaintances from Zurich such as Tzara and Picabia joined. Arp collaborated in various avant-garde magazines and initiatives with poems, collages and graphic work. At the same time he established ties with the constructivist avant-garde through El Lissitzky—whom he met in Berlin in 1920—and Kurt Schwitters—in Hanover, seven years later. The Bauhaus convened a congress in Weimar in 1922 where he met Moholy-Nagy and Van Doesburg, in whose magazine De Stijl he also collaborated. From the Dada nucleus in Paris emerged Surrealism in 1924, firmly led by André Breton. Arp joined the group and appeared in the inaugural exhibition of 1925. Throughout his life he remained united with the Surrealists, although he was careful to distance himself from their most sectarian behaviors and did not break his ties with the analytical and constructive sector of the avant-garde.
This versatility and independence manifested themselves in his participation, always with Sophie Taeuber, in Cercle et Carré in 1930 and Abstraction-Création between 1931 and 1934, groups that defended geometric abstraction. Since the twenties, Arp combined collage and graphic work with relief and, from the forties onward, sculpture became the focus of most of his dedication. The years of World War II, which he spent first in Grasse, in southern France, and then in Switzerland, were difficult, especially because of Sophie's unexpected death, which plunged him into desolation. However, it would be the postwar years that consecrated his universal fame with retrospectives such as the one in New York in 1958 or the one in Paris in 1962. He was accompanied in this latter period by Marguerite Hagenbach, whom he married in 1959. After his death, Marguerite would fulfill the artist's wish to see his work united with Sophie's in a foundation, established in 1979 in the Meudon-Clamart house that he had built in 1926 following the plans drawn up by his first wife.